Joben.Rara.blogs(".NET")

When working software is not enough

A team that followed agile practices still finds itself in trouble.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/A-Story-of-Project-Failure-Mitch-Lacey

Points that stand out a.k.a note to self

Signs that project was in trouble but got ignored - starting 35 minutes

• a statement of work that took 6 months. [requirements were unstable]
• team was blind to complexity of customer organization Having a customer representative does not actually mean he or she represents the real customers
• customer IT organization was not involved
• customer thought of agile in terms of waterfall development
• No accountability on side of customer

Common thread I see is a breakdown in communication. What people missed big time was the assumptions both sides made. Customer assumed everything they wanted would get built. The dev team assumed the customers understood that the product backlog determines what gets built, that its a finite bucket.

Lessons Learned - starting 50 minutes

• customer representative did not take accountability for their decisions. Business users changes requirements that was validated by the customer rep
• Team failed to hold customer accountable for their decisions
• Having the data does not mean you are right
• No true project owner. One was concerned with time/money. Another was concerned only with functionality. [Two headed monster]
• Team did not learn about the real project approvers until later

Takeaways

• If you know the true project cost - don't fool yourself in believing you can cut it down but moving work to the customer.
• Customer education is paramount. There has to be a plan for continuous education.
• Raise uncomfortable truths - takes courage [an agile value]
• Build an escape plan. [Each building has a fire escape]
  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Questions it raises in my mind

• Should there be an agile-fitness test/assessment for dev teams and organizations - before you start out an agile project?
• How much controls should be in place to stay agile without descending into chaos/anarchy?

AccelerIE8

I’ve been using IE8 Beta 2 for some time now. One of its features is something called accelerators. The concept is simple. In our everyday browsing experience, we find ourselves copy and pasting text from one site to another. Examples of this would be searching for a particular term you read while browsing a page. What I’d normally do is open up a new tab, copy and paste the term into the search toolbar or type www.live.com in the address bar and then paste the term into the search text box.

What an accelerator does is to cut out the copy+open tab+paste steps.

To learn more about it, I tried my hand in creating an accelerator and ended up with two. An accelerator is nothing more than an xml file. I used this developer’s guide to get started.

The code below is an accelerator for looking up stock quotes from MSN Moneycentral.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
  <homepageUrl>http://moneycentral.msn.com</homepageUrl>
  <display>
    <name>Get Stock Quote on MSN</name>
    <icon>http://moneycentral.msn.com/favicon.ico</icon>
  </display>
  <activity category="Quote">
      <activityAction context="selection">
      <execute method="get" action="http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote">       
        <parameter name="Symbol" value="{selection}" type="text" />
        <parameter name="getquote" value="Get+Quote" type="text" />
      </execute>
    </activityAction>
  </activity>
</openServiceDescription> 

[Edit] -- I can't get my link to work for now. I've uploaded these to http://www.ieaddons.com and I'll just link to them once they are up.

If you are using IE8, install my Get Stock Quote accelerator and try it out on the following: MSFT   ORCL   GOOG   ACN (Select one of the stock symbols, right-click and select the 'Get Stock Quote' accelerator)

Or you can try out my Acronym Finder accelerator and look up the following acronyms: BRB   YAGNI   WTF   JAFO

My only gripe at this point is the way the accelerators are accessed. I'm thinking a keyboard shortcut or a favorites mode would be better than what is available now.

Visualizing RegEx

I'm a big fan of visualization. Seeing my del.icio.us feed for the day, I saw this RegEx visualizer built by Oliver Steele. It's not meant to be a regex workbench or validator (It does not recognize certain character ranges like [1-5] or qualifiers like {1,3}). Still, its educational and just reading "non deterministic finite-state automaton" brings back memories of Chomsky and grammars and hanging on to dear life to get a 3.0 :-)

I still have my book "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation." As a wise professor used to say to us in class, "Reading (esp. difficult text) stretches the mind". I keep it mostly to intimidate and appear smarter ;-)

Software Estimation Tool - easy to use. requires little input. quick and definitive.

Forget Function Point Analysis. Tell Steve McConnell to stuff his book someplace dark.

This really works very well.

Software Estimation Tool

Ruby phone in question

I'm meeting John Lam sometime this month... (ok, me and about 100 others ). I'm attending his talk on Dynamic Programming Languages for the Web a.k.a IronRuby, IronPython on Silverlight. If you want to ask him a "phone in" question, let me know so I can make a list.

A sample game using Silverlight

Tim Heuer blogs about the experience of Terralever, a .NET shop who currently produce interactive games based on Flash. They wanted to see if Silverlight can be used to build the type of interactive games they have been building. The end-result is Zero Gravity. They even made their character, Lt. Bennett, "social network aware" so that you can add him to your Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter.

Read more about it here -> silverlight: who needs inertia, introducing lt. bennett

About the game. I got to level 8 (teleportorama). I'm not sure if I hate the music though.

