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I won’t bother to repeat what Gojko has said on David J, Anderson’s book on Kanban, other than to say I agree wholeheartedly. I too have been looking for a good introduction book on Kanban as applied to software development (so Kanban as opposed to kanban, not the capital K). This is exactly what with book does. OK I know that this information is out there on the web (http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/); but there times, especially for introducing potentially non technical people to development methodologies, where you want to point people at an easily accessible introduction they can dip into. This is that book, have a look it is worth it ...

June’s Agile Yorkshire meeting is on the experiences of the BI development team at Skipton Building Society on bringing automated testing to data warehousing using Fitnesse and dbFit. For more details check out the Agile Yorkshire site

When you drop a combo box on a Access 2010 web form and databind to a query or table with a value column and display column (e.g. the query select id, description from table1) you don’t get what you would expect. It shows just the value e.g. a set of integers in the combo. This is not the case if you are using a standard Access client form. the wizard that gets run sort it all out for you, and if it does not, you just set the ‘Bound Column’ property to sort it out. ...

The next chapter of the ongoing saga. I had the 403 errors again today when using my phone as a modem to test out firewall. As I was in the office I had time to call Vodafone support. As expect I had to speak to a succession of people: Person 1 – call centre advisor, passed me straight onto ‘support’ Person 2 – support advisor but seem lost when I spoke about web protocols, I think it was more ‘making a phone ring’ support Person 3 – 2nd line support, success, as soon as I explained my problem they said ‘yes that happens’. The problem is down, as I had suspected, to congestion in their WAN network (not the 3G network, though the density of cells is a factor). When you try to use HTTP Vodafone route a request to their authentication server to see if your account is allow to connect to the site. By default they block a list of adult/premium web sites (this is service you have switched on or off with your account). The problem is at busy times this validation service is overloaded and so their systems get no response as to whether the site is allowed, so assume the site you asked for is restricted and gives the 403 error. Once this happens you seem to have to make new 3G data connection (reset the phone, move cell or let the connection time out) to get it to try again. ...

Don’t be a muppet like me and turn up for an Agile Yorkshire meeting on the 2nd Wednesday of the month out of habit. Due to the move to the great new location of the Old Broadcasting House the regular date has had to moved to the 2nd Tuesday. Bit of a pain for me as I struggle to make Tuesdays.

I got this commonly seen version error when I tried to upgrade my RC version of Office 2010 to RTM Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of Microsoft Office 2010. You must first install any prerelease versions of Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup. I had already removed by RC Office and Visio. Turns out the problem was I had the Outlook Hotmail Connector (Beta) installed too. Once this was removed the install worked fine. ...

Visual Studio 2010 provides many new features to aid Application Lifecycle Management. Learning its capabilities can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to Team Foundation Server. So enter the new book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ by Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy and Martin Woodward. This provides a great overview of all the the key features of Visual Studio and TFS 2010, presented with a view as to how TFS gives an end to end delivery of an ALM process. ...

Got time today to start our proper internal TFS 2010 rollout. This involves linking up the new TFS to our SharePoint 2010 farm and merging in the contents from 2008 TFS and 2010 RC servers. All went fairly well, our SharePoint farm caused a few problems with its rather nice redirection feature. This allows you to gradually move SharePoint content from an older server to a new one. A page is requested from the new server, if it is there it is used, if it is not the content on the old server is used. This caused a couple of problems during the install of TFS that content was not on the new SharePoint server so it redirected to the old one. However, the correct response was that the content was not there and TFS need to install or configure it. Once we realised this was going on there were no major issues with the TFS 2010 installation. ...

A while ago I blogged about the problems I was having with 403 error when trying to use my HTC phone as a 3G modem or using Opera or IE on the phone itself. When I initially complained Vodafone refunded my data fee for the month and said engineers were onto this known intermittent issue. No grief, Ok I did not want to see 403 errors but I was happy with the customer service, fast and no quibble. ...

After upgrade TFS 2010 RC to RTM you might see a problem when you try to create a new team project. The creation fails with error: Module: Engine Event Description: TF30162: Task “Queries” from Group “WorkItemTracking” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: TF237195: The following user name is not supported: [SERVER]$$PROJECTCOLLECTIONADMINGROUP$$ The answer is simple, but I had missed it! Make sure that you are creating your new team project from a copy of the 2010 RTM version of Team Explorer. If you use the RC version you will see the error. ...