thinking-out-loud

New Blog Addresses

Jef Newsom and I are parting ways. No, we're not breaking up or anything tragically sad like that. We still work together at Improving and co-organize the Dallas C# SIG. But we've decided to create new, individualized blogs. 

Here is Jef Newsom's new blog.

Here is Todd Girvin's new blog.

I'll also update the links on the Improving blog roll so you can find these links more easily later.  We'll see you all at the new locations!

A Retrospective on PDC 2008

Last week I was off boondoggling at PDC 2008.  Most of the sessions I attended were really informative, intriguing, or at least entertaining.  Here are the highlights...

1.  Pre-conference session on Agile Perspectives:  this was a good refresher for me on agile and lean practices and some discussion from Mary and John Poppendieck along with the Microsoft P&P team.  Nothing earth-shattering here.  And, I still get the feeling that much of Microsoft doesn't yet practice Agile methods, though it seem that more and more product teams - on the order of a few thousand people, are.  That's good news.

2. Day One - Big news from Ray Ozzie is Windows Azure :  the "Windows in the cloud" platform for hosting services, web based applications, and a variety of Microsoft provided things for connecting up apps and services that aren't hosted in the cloud.  I went to several sessions on the Azure architecture and saw how the physical machines are managed, how messages flow through the network, how apps an services are administered.  This has to be the most impacting thing from PDC this year.  Attendees got to sign up for development accounts so you can build and host your own services or use ".NET Services" in the could to communicate between your apps and partner services.

3. Visual Studio Team System 2010:  There are some great new diagrams in the Arch and Dev team editions - most of the useful UML 2.x diagrams like Class, Sequence, Use Case, Activity, and a couple of others.  Also, an Architecture Explorer mode gives the ability to drill into assemblies, namespaces, and classes and then surf around their dependency links and drill in for more detail.  This is very cool for unraveling those "big ball of mud" architectures, as Peter Provost put it.

4. Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 with Daniel Moth:  .NET 4.0 is (going to be) enhanced with a set of classes wrapping the ThreadPool to give us simple task creation and synchronization and optimal execution using one thread per core in a multi-core or multi-proc environment.  Having been frustrated for a while the the ThreadPool class, this is a very nice addition.  And they use a provider model for scheduling if you want to get down in the details. 

5. Most cool to me, and apparently to many session attendees by it's #1 session ranking, was The Future of C# by Anders Hijlsberg: I went to the replay of this session and it was packed.  C#4.0 brings together the CLR and DLR with a new keyword dynamic to give us dynamic typing, which is super useful for COM-interop and other fun stuff.

My best experience, and the thing that really made the trip to LA & PDC worthwhile, was not a session at all, but the networking opportunities.  And of all the relationships we developed and strengthened, the culminating event was getting invited to a relatively exclusive breakfast with the Visual Studio Team System product team leads.  We talked about the future of the product, how they are planning to package it, what areas they need most feedback on, and partnering opportunities.  And, the marketing team was gracious enough to grant a full Team Suite license to Improving to give away at our upcoming AgileDotNet Conference.  Most of the other session info you can get online at www.MicrosoftPDC.com, but opportunities like that are hard to come by.

VS Live Dallas

In a couple of weeks you can have a full day of discussing Agile development with the Microsoft .NET Framework at AgileDotNet.

In a little over a month, you can have a full day learning all kinds of development techniques in .NET at the VSLive Dallas conference.  If you go to sign up, use the referral code of SPGIR so they know I sent you.  I'll be speaking on Architecture in the Fast Paced World, similar to what I did at the Tulsa School of Dev.

Kai-Zen Conference

Kai = Change

Zen = Good

KaiZen = Change is good. 

KaiZenConf = An open spaces conference on continuous improvement. 

I'm here in Los Angeles, CA at the Microsoft PDC listening to the Agile Perspectives session presented by Grigori Melnik and Mary Poppendieck.  Mary and Her husband Tom wrote a couple of great books called Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development. 

The Mary and Tom as well as Improving's Jef Newsom are attending the Kaizen Conference in Austin next week.  I wish I cold be there, but I guess you can't spend all your time going to conferences, right?  At least I got to see Jef's presentation at Improving last week. It was hilarious. 

Visual Studio 2008 Dev and DB editions together at last

I'm sure many already know this since I've been lax about blogging lately, but here's some pretty cool (somewhat new) news. 

