July 2005 - Posts - Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

Rapid Results without a Rugby Scrum

The Financial Times IT Review has an article called Rapid Results without a Rugby Scrum. Apparently Yahoo! has 15 Scrum teams operating right now, but only in certain situations according to Pete Deemer, vice-president of product development.

“We’re always looking for new ways of doing things,” says Mr Deemer “and we’re trying to figure out where it works best.”

Pete seems willing to give Scrum a try, but Ken Schwaber remarks that his efforts are not targetted to IT executives.

“We aim at CEOs because CIOs [chief information officers] are part of the problem, not the solution,” says Mr Schwaber. “We are trying to directly connect the software developers with the customer, and CIOs are not too thrilled about being cut out of the action.”

Of course, it takes executive sponsorship to try something new and risky.

“We expect only about one-third of companies that try to use it will succeed,” he says. “Those companies that do succeed with it are often those for whom technology is their lifeblood, and if they don’t succeed with it, they risk going out of business.”

Posted Jul 27 2005, 12:32 PM by darrell with no comments

Filed under: Agile

Dear Google...

I found this funny quote from a spamming SEO on Google's page for Search Engine Optimizers:

Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...

Posted Jul 20 2005, 12:34 PM by darrell with no comments

Review of Visual Studio Hacks by James Avery

Note: While I did contribute just 1 of the 100 hacks, I wasn’t paid, so don’t think I’m motivated by money.

Visual Studio Hacks is the best power-users book about everyone’s favorite IDE that I’ve seen. A few hacks explain little known features, but the vast majority of the book is dedicated to unleashing the power of Visual Studio extensibility. And most of the book covers topics that the standard documentation and references don’t cover.

James also covers a slew of great add-ins. Most of these were created by the developer community and are extremely polished. And they are certainly better than doing things by hand!

The Hacks series from O’Reilly are great for reading when you find yourself with 10 minutes of free time at the doctor’s office or stuck in traffic. You can cover a hack or two, put the book down, and then not have to worry about remembering the state of the book when you pick it back up.

Buy the book at Amazon.

You can preview 5 of the 100 hacks at O’Reilly’s web site.

James has setup the Visual Studio Hacks web site and updates it regularly.

Posted Jul 20 2005, 06:33 AM by darrell with 4 comment(s)

Filed under: Book Reviews

MVPs - are you going to the Summit?

And what days are you going to be there? Let me know, I'd like to catch up with everyone. Thanks!

Posted Jul 19 2005, 03:08 PM by darrell with 20 comment(s)

Filed under: .NET, Windows

Why is Visual Studio debugging so slowly?

There are many possible causes for Visual Studio (2002 and 2003) to run slowly during debugging.

Antivirus software can really slow down the process, so check there first.

Many times it's a domain issue such as an authentication timeout. Check the event log for errors.

Setting Enable Unmanaged Debugging to true in project properties can also cause debugger slowness. Try setting it to false. Native debugging is slower in general than managed code debugging, so if you don't need to debug Native code, turn it off in the options.

Another possible cause is if you had a Beta or Release Candidate version of Visual Studio .NET installed. There may be no problem initially and it occurs intermittently after a solution gets larger with multiple projects in it. See Microsoft Support article q312115.

Policy files in projects used in Enterprise Templates can also slow things down. Make sure your strongnamed project does not have any policy file (*.tdl) included.

Sometimes IIS can get "hosed." Uninstall and reinstall IIS, and then run aspnet_regiis -i.

If that doesn't work try repairing the .NET Framework in:

Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click Add/Remove Programs.
Click "Click here for support information".
Open the Repair.htm file, which is installed to the version directory for the .NET Framework.
Follow the instructions in Repair.htm.

Posted Jul 19 2005, 10:53 AM by darrell with 7 comment(s)

Filed under: .NET

New ImageMap control in ASP.NET 2.0

Here's a cool new control in ASP.NET 2.0, the ImageMap. You use it like this:

      <asp:imagemap id="Shop"           
        imageurl="Images/ShopChoice.jpg"
        width="150" 
        height="360"
        alternatetext="Shopping choices" 
        runat="Server">    
        
        <asp:circlehotspot
          navigateurl="http://www.tailspintoys.com"
          x="75"
          y="290"
          radius="75"
          hotspotmode="Navigate"
          alternatetext="Shop for toys">           
        </asp:circlehotspot> 
        
        <asp:circlehotspot
          navigateurl="http://www.cohowinery.com"
          x="75"
          y="120"
          radius="75"
          hotspotmode="Navigate"
          alternatetext="Shop for wine">
        </asp:circlehotspot>     
          
