It seems I have a lot of fans in Poland. 

 

Actually I suspect there are a lot of spammers in Poland who are trying to scrape my site for emails or send comment spam.  UAE & Lithuania also appear to be a problem.  I'd really like to block big chuncks of the planet from getting to my site but I'm not sure this is possible.  Anyone got any idea how to do this?

I just upgraded my blog site to dasBlog 1.9.  It's been a long time between releases - which is a good thing - but so far I can't see a lot of difference from 1.8.  There are a few new themes and 3 new settings - auto expire comments, html comments & gravatar icons (whatever they are).  There is no support for Comment RSS and the activity reports still only work a day at a time (my biggest complaint).  Still, it's a rock solid product and the upgrade was extremely painless, although my customised theme has broken so I need to do some work on that.

I switched my Xtra account to the new unlimited Go Large plan 2 weeks ago and have found that for anything other than surfing it is incredible slow - dialup slow.  Yes, I know it's managed for peer to peer and bit torrent type stuff, but even basic file downloads over HTTP are rediculously slow.  At the current rate, downloading Vista from MSDN will take 3 or more days.  Now I can fully understand having some sort of restrictions but I live in an semi-rural area where there are not too many users and I do my big download at non peak times - from 6am to 6pm usually.  Prior to Go Large I was getting about 5-8 times the performance.

There's a few others complaining about Xtra and reccommending a switch to Orcon or others which is a great idea for some people but where I live, Telecon are the only cable providers so while switching will not reduce Telecon's monopoly or profits it may restore my bandwidth.

The other option is to switch back to the previous 5Gb plan I was on. In most months this was sufficient but with school holidays 5Gb usually lasts about 2 weeks.

So, all I can really do is moan about it here and make sure I cross link as much as possible to get up the google hit list.

Oh, crap, just found this, I should have checked more before switching plans.

Ah, cancel that, just found this.  However, it really does show how incompitant Telecon & Xtra are.  I really feel sorry for the people that work there - and I know a few.  It must be hard working for a company that is so hated by so many people, but really this is the fault of senior exec's and a few idiots in marketting.  They will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.  Viva le revolution!

I just spotted this excellent set of posts.  If you want to learn about MSBuild then this is a great starting point.  You should probably also subscribe to the MSBuild teams blog here.

It never ceases to amaze me how hard it can be to sell good software development practices to business people.  All they see is the dollars or increased delivery times.  As a 20 year veteran(vintage?) programmer, analyst and amateur architect I like to think that I know a little about creating good software and how to do it well.  However, I'm not so good at creating a business case for this.

I'm now working for a company that care about doing things the 'right way', or at least the Intergen way.  We care passionately about professionalism and doing what is right for the customer - even if that means saying no occasionally.  This is an ongoing battle however, we are not perfect at it.  We are still subject to the whims of business requirements and real world financial constraints. 

I'm currently assigned to a customer with a team of about twenty internal and contract developers.  The code base for the current systems is being migrated to an SOA model using .Net 3.0 and some external components from 3rd parties.  The business is driving hard for delivery on critical requirements, some of which are driven by regulatory agencies. 

There are a number of issues with the project that I'm sure are common to a lot of other businesses.  The existing code that I am working on is, shall we say, challenging, very challenging.  It was created rapidly with little care for future requirements or expansion and has been patched by many developers for about three years.  There is little or no documentation.  Teams working on similar projects are separated physically and logically.  There is no real architecture plan that I have seen.  Testing is at the bottom of the cliff.  There is only lip service paid to agile practices.  The list goes on but despite the issues, the team still produces quality solutions that service the business requirements, to a certain degree at least.

