Fear and Loathing

Matt sent me a note saying that they’ve posted the web cast I did for the New York City SharePoint Users Group a couple of weeks ago on the BDC on their site. You can watch the 30 minute session here. It covers walking through some of Todd Baginski’s BDC generator tool, and showing results in SharePoint. With only 30 minutes, its hard to get into things like building custom search tabs, sucking in data from a web service, and other BDC goodness. I’ll get into all that at DevConnections in November as I have a 75 minute session I’m presenting on the BDC.

You know, I really have to improve my speaking skills. Either I was nervous, on drugs grown in my homemade crystal meth lab, or really need to listen to myself more often. Lots of “ums” thrown in as I was speaking so I apologize to listeners. I really do know what I’m talking about (at least I hope I do) and have done enough of these that I should know better. Although I’m doing these web casts with a cell phone on one ear with one hand and typing with the another. I probably should invest in a headset.

And no, I wasn’t wearing any pants during the web cast.

Now that my web hosting company, Webhost4life, has got their act together I’m going to be upgrading some of my sites to WSSv3. This will include my SharePoint dev site with all the application templates. Not sure if I’ll spin up an extra site or what I’ll do, but my main vanity site (currently running on DotNetNuke 4) will get a SharePoint facelift along with a few others. If you’re trying to access them this weekend, they may go offline as domain and sub-domain names swap around. Then it’ll be time to start uploading custom web parts and really going to town.

Well, 30 days later and our first sprint is done. We finished ahead of schedule at about 2pm the day before the sprint “officially” ended with one task remaining that the QA guy had to do. It was a fun ride and challenging. The entire team (sans me) had to deal with the following new technologies:

• Smart Client Software Factory
• Composite Application UI Block
• Enterprise Libraries
• Model-View-Presenter
• .NET 2.0 and Generics, Delegates, etc.
• ClickOnce
• Unit Tests
• TDD
• Visual Studio 2005
• Team System

As well as adapt to the Scrum process as they were mostly used to waterfall-esqe approaches (BDUF, highly detailed specs, etc.). I think everyone adapted pretty well. We had some churn the first couple of weeks as the plumbing got settled, we got used to using Team System (as a team) without clobbering each others work. Here’s the burndown from the iteration:

Things were a little goofy. First off I entered all the features into the Product Backlog, but then another guy (while I was enjoying the backwoods of B.C.) entered the same set and deleted my initial ones. Then we forgot to enter the initial estimates for the sprint. Finally we had entered the estimates but then had entered them in hours and Scrum for Team System uses days for the product backlog items. So that explains the false start (I’m still trying to manipulate the original warehouse database to correct that).

The other three gaps were caused by over estimation. On the 28th of August, we introduced a data layer using NetTiers and a few simple tables. That knocked two tasks that were pegged at 14 hours each down to nothing in a day. On the 11th of September we did the same thing for the next set of data we needed to store. Finally on the 18th of September we realized there were 3 or 4 tasks that were estimated at about 8–10 hours but they were really just rolled up in another screen, so that was knocked off in a day.

Not the prettiest sprint burndown chart out there, but it’s real numbers.

As for our Sprint Review, that was almost a huge guffaw. Our review with the customers was yesterday at 10am. We had stopped development and put out a release for final QA testing by noon the day before. Everything worked fine. The QA guy and some devs were working until about 9pm that night either just admiring what we did or were adding little things we wanted to put into the system (but we weren’t going to show this) and all was well. Then at 7:30 the next morning, our QA came in and couldn’t run the app. By the time 9am rolled around and we were checking the release to go over the demo, nothing worked. We tried on every machine and still no dice.

At 9:30 we reset the database and I thought we had done something horrible because the app wouldn’t even launch. Man, we were sweating bullets. Finally we determined that something happened with the proxy server on the network, so launching our ClickOnce app was failing and the exception handler couldn’t deal with it (for whatever reason). The network guys push stuff out all the time but apps for this customer never were this complicated, so nothing ever was affected. Anyways, to get the demo up and running we commented out some handling and it ran fine.

As we were really cramped for time and didn’t have time to start up the laptop to demo the system, I didn’t want to chance having that fail so we grabbed the one dev’s desktop (a Dell Dimension E521), his keyboard and mouse and screen (luckily it was a LCD and not a CRT) and hauled ass across the street to the building where we did the review.

At the end of the day, the customer was happy with what we did. There were a few suggestions and ideas that we’ll add to the next sprint. We spent an hour and a half going over the backlog items for the next sprint and ended up with a nice list to deliver the first release at the end of October. That burndown will be more of a slope than a bumpy ride, but the team had fun and we delivered working software which was the key thing.

