Fear and Loathing

I try to keep Life 1.0 in a somewhat organized chaos. When it comes to my computer, there are a lot of things on it (source code, programs, documents, etc.) and there are a lot of things it keeps eating up from the internet (feeds, favorites, newsgroups, emails). That’s a lot of stuff to manage. So when it comes to trying to manage it all, it becomes a bit of a bear. I’m a strong fan of David Allen’s Gettings Things Done (GTD) approach and try to use it with work and hobbies and such (BTW, check out Hanselminutes from a couple of days ago for a lot of great Outlook add-ins around this). This helps organize the mess, but then there’s the problem of disparate types of data and what tools to use to track, read, and store them.

Take for example the big three. RSS feeds, Email, and Newsgroups (I won’t lump in bookmarked favorites as they aren’t as dynamic). As I’ve committed to Office 2007 now, Outlook is my email tool and it does a pretty good job (other than being a resource pig). The links from Scott’s show help on organizing things so hopefully SpeedFiler or something will help with this. Also the flag/task feature you get OOTB is a great way to follow-up on things. Any email that comes in becomes one of 4 things:

• Something I should respond to immediately (a simple reply) so I do (then delete it)
• Something I should follow-up later so I flag it for today, tommorow, next week, etc. This creates a task that’s link to the email. When the email is marked as complete (or deleted), so is the task.
• Something I should delete so I do
• Something I should file for future reference, so I do

The filing is what I might make use of SpeedFiler for, as I do have a lot of different PST files (one for projects, one for software products, one for online things like passwords/sites/domain registrations) and a lot of folders in each one (one folder for each project on the go, one folder for each piece of software organized under the company name). It all works pretty well and since about June I’ve kept my inbox down to a dozen or so messages, all marked for follow-up (as opposed to the 800 items that would just sit there until I slugged through them and moved them somewhere).

That takes care of emails but what about RSS feeds? Outlook 2007 is pure and simple crap when it comes to these (at least in beta 2). They don’t update correctly, don’t always display correctly, and seem to chew up even more resources than email alone does. That sent me back to RSS Bandit. I really enjoyed that tool but it suffers from a few problems. First is focus. When I’m just moving the cursor through the list of feeds, it sometimes decides to change focus back to the tree. I originally had it configured to mark categories read when I moved off them, but that quickly changed. It does a good job of displaying the feeds and overall isn’t bad (although it does suffer again from memory hog as it’s always running around 200mb which to me just isn’t right). I just installed FeedDemon and it looks interesting. What I like about it is the fact it tracks what I read which helps me find those feeds that I subscribed to, but couldn’t care less about a month later. Maybe FD will turn out to be my reader of choice so time will tell.

So now we have to deal with newsgroups. I read about a dozen groups along with a half dozen private Microsoft ones. That’s about my capacity as I just can’t keep up beyond that. RSS Bandit has a feature to read newsgroups which looked like a good idea at the time, but it’s threading model is horrible and it’s impossible to figure out where the thread started. There are some stand-alone newsgroup readers out there, but nothing that really jumps out at me. I was using Newshound, an Outlook add-in, but it suffers from beta block. It doesn’t support 2007 (yet).

It’s all very bothersome. One one hand, I could use something like Newshound and intraVnews as Outlook add-ins, which would give me pretty good RSS and Usenet readers all in the comfort of my Outlook. On the other hand, I could just delegate Outlook for emails and use FeedDemon for RSS and [insert cool news reader here] for Usenet.

So what’s a girl to do? Turn Outlook into the catch-all for information (like Scott has said a few times, just embed OneNote into the note feature and we might as well throw in a browser tab and we don’t need any other products) or have different tools for similar jobs. It’s all information at the end of the day, and I don’t see RSS feeds, newsgroup posts, or email as being that different in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we need a BDC for information on the desktop. 

What do you guys recommend? How do you manage your information stack?