As a fan of Team System I am very keen to see this introduced but I understand that it's a big task and may not offer a speedy fix to these issues.  It's also hard to sell.  Why is this? I think there are several reasons:

• It's hard to describe.  Business doesn't want to hear about improved source control, work item tracking and unit testing.  They want to know about reduced cost and increased profits.  Describing how Team System aids in these areas is hard.  The intangible benefits, like improved communication, are hard to estimate because they are very subjective.
• The perception is that it's expensive.  This is clearly crap and I'm sick of people saying that it's expensive.  What is the real cost of a software defect that takes eight passes through QA to be fixed?  What is the cost of a defect in a shared library that stops twenty devs from working for three hours?  What is the cost of not tracking defects at all?  These are things that are easily measured.  A few thousand dollars per developer is NOT expensive.  If you think it is then you are in the wrong business.
• Developers don't want to work in a factory.  We like to be creative and have freedom to work on what we want, when we want and how we want.  The thought of being controlled by a large system and spoon fed tasks to complete on the production line is disturbing.  Some developers take this to extremes and refuse to follow any common best practice such as writing comments, documenting systems or proving their code works. This attitude is not prevalent but it is something I encounter occasionally.  It is very naive and must be stamped out!  If you want to be that free, go work for yourself.  Most businesses demand that you work at work and deliver something occasionally.  Team System helps you focus on the work without dictating how to do it.  You can configure as many or as few rules are you like.

I'm not saying that Team System is the only solution to bad practices, far from it, but it's one solution that I have seen work and feel passionate about.

So, if you've read this far then I'm hoping you agree with me, at least in part.  What can we as developers do to sell good software practices?  Like any expense or investment, it must be justified.  You need to make a case for it.  Show the bottom line.  Record and measure the failures and use these as weapons.  Set good examples by following good practice - unit testing & TDD does not reduce productivity, it increases it. Read and learn.  Talk to your managers - if they don't listen, look for a new job - if they don't care about losing your skills then you are better off somewhere else.  There are plenty of great companies out there and some of them even respect your opinion!

Darryl and others have mentioned recently about the impending doom that is IE 7 :] If you are like me and decided not to use it - for one reason or another - then beware that it is very likley to be automatically installed on your favourite computer weather you want it or not.

Now, dont get me wrong, I like IE7 but during the early betas I had an issue with it and Visual Studio Team Suite so I haven't used it on my work machine since then.  I do use it at home though and it works fine, but from a user POV I don't think it works any better than IE6.  From a dev POV I've just realised that I haven't done any testing on my sites (personal or otherwise) so I should probably stop blogging and get testing!

Anyways, my main gripe is that this is rolling out as a critical (or at least high priority) update so most users will get it without asking for it.  I can understand the justification for doing this - it does fix a lot of potential security issues so it would fall into that category - but I can see this causing some problems for a lot of people.

Alex has just released Base4 version 2.1. 

I haven't been following the progress of Base4 that closely but it appears that it has matured into a very stable and innovative product - take a look at the 15 minute video if you doubt my word!  I can't see how any other product could be simpler to use than Base4.  It's awesome.

Alex: it might be a good idea to do some benchmarks like the NHibernate v ADO one I saw recently - sorry can't find the link now.  It would be interesting to see the comparison.  I'm thinking that Base4 would stack up very well against NHibernate :)

• Project Manager / Business Analyst
• 1 Senior .Net Developer
• 2 Junior / Intermediate .Net Developers
• 1 Tester

Ok, so the trick to having a new battery is that you still have to charge it occasionally.  But thankfully my notebook (paper one) and pencil still worked so I managed to pickup lots of nice tips from Scott Guthrie, all of which I'm sure you can find on his blog already.

However, my favorites were:

MaintainScrollPostition.  Add this to your Page tag to have the browser restore the scroll position after a postback.

DefaultButton. You can set the default button for a Form or a Panel.  Useful for a search panel at the top of the page.

OnClientClick. My JScript skills are more rusty than my ASP skills so I was very pleased to see that I can use this to do simple confirmation/cancellation dialogs.  Eg:  OnClientClick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to bomb Beirut?');"

Cross Page Postbacks. I knew about this but sort of forgot it.  Could be most useful for a search page.  Not sure if you can specify a target though.

RSS Toolkit.  I already have a job to add some content to a community sight from an RSS feed.  The RSS Toolkit will make this pathetically simple.

