I was watching the Channel 9 video on the Silverlight game Zero Gravity, the developers said that their aim was to produce an addictive game - they certainly succeeded. This is a great video to watch to get a developers/design view on Silverlight Technorati Tags: Silverlight
Scientific American has a interesting article on a Data Center in a box. Basically it is a standard shipping container full of Sun Servers. I am our our IT manager would like one! it should fit on any house’s driveway, a stylish addition to any home. It is an interesting spin on the old IBM data recovery model where they turned up with a duplicate of your system in a truck in event of a major failure. The key change is it is being sold as a greatly cheaper option than a traditional data center. All it needs is power, a water supply (cooling) and I suppose given our current weather, a location not prone to flooding. ...
I have been having a phase of reading novel’s I read years go, this time it is Neuromancer by William Gibson (published 1984). This choice was triggered by it being reviewed on BBC Radio4’s A Good Read, the suggestion of Bill Thompson the BBC technology columnist. I have been surprised by how little it seems to have dated, ok in places the sizes of data streams and the like seem small (how fast capacity moves on), and maybe the way cyberspace is visualized was nearer the mark of today’s virtual worlds in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (published 1992) but on the whole it seems just as believable as a remember it being when I first read it. Still a worthwhile enjoyable read that has not aged as so much Sci-Fi does. ...
Introduction I said I would post again when I had something to show in my TFS WorkItem webparts project, well here it is. I have created a pair of web parts, one to list all the work items and the other to display the details of a given item. For testing I have create a single ASP.NET 2.0 web page that implements a WebPart manager. This needs to be setup to allow connection between the two WebParts. Note: if you use this sample you will probably have to recreate the connection between the web parts on the test page. Click the edit option (dropdown at top right) for either WebPart and use the connect option. When running it should look like this. ...
After I installed the eScrum template everything seemed fine bar the reports, only the work item report showed anything, in fact on the other reports their parameter combo boxes were empty. The key difference is the workitem report is drawn form the SQL DBs, while all the other reports are drawn from the OLAP warehouse cube. If you connect to the SQL server and run the command select * from dbo._WarehouseConfig where id in (‘LastPRocessTimeStamp’,‘RunIntervalSeconds’) ...
Problem Today I tried to move VS2005 solution in TFS source control from one Source Control location to another (on the same server) as I had put it in a stupid location to start with. So I unbound the source control (File -> Source Control -> Change Source Control) and then went into Source Control Explorer and deleted the directory and then committed the pending delete. This removed the files in the source control BUT ALSO the local ones on my disk, due to the workspace mapping. This was not what I expected, you use source control so you always have copy, a safety net, I had just lost all of my copies by using source control! ...
When developing SharePoint add-in try to remember if you put a previous version of the DLL in the GAC or not. I have just wasted a couple of hours trying to work out why a new version of a DLL is not being read from a site collection’s bin directory, when there was an old version in the GAC. Of course this would not have been an issue if I had been checking the version number properly! A good argument for pair programming to avoid these stupid blind spots ...
I have been looking at writing some SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) web parts to show information about TFS workitems. This turned out to be a bit more complex than expected. I wrote a ASP.NET 2.0 webpart using the TFS WorkItem Tracking Web Project on Codeporject as a starting point. My first WebPart just listed workitems in a project. This went OK and the webpart worked fine in a simple ASP.NET Web Part Manager based test page. ...
I have just watched the Dot Net Rocks TV Show that Colin Mackay recommended during his DDD5 session on Mock Objects (and posted about in his blog). I cannot agree more that it is great practical intro to using the Model/View/Presenter pattern, easy to follow and not getting bogged down as is so often the case with anything on patterns. I must get round to watching more on DNR TV, I listen to to the DNR Radio Podcats regularly but subjects like this are far easier understand when you see the code. However between DNR Radio, DNR TV, Channel 9, MSDN TV etc. and wanting some form of home life I am not sure how I will find the time. ...
After not really enough sleep it seems a good time reflect on DDD5. My session I felt my session went well, and the initial feedback was good. It is always good to be asked question all day about your session, proves it got people thinking; I certainly learnt a few tricks for TFS from these conversations. A common question I got was ‘I am using Product XYZ should a change to TFS?’. To this my answer is always a question ‘Does your system, whether off the shelf or home grown work for you?’ If it does then don’t rush to change it. Certainly look at TFS and see if it is better solution for your project needs - if it is not don’t change to TFS. If you don’t a working system to manage software development certainly look at TFS, or anything for that matter. Good software only comes out of a structured process, whether the process is Agile or Formal in style all the team must know what it is and adhere to it. ...