I’m currently being a ScrumMaster/mentor for a team on a new Smart Client project (I always think I should be rolling a 20–sided die with each build). It’s a big step for the team as they’re generally VB6 and non-OO/non-.NET developers. It’s also a pretty big step for the client as they’re new to Agile as I’ve been introducing little things over the last few months (unit tests, continuous integration, presentations on various patterns, etc.). Now the rubber hits the road and we’re full on Scrum (well almost, still need to convince them to estimate with story points intead of hours). The project officially kicked off Monday (when I was still off the grid somewhere in B.C.) and just I got back today to do some slight course corrections with the team (rebuilding the solution tree, focusing more on the domain and tests rather than the UI and back-end infrastructure, etc.). I’ll probably be blogging more on the project and how things are going and some lessons learned from the Scrum side of things (in between what SharePoint I can wiggle in between my daily stand-ups).

The other cool thing is that this is the first project I’m using Conchango’s Scrum for Team System plug-in in a non-pet project manner. I’ve managed a bunch of little projects since the plug-in came out, and even took some Enterprise projects that were “Scrum-like” (read: doing items iteratively, but not really so it never worked out) and built a “what-if” scenario with it in VSTS, but now I’m giving the tool a real run for it’s money (free!) and seeing where it can go. So far things are coming along, although there are a couple of glitches like the product backlog isn’t filling up on the dashboard (the report works though). I think it’s due to the fact that I didn’t assign relative weights to the items or something, but not sure. The burn-down is coming along (even if it’s only the 2nd day) as the team is really digging entering the work remaining rather than how many hours they scrutinized over what they did. While the burn-down is currently looking like a burn-up (the projected end date is a few months off our original iteration due to some flux in the estimates) I’m confident it’ll come down and start leveling out to what it should be.

If you haven’t checked out the plugin and want to do some real Scrum planning and tracking with VSTS, please check it out. I was strugging with the start of this project, screwing around with spreadsheets that I’ve used in the past and decided to try out the plug-in to fully manage the project. The PM is digging it as he can easily see where things are at and has no worries about what’s being done (and what’s to be done) and I find it works better than MSF for Agile and is simpler to use (although I’m still hunting around for a webcast where a Microsquishy explained MSF for Agile in Scrum terms which may change my opinion). The plugin is free and you can just add it to your VSTS setup quickly if you want to try it out. You download it here from Conchango’s site (which also has a lot of great documentation and resources on Scrum in general as it applies to the tool) and check it out.

Note to self: Don’t spend more than a few days away from a computer hooked up to the internet. It’s bad for your catch-up health when you get back.

I’m still slugging through 800+ emails, and then there’s a few days worth of RSS feeds that total about 3000+ posts I still need to read through.

It’s going to be a loooong day!

Just a note that I’m swamped in Redmond this week. We’re doing some work with Microsquishy, and frankly I’m finding that I’m getting back to the hotel at 10 to be back on campus by 8. Somewhere in between there I’m trying to catchup on about 200 emails I have, plus trying to get some code and whatnot written in the interim. Not a lot of time for this, so if any mails/questions fall by the wayside that you send me please understand I won’t be too responsive this week (or next week for that matter as I’ll be close to being off the grid as I’ve ever been). Thanks.

If you haven’t built a full-blown, multi-layer, 3–tier web application with ASP.NET yet then here’s your chance. In case you missed it back in June, Scott Mitchell has a 10 part series on doing such a thing. While I don’t agree with some of the approaches (I’m not a fan of strongly typed DataSets) he uses the series is well written, has a lot of great techniques on building a website with ASP.NET 2.0, and is a good read for those wanting to get into it.

Here’s the links the entire series:

• Tutorial 1: Creating a Data Access Layer
• Tutorial 2: Creating a Business Logic Layer
• Tutorial 3: Master Pages and Site Navigation
• Tutorial 4: Displaying Data With the ObjectDataSource
• Tutorial 5: Declarative Parameters
• Tutorial 6: Programmatically Setting the ObjectDataSource's Parameter Values
• Tutorial 7: Master/Detail Filtering With a DropDownList
• Tutorial 8: Master/Detail Filtering With Two DropDownLists
• Tutorial 9: Master/Detail Filtering Across Two Pages
• Tutorial 10: Master/Detail Using a Selectable Master GridView with a Details DetailView

There’s also a more detailed page here that has both the C# and VB.NET downloads available along with PDF versions of the articles. It’s a wonderful series and really goes deep into everything you need to know about building an Enterprise-scale web site.