If you have Visual Studio Team Edition for Developers and an MSDN Premium subscription, you can download the Team Edition for Database Pros, too.  I love the features in DBPro.  Every development team should use database script refactoring, data generation, source control of scripts, and schema comparisons.  Then you can get away from the shared development databases that screw up the environment when one developer changes something.  Check it out!

AgileDotNet 2008

There have been rumors floating around, but now it's finally official.  The AgileDotNet Conference 2008 website has been posted and is ready for registration.  The details are behind the link, but it's hosted at Microsoft in Irving, TX on Nov 14th, 2008 and has breakout sessions for developers, project managers, requirements analysts, and quality assurance engineers.  Space is limited, so register soon!

Google Chrome on the sHit List

Yesterday I saw this article saying the new Google Chrome browser swallows Pop-Ups, but Advertisers get billed.  That probably doesn't bother most users, but it's really going to piss off the market that pays for Internet usage.

Then today heard that my wife's company, a large financial services firm, is black-listing Google Chrome for internal use.  The issue is that the Chrome usage license supposedly gives Google ownership of the content viewed in the browser.  Purportedly, the usage license would give them access or "ownership" to proprietary corporate information, code, documents, etc., which is totally not cool.  Now, I just read the entire Chrome End User License Agreement and don't see anything of the type.  From a little deeper research, I see that Google has removed the offensive Big Brother Clause. 

So, will it be widely adopted?   Firefox, Opera, IE 8 are all coming out with great new features.  It's cool to see some browser wars again.  The winner will definitely be us, the end users.

Agile in Name Only

I've had some prospective clients say "We tried agile but it failed."  Of course the person I was talking to wasn't involved in the project and couldn't give me any details, but I wonder if it went along the lines of this article on "Agile" failure.

Agile 2008

So yesterday I went to OKC to present on Agile Development in Microsoft .NET.  I spoke at a noon and an evening session, which is a fun way to do things.  You get to refine your presentation for the second delivery.  Today I'm supposed to be flying to Toronto for the Agile 2008 conference.  I was really looking forward to being there today and tomorrow to staff the Improving booth and attend some sessions.  But, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."  I missed my first flight out, the second one was canceled (probably to save on costs) and the third and final flight is now suspended due to maintenance issues.  If I have to fly up tomorrow instead, I'll be missing have of the 3rd day and therefore one half of the full conference.  It's probably not worth the trip, at that point.

Another thing that made me really want to go is that I've been nominated for the board of the Agile Alliance.  The board had a meeting yesterday, are taking votes today, and are announcing the election winners tomorrow.  I was expecting to be there for the announcements and hoping to win a seat so I can further my mission of bring Agile methods to traditionally non-agile corporate developers using Microsoft technologies.  If you're a member, go vote for me!

Well, they just announced that they have a plane for us, so I'm off to another terminal.  Wish me luck!

Agile development in Microsoft .NET

On Monday, August 4th, I'm speaking at the Oklahoma City .Net Developers Group  lunch and dinner meetings about software development with Agile methods using Microsoft .NET.  I plan to cover the basic principles of the Agile movement and why it's gaining so much momentum, as well as best practices for the software developer and some good tools to support them in the .NET world. 

I hope to see some friends there from my time working with Chesapeake Energy. CHK was my first customer to install, configure, and use Visual Studio Team System when the 2005 version was still in beta.  I wonder how their Agile adoption is going.  Anyway, if you're in the OKC area, come out for either the lunch or dinner meeting and say hello.  Address and directions are on the left side of the meeting announcement page.

TFS 2008 Power Tools

I just downloaded and installed the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools listed in the latest Microsoft Download notifications.  These Power Tools integrate some cool features straight into Visual Studio 2008.  I especially like:

• Build notification sys-tray tool for monitoring continuous integration
• Work item templates for setting default values when creating new work items
• And perhaps the Forbidden Patterns Policy would prevent newbies from checking in IDE cache files as I've recently seen.

Agile Alliance: Board of Directors

I've been nominated for the Board of Directors of the Agile Alliance, an international community that "supports those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable".  If you're a member of the Agile Alliance, please vote for me.  If you're not a member but are a proponent of Agile software development, become one by joining now.   Improving is a corporate member and a sponsor of the Agile 2008 Conference.  We're also a strong supporter of the Dallas chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network.