And lots more.  I can't wait to get back to work and implement a few of these on my current project.

I asked Scott at the end of the session if it would be ok to re-present his slides at a user group event and he was very agreeable to that so I think it's about time we had another meeting!

I'm feeling inspired enough to attempt some live blogging.  That's what TechEd (and a new working notebook battery) does for me.  So, I'm sitting in the the Sky City theatre waiting for Scott Guthrie to start his ASP.Net Tips & Tricks session - his final one for TechEd NZ before he flies off to Australia.

And I'm using Windows Live Writer which is awesome.

More soon.

TechEd 2006 is a blast already.  I've only managed to get to one session so far - Paul Andrew on Workflow Foundation (checkout the article on Paul in Computer World) - but everyone is in a great mood and things seem to be working really well.

This is the biggest TechEd ever - about 2200 attendees plus loads of presenters, sponsors, partners and other assorted klingons :].  It was a little tight for room after the keynote when everyone flooded out of the room at the same time, but otherwise, it's not too cramped.

The Hands on Labs - where I am spending most of my time - are working really well.  We had the room three quarters full yesturday afternoon and today there has been a steady stream of people filling in time between sessions etc.  There's some really great labs to do to - eg, the ones on LINQ and ADO 3, and Workflow Foundation. 

The yellow Intergen shirts certainly get peoples attention, especially when we travel in herds!  I'm a bit scared of travelling alone though in case I get picked on.  (I'll post a photo as soon as I get a mo).

If your missing out on all the fun of TechEd because you couldn't get tickets then take a look at http://www.techedlive.co.nz/ for a live feed of news and activities.

Like Rod I am completely baffled by the game of Football.  I'm sure it takes considerable skill to perform some of the elegant goals you occasionnaly see in the Readers Digest versions we get on the sports news at night, but for the life I me I cannot explain why anyone can sit through the remaining 89 minutes of utter boredom.

To make it worse, I've been surrounded by devotees of the "Beautiful Game" for the last month - either at work or socially - and even the most ardent of these fans will admit that it can be a tad tedious at times.

On the odd occassion that I have been tortured with more than a glance at the action it has inevitably been 0-0 in the 83rd minute, or some mumma's boy has tripped on a blade of sharp grass and ruptured his spleen.

Xenu gave us hands for a very good reason. FFS - just pick the damn ball up and run with it!  

 

If you have been living in a cave this week, you may have missed the announcement about the demise of WinFS.  On the face of it, this post seems reasonable but like some of the respondents I'm a tad disappointed and worried.

We have been hearing for many years about the new file system based on SQL that would let us do all sorts of cool things.  It never seemed to happen until WinFS came along.  Now that WinFS is gone(ish) the future seems very uncertain.

At least it looks like ObjectSpaces might actually happen in the form of ADO.Net Entities but Microsoft are very late with something that has been done by many others already - e.g., WORM, nHibernate and Base4.  I think Entities will succeed only because of LINQ - without that, it's no better than the other players in the ORM game.

Vista & Longhorn were supposed to deliver the fantastic new file system.  After using Vista for a few weeks I'm now inclined to think that Vista is just a fancy XP.  I'm sure MS will sell lots of Vista to home users via the OEM channel but I'm yet to see one valid business reason for Vista and if there is to be no WinFS then what will be the point of Longhorn Server?  Security? - sure but it's not like XP/2003 will stop being secure when Vista/Longhorn ship.  Performance? - maybe, but at a hardware cost.  Wizbang? - it has plenty of that but apps won't look much better until they have been redsigned for Vista, a simple recompile won't make them look like Vista apps. WinFX / .Net 3?  - well I can do all that on XP/2003 and as most users are still going to be using legacy OS's I'm probably not going to be writing apps for Vista/Longhorn any time soon.

I think Microsoft have reached a cross-road in the development cycle.  Products are getting pretty solid, features locked down, integration is coming together.  The final picture is starting to become clear.  I haven't lost faith in Microsoft - far from it - but they are going to have to pull something convincing out of the marketing hat to reassure the congregation.