You may be noticing a theme today.  I am finding a number of good links today I am posting for posterity.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/the_art_of_recr.html

Tuesday, March 21, 2006 1:47:03 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Great article on Negotiation.  I see myself unconsciously doing many of the things mentioned in the article but learned a few new tricks while reading through it.  Posted here so I don't lose it!

http://www.agilekiwi.com/negotiation.htm

Tuesday, March 21, 2006 1:40:57 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Brian Harry posted asking what should be in Team Foundation Server vNext.

I have several pet features that were cut at the SDRs I went to that I would like to drop back in the hat:

 Aggregation - At most large shops there will never be a single TFS Project.  Yet management needs a view into the projects across the entire corporation. Give me a way to get consolidated views of where all my projects are at, how much effort was expended in a release, i.e. what it is actually costing me to build my software and what is the big picture.

 Occasionally connected developer - give me a way to still do source control while I am disconnected from TFS.  Then when I get back into the office let me resync the source control systems.  This allows me to still checkpoint my work as I refactor while on the plane but still have visibility into the steps I went through when I get back into the office.

 Methodology Editors - Just about everyone would love to change the methodologies in some minor way but the bar to doing this is pretty high. We have great Windows Forms and ASP.NET designers, why am I hand editing XML files to change the layout of work items?  Reminds of editing dialog resources in the dark days of windows.

 Web UI / Customer Portal - Not all of the consumers of TFS data are users of the IDE.  The Sharepoint site was a great start in this direction but step it up. Add a way to enter work items directly in the sharepoint site.  Give me a way to create a customer facing portal that gives them some limited visibility into my methodology.  i.e. be able to enter/search work items, get builds and look at fixes in SCM.

 Better Integration Tools - MSBuild is cool.  But once again I am back in the dark ages editing XML by hand!  Make the Team Build wizard re-entrant so I can make changes.  Better yet use your wizzy new DSL toolkit to give me a DSL that sits on top of MSBuild and gives me a nice UI to create/edit/maintain my build scripts.  Extend the build system to do things like help me build my database from scratch out of artifacts checked into the SCM system.  Almost every team needs to do this yet the tools are lacking at best.

Those are a start!

Wednesday, March 01, 2006 3:02:09 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

VSLive is heading back to Las Vegas. I am responsible for the whole show this time around both SmartClient and ASPLive tracks.  You can find the submission site right here: http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/callforpapers/

Get those submissions in and hopefully I will see you in Las Vegas!

Friday, February 17, 2006 10:54:36 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Big change for me today.  After 5 years of being independent and running my own company I accepted a position with a local company today.  As of today I am now Chief Architect for Vertafore. I have been working with these guys in a consulting role for the last few years and they for some reason thought it was just an extended job interview! I am excited to continue to work with the great team at Vertafore.

I will likely keep this blog in place but it may move at some point in the future.  Will let everyone know.

Monday, February 13, 2006 2:41:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [5]  

I am a big fan of Jamie Cansdale's TestDriven.net.  Today I tried to use it in VS2003 and clicking on the Run Test(s) item did nothing!  I almost panicked.  I couldn't envision going back to nUnit GUI.  I checked all the usual suspects.  Uninstalled, got the latest build of TestDriven.net, reinstalled, reset the packages in VS.NET, read the FAQ on the TestDriven.net site.

Finally I gave up and sent Jamie some mail.  Jamie doesn't know me from Adam. Not only did he respond but he responded within 5 minutes!  Had me use SysInternals excellent DebugView to give him a log of what was going on. Looked like there was an issue using EnvDTE to get the active window in VS2003.  He pointed me at a Craig Skibo article documenting a problem with some uninstalls unregistering components used by Visual Studio AddIns.  Specifically DTE.OLB.

Ran:

Monday, February 13, 2006 2:37:54 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

We have hit two issues in recent weeks with this. 

1.  ASP.NET Session or Authentication cookies do not work correctly on a server with an underscore in the name. Jon Box reminded me of the issue and Scott Hanselman chimed in. Come to find out this is really an Internet Explorer issue.

2.  SQL Server has issues installing and other random issues on a server with a hyphen in the name.  Note this is primarily a SQL 6.0/6.5 issue.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006 9:08:06 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

We are getting ready to roll out a product with one of my clients based on Analysis Services 2005. The product is one of their first that requires Active Directory integration.  This is mainly predicated by the fact that for some reason Analysis Services 2005 will only work with Active Directory based authentication.  So we had to create a whole new credential store just for this addin.

As we were doing it we decided that we would create a group for each cube and then add members to the group to grant access to the cube.

This worked great in Development but when we went to deploy it to our QA environment failed.  The users never had access to Analysis Services.  It drove us bonkers trying to figure it out.

After some time on the phone with Microsoft PSS we found the issue to be the fact that we had used a Domain Local Group.  Come to find out these groups are only intended for use on Domain Controllers.  I had neve seen this distinction and must admit I had always wondered the difference between the two group types.

Our development machine was not a domain controller but for some reason the groups worked there. The solution?  Move to Domain Global Groups which will work on any machine in the domain.

Friday, January 13, 2006 10:46:53 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Anyone else headed to Mix06? 

I must admit I was really debating on this one. 

The promotional materials are very, very slick.  Very black turtleneck to use a phrase from the 90s.

On the other hand the information on the web site was pretty minimal until just this week.  No detailed session descriptions with presenter names, etc.  We have started getting some session information but it feels very preliminary and there is still no information on who is presenting. The conference is only 9 weeks away! It is almost as if they are saying, "Trust us, we sell out TechEd every year."

Well I finally quit waffling and decided to go.  The promise of what they are offering is enough and I do somewhat trust Microsoft after the last couple of PDC events that have turned out quite well.

I am excited Microsoft finally realizing their is code in a web application in places other than just the backend and am hoping we see some interesting new stuff.

The fact that it is in Las Vegas isn't such a bad deal either!

See you in Vegas!

Friday, January 13, 2006 8:06:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]