Virtual Machine Optimization

This afternoon I'm working on creating some core virtual machine hard drives with my colleague Pete at Improving.  I found this excellent article on creating and optimizing VHDs using differencing.  But, it doesn't answer a question I have about sharing base VHDs.  My understanding of the NT kernel (the core OS for Windows Server/XP/Vista) is that memory-mapped file IO gives the benefit of only one in-memory copy of any read-only file regardless of how many processes load that file into their working set.  I get this idea from Helen Custer's old book on with Windows NT operating system, which I read when it first came out.   

So, I have this theory for which I can't find any others confirming or denying.  It goes like this:

* Create a base VHD with the core operating system for use in multiple machines (a la the article).

* Mark the base VHD read-only.

* Create a new VPC/Virtual Server/VM using a differencing file on the base VHD.

* Create a second VM using a second differencing file on the base VHD.

* Start both VMs at once.  The base VHD should only physically be loaded into physical RAM once!  The physical memory of the file will be logically mapped into each of the VM processes, but won't consume any more physical or paged memory on the host machine.

I guess I have to actually run the experiment to prove this as no one I can find seems to be thinking about this memory-mapping concept enough to make a statement one way or another.  Google has failed me. :(

SQL Service Broker (SSB)

I've been working on a project to do high-volume audit logging for a large ESB with SQL Service Broker.  We're using SQL Express on the logging client to host the initiator queue and SQL Enterprise to host the target queue.  For some reason, processing messages out of the target queue peaks at a couple of hundred messages per second, even on a quad processor machine with plenty of RAM, and then SQL Server starts consuming about 95% of the CPU.  This article on SSB performance shed some light on the need for multiple conversations, which helped a little but didn't solve the problem.  Time to file a trouble ticket with MS. :(

R# 4.0 and CodeRush

It looks like ReSharper finally came out with the 4.0 beta that's compatible with VS2008.  My colleagues have been pushing toward CodeRush and I intend to learn just better understand what it can do.  I did a quick search and found this "smackdown" comparison between the two.  Bummer that they don't play well together. 

.NET Framework 3.5 Certifications

Tomorrow there are a couple of Live Meetings on the new .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 certifications.  Check out the link to see the 3.0/3.5 topics for which you can now get certified and some detail on the specific exams.  Enjoy!

Agile Product Management with Innovation Games

I'm a huge fan of Agile principles and applying them to organizational challenges other than just software development.  For other like-minded hippies, you may be interested in a class on Innovation Games being taught in Austin by my good friend Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys.  We practice Luke's Innovation Games now and then at Improving to overcome blocks in managing a product backlog or just developing one. 

If you haven't read the book, I encourage you to check it out or sign up for the course.  It's a great set of tools to have in your agile toolbox. 

Java Spring Web MVC 2.5

Yesterday I chatted with Erik Weibust over at the Java Spring User Group and he told me that Keith Donald, a founding partner at SpringSource and famous for creating Spring Web Flow, is speaking at the May meeting at Improving tomorrow night, Wednesday May 20th.  The meeting starts at 7:00p and the doors to the building lock at that time, so get there a little early. 

For those of you in the .NET world, SpringSource has released a version of Spring .NET, which is a full-featured open-source IOC framework for .NET.  I'm looking forward to hearing Keith speak.  Erik says he's very engaging. 

New .NET Versions and the CLR

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Tulsa School of Dev.  While there, I got to catch up with my long-time friend, Brett Schuchert.  Brett is quite the programming language buff, and knows the C++, Java, and C# inner workings very well.  We got into a discussion about virtual tables being constructed at compile vs. load time and he asked if I had heard of any advances in the newer versions of .NET.  But as I recalled (and have now verified), .NET v3.0 and v3.5 both run on the same old .NET v2.0 CLR.  We'll have to wait for a CLR change to optimize the virtual tables.

Free eBooks for LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight

I'm here at Microsoft listening to Jef talk about LINQ internals at the Dallas C# SIG meeting. Since I love to multitask, I wanted to take the opportunity to post this link to free eBooks for LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight. I've only started reading the LINQ book, but really like it so far.

Fair warning: you need to have an MCP number to register and download these eBooks. But of course, if you want to become a Microsoft Certified Professional, contact Improving for training and "second chance" exam retake coupons.