One more note. We couldn’t figure out why when we were going through the product that a list of values were not coming back from a corporate web service. A different list we used was being populated from that same service, but the one list of numbers we wanted wasn’t. Later that day I found out that one of the devs in the other building had deleted that web service method because he thought it was a duplicate. Luckily, our system was built using Smart Web References (part of the Smart Client Software Factory) and will simply return us the list of values and a success/failure value of the web service call. This isn’t exposed to the user, but at least the app didn’t hit and unhandled exception during the demo. Thanks Les!

Yes, just like your favorite MVP, International Talk Like a Pirate Day comes but once a year and it's today, September 19th. So go ahead, wander around your offices like a blubbering peg-leg idiot and feel free to slip in a few "argghhs,"  "mateys," and "shiver me source code" comments to anyone who looks like a land-lubber.

Robert Bogue has been around in the SharePoint sphere for sometime now and is just starting to put together screen casts (web casts, whatever you want to call them) for SharePoint.

The first in his screen casts is based on a live presentation he’s been giving for the past year and a half. It explains all the ins and outs of SharePoint search. It’s based on 2003 but the principles apply to 2007 (and I’m sure he’ll update it for 2007 hint, hint). So he’s offering up his SharePoint Advisor presentation, repackaged into a web cast. All free as in beer, which is always good.

You can check out his blog entry here and watch the screen cast here.

Watch for more screen casts from the entire SharePoint MVP community (and other SharePointHeads out there) over the next few months (including yours truly) as we discover what we can do with this wonderful technology ;)

I seem to be doing software service announcements lately, but I’m just levelling out my 3rd party tools and whatnot on my laptop as I spend a Sunday afternoon catching up on podcasts and coding stuff in the background (I’m just too A.D.D. to be doing one thing at a time).

Recently I’ve been struggling with my RSS feeds, newsgroups, and email. Basically I’ve been trying to find a good set of tools/add-ins to manage email, RSS feeds, newsgroup postings, and (to a lesser extent) bookmarks). I mean here we are in the information age, but there’s so much information out there. So many inputs coming in, and trying to sort it all out with tools. I’ve installed and tried out various tools and tool combos which went through a folly of tools:

• RSS Bandit for RSS feeds
• RSS Bandit for newsgroup posts
• Outlook 2003 + Newshound for newsgroup posts
• Outlook 2003 + IntraVnews for RSS feeds
• FeedDemon for RSS feeds
• Outlook 2007 for RSS feeds
• Outlook 2007 + Newshound for newsgroup posts

I think I’ve finally found the sweet spot. Thanks to Andrew Connell who uses Omea reader, I decided to give it a try. It’s by the guys from JetBrains who make ReSharper, IntelliJ, and a whole bunch of cool tools. AC uses the notify feature of it to read newsgroups, and be notified when someone replies to a thread (usually one he replies to). This is a great feature of the tool because in this day, we’re trying to sift through hundreds of posts a day in a half dozen SharePoint newsgroups. No easy feat even for a super-human MVP like myself.

I downloaded the tool, imported my OPML and found it to be slick. It lets me categorize the content as there are many blog entries I keep as a knowledge base. It’s fast and downloads/updates in the background and doesn’t require a gob of memory (one of the problems with RSS Bandit). And the notify feature just rocks.

So I’m now hooked on JetBrains Omea Reader for RSS feeds and newsgroups and Outlook will just be fine for email. Omea can handle your mail as well, but I think I’ll stick with Outlook for now.

Anyways, enough with the tools. Time to get back to writing tests. Red. Green. Refactor. It’s a great Sunday!

Just listening to Joel Semeniuk on the latest podcast of .NET Rocks! as they talk about Team System. As a Scrum-junkie, I really love the fact that Microsoft did something right with Team System when they left the system open. It opened the door for people like Conchango to put out their very excellent Scrum for Team System set of process templates. As Joel mentions in the podcast, for a developer who’s savvy with Team System but doensn’t know about Scrum the plugin lets you understand Scrum a little better, and vice-versa for the Scrum guy who doesn’t know Team System. It works for both types of developers which is nice. If you’re trying to struggle with Team System, or you’re trying to get Scrum working with the MSF Agile template MS ships then you might want to take a look at Scrum for Team System. It’s very slick (and free!).

It’s B2TR fever this week as Microsoft released the technical refresh. Of course it’s got a lot of people scratching their heads about installing, but there are also a lot of new cool features there. Be sure to keep an eye on the SharePoint blogs (SharePointKicks is an excellent source for this) as many people are posting screencasts, walkthroughs, and all that good stuff for installing and upgrading the TR.

Also the SDK for Office Server has been updated and is avaiable. It also includes a download with samples. These samples include Business Data Catalog metadata samples, Custom Single Sign-On Provider, SampleWebService, and Custom Filter Web Parts. You can grab both new downloads from Microsoft here.