Enjoy!

Where have all the add-ons gone? Groove is an interesting tool. It came out of nowhere, powered by Ray Ozzie, and looked like Notes done right. And it was. The architecture was great, using it in small organizations was cool, and it was perfect for the road warrior sales guy to keep in touch with the mothership.

However it seems (to me anyways) that it’s a decaying piece of wood that nobody seems to care about. Version 3.1 is pretty good and it’s been added to the Office 2007 lineup, so MS must think this thing is going places (or the fact that Ray is going to be #1 at Microsoft). Today we was cleaning up a Groove workspace we use for little things (todo lists, wish lists of things we want to buy, places we want to go, family pics, etc.) and wanted more. I hadn’t checked Groove.net for a long time (probably 6 months or so) and figured there must be new add-ons that would be neat to get.

What a sad state of affairs. First, the tools page hasn’t really changed much in the last year. Second, there’s only a couple of vendors offering very little. What’s worse, a few of them have websites that don’t even work. Information Patterns for example only has 3 products on the go and when you look at their Toucan Collaborate tool (a productivity suite) the link to their dedicated site takes you to a parked domain. There was an interesting tool which was an implementation of Reversi, but when you go to NetsenderCorp’s site and try to download or order it (or any of their products), you get a 404 error.

This certainly isn’t anything like say the DotNetNuke community where Snowcovered keeps pumping out modules every week. Modules that work and that you can download or buy. While many people argue Groove is stepping on SharePoints toes with it’s offline capability (people always call Groove the “offline” SharePoint), it’s still a pretty neat platform. It’s highly extensible, you can build .NET apps to plug into it, and it seems to have a lot of potential. Now it seems to be the red-headed step-child of Office and thrown in for good measure (maybe to try to revitalise the Groove community).

All in all, either I’m looking at the old world and there’s some hidden corner on the web where Groove is thriving and producing all kinds of new content, or Ray and the Groove guys figure they’ve maxed out their investment and the community that never was just isn’t.

Very busy this week. Next week I’m at Microsquishy as we go into the dark corners of the MS underworld and do crazy development-type stuff all week long in the halls of Building 40. Not sure if I’m allowed to say what we’re doing so that’s as close as it gets for now.

As I’m winding this week up, I have a small team (3 devs, 1 architect, 1 BA, 1 business user, 1 QA) I’m mentoring and providing Architectural and development guidance to (and being their Scrummaster) for a new project with a client. It’s all very exciting as we’re going to be using the Smart Client Software Factory, ClickOnce deployment, continuous integration, TDD, etc. The whole nine yards with a team of devs who haven’t written a .NET application before (or had very little exposure to it). Sounds like a horror story, but I’ve done it before with newbie teams and it’s all good. So that’s got me running around like an MVP with my head cut off, getting them setup with tool and hooking them up with labs and such.

Finally the week after next (August 21–25) I’m off in the backwoods of BC on some family reunion thing (my first). Yeah, sounds like fun huh? A little bit of my sanity came back as I found out they have Wi-Fi at the camp which was going to save me many trips to the local ‘bucks for my internet fix. Yeah, off the grid is not in my vocabulary.

In my always present ego-searching that I do, I come across odd instances of people referring to me or my blog. Case in point, I stumbled across this link on a site that (I guess) features interesting links he finds on the blog-o-sphere. His entry for this blog:

"nice blog about sharepoint .net and sometime OS X integration"

Hmmm. I don't remember blogging about OS X integration, ever. Is he talking about something else (like maybe MOSS?). I dunno.

The only mention of Macintosh or OS X I've made was back during PDC here and I just causually mentioned (in the last paragraph) that my new Mac Mini kicked the llamas hiney. Other than that post (and now this one) that's the only mention of Mac anywhere here (not that I'm a Mac-homophobe or anything as I do own one).

I sometimes wonder what drives people to say things these days?