      </asp:imagemap>

And the code-behind looks like this:

  void VoteMap_Clicked (Object sender, ImageMapEventArgs e)
  {
    string coordinates;
    string hotSpotType;
    int yescount = ((ViewState["yescount"] != null)? (int)ViewState["yescount"] : 0);
    int nocount = ((ViewState["yescount"] != null)? (int)ViewState["nocount"] : 0);

    // When a user clicks the "Yes" hot spot,
    // display the hot spot's name and coordinates.
    if (e.PostBackValue.Contains("Yes"))
    {
      yescount += 1;
      coordinates = Vote.HotSpots[0].GetCoordinates();
      hotSpotType = Vote.HotSpots[0].ToString ();
      Message1.Text = "You selected " + hotSpotType + " " + e.PostBackValue + ".<br>" +
                      "The coordinates are " + coordinates + ".<br>" +
                      "The current vote count is " + yescount.ToString() + 
            " yes votes and " + nocount.ToString() + " no votes.";
    }
      
    // When a user clicks the "No" hot spot,
    // display the hot spot's name and coordinates.
    else if (e.PostBackValue.Contains("No"))
    {
      nocount += 1;
      coordinates = Vote.HotSpots[1].GetCoordinates();
      hotSpotType = Vote.HotSpots[1].ToString ();
      Message1.Text = "You selected " + hotSpotType + " " + e.PostBackValue + ".<br>" +
                      "The coordinates are " + coordinates + ".<br>" +
            "The current vote count is " + yescount.ToString() +
            " yes votes and " + nocount.ToString() + " no votes.";
    }
    
    else
    {
      Message1.Text = "You did not click a valid hot spot region.";
    }

    ViewState["yescount"] = yescount;
    ViewState["nocount"] = nocount;
  }

Posted Jul 15 2005, 06:58 AM by darrell with 6 comment(s)

Filed under: .NET

Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management now available

Raytheon will now send you the full text of Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management for free.

[via Clarke Ching]

Posted Jul 14 2005, 10:41 PM by darrell with 2 comment(s)

Filed under: Agile

The reality of Team System pricing

Some of my fellow CodeBetter bloggers (Brendan and Jeff) have taken up the old “Team System is too expensive” chant again. Here is my reply.

The reason the price doesn't make sense to you is because you're not the target market. The target market for Team System is large development groups that are currently using products like ClearCase. Is anyone that is complaining about Team System pricing using ClearCase? I highly doubt it, and if you are using ClearCase, you’re probably excited to pay tens of thousands of dollars less for roughly equivalent functionality.

I was around for the initial install of ClearCase at my previous employer. For ClearCase, which is a configuration management suite and much of which will be available in Team System, the list price is $4,125 for a floating license. You’d need somewhere between 3 to 6 floating licenses per developer. That’s JUST CLEARCASE.

Like Eric Sink said in his excellent comments on the pricing of Team System, MSDN Universal does not mean that you get everything Microsoft sells. That’s just plain wrong. It’s true that is a change, that Microsoft hasn’t managed it very well, and that in general people don’t like change.

Microsoft did relent somewhat and allow current MSDN Universal subscribers to get 1 of the 3 role editions and 5 CALs to the Foundation Server at no additional cost. So for small development shops the incremental cost of getting all 3 editions combined (for 1 person, the other 4 get Premium) AND access to Foundation Server is $1,200.

Let’s put this in perspective. The current list price for MSDN Universal is around $2,800. For access to everything with an upgrade you will pay a total of $4,000.

This works out to an increase of $100 PER MONTH.

Now, if all of the Team Server features are not worth an additional $100 per month to you, then go ahead and be cheap. Use open source software or whatever else. Don’t get me wrong; I love open source software. But if there is something that allows me to bring more value to my clients at an acceptable financial tradeoff, I’m going to do it. If you are a consultant, how does $100 per month compare to your hourly rate?

Posted Jul 13 2005, 02:20 PM by darrell with 24 comment(s)

Filed under: .NET

Good introductory IronPython article

Over on DevX there's a good introductory article about IronPython.

[via Paul Laudeman]

Posted Jul 12 2005, 08:43 AM by darrell with 2 comment(s)

Filed under: Python

Firefox extension: Last Tab

My new favorite Firefox extension is Last Tab. It modifies Ctrl-Tab to switch to recently selected tabs, rather than always go from left-to-right and it focuses the most recently selected tab when a tab is closed. Sweet!