Ruby on Rails envy ads

I don't know if you've seen these, its RoR vs. PHP/Java set into the famous "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ad format. I found about 4 of these. here, here, here

Bug Bash Comic

Funny but true. :-)

Recycling: Short Introduction to Regular Expression

What are regular expressions and why should I (a.k.a. developer) care?

If you’re looking for a definition, try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression .

However I think it’s better to show you rather than tell you what a regular expression is.

What if you wanted to search your code for all instances of btn_Ok, btn_Cancel, btn_Reset and change them into OkButton, CancelButton, ResetButton. Looking at the task, you’ll see that it’s a fairly simple pattern and you can do this with three runs of Find-and-Replace. But what if you had to change 10 of these? 100? Suppose there was a way to do this with just one run, would you like to know how?

The answer would be “Use a Regular Expression (during a Find and Replace)”.

Assuming that our favorite code editor was capable of using a standard regular expression, what would the “pattern matching language” look like.

(btn_)(\w*)	this will match all strings that have the pattern btn_Ok, btn_Cancel, etc. It uses groupings so it could use it during replace.
\2Button	this replaces the strings matching the pattern with the text after “btn_” and the word “Button”

Using vim, this would be :%s:\(btn_\)\(\w*\):\2Button:g

In Visual Studio, the syntax is a bit different. I’ll mention why later on.

{btn_}{:a*}

\2Button

Regular expression only requires you know a few rules to get you started. Check out The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions as a starter.

Pattern matching is not only useful for find and replace, you can also use it to validate user input. Validate User Input with Regular Expressions (VB.NET)

The following links have sample regular expressions found in input validation scenarios like a valid email, a valid Telephone number, a valid URL, etc.

5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know, Regular Expressions that are good to know

Learn about regular expressions in .NET

MSDN Webcast: Using Regular Expressions (Part 2 of 2): Metacharacters (Level 200)

Regular Expression Language Elements in the .NET framework

.NET Developer's Guide to Regular Expression Examples

MSDN forum on Regular Expressions

Use regular expressions in Microsoft Word

Add power to Word searches with regular expressions

Putting regular expressions to work in Word

Test your regular expressions with these online tools.

Regular Expression Tester (dotnetcoders.com)

Regex Tester (regexlib.com)

Or you can download Expresso, a tool “useful for learning how to use regular expressions and for developing and debugging regular expressions prior to incorporating them into C# or Visual Basic code.” It can even generate the proper C#, VB, and Managed C++ code for the regular expression you’re testing.

And Visual Studio does not play nice

The Visual Studio IDE and Regular Expressions details how Visual Studio supports regular expressions in its find-and-replace but uses a different “dialect” of regular expressions. (Bad VS, bad!). Michael Flanakin posts a collection of Regular Expressions for Visual Studio Code Analysis that uses Visual Studio’s particular syntax. Here’s a beginner’s guide to using  VS Find and Replace with regular expressions.

Setting Proxy settings in IE using PowerShell

Whenever I go to a client and need to plugin to their network, I would find myself typing in proxy settings to get internet access. In IE, that would be in Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings. When I'm back in the office and plugged in to my corporate network, these settings get overridden to valid values in my corp network. Given that I regularly visit my client, you can see how I have to do this dance every now and then.

So out with my PowerShell toolbox to hammer together my "set-proxysettings.ps1" script.

First, I had to find where IE stores these settings in the registry. I used regmon for that.

Once I had the registry settings, the rest was easy.

So whenever I'm at my client's site, I just run my powershell script to set my proxy settings.

For an excellent resource on learning PowerShell see Mastering PowerShell in your Lunch Break

DLR on Mono

Hey Cruizer, DLR is now on Mono.

It’s now official. Thanks to Zoltan Varga’s recent check-in to SVN, Mono now successfully runs IronPython 2.0A1/DLR,

[mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono -V
Mono JIT compiler version 1.2.4 (/trunk/ r77478)
Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
        TLS:           __thread
        GC:            Included Boehm (with typed GC)
        SIGSEGV:       normal
        Architecture:  x86
        Disabled:      none
[mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono ipy.exe IronPython console: IronPython 2.0A1 (2.0.10427.02) on .NET 2.0.50727.42 
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 
>>> 

[Mono:DLR] Hello, Dynamic Language Runtime-enabled World!

Name game on SilverLight

Cruizer has a point, "SilverLight" really does sound like a play on "Flash". I never thought of it that way. I guess I'm losing my sense of fun. ~Groovy

Names aside, I think looking at SilverLight just from a "Flash" angle is missing the exciting stuff. I'm not too pumped up about having another "media player" or animation engine. (That is a topic for a different post) 

What I'm really excited about is its support for dynamic languages. To think that they could shrink the .NET runtime to around 4MB and still have it support a lot of useful namespaces is amazing.

Looking at the VB Team's blog on SilverLight support for "VBx", the runtime would support some generic collections (List & Dictionary) and even LINQ over objects while still including most of the "well-loved" VB functions. I think they have really done well in shipping out a well-factored .NET framework including "Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll"

I'm not a VB guy and I'm experiencing "DLR envy" as I code in C#. So I'm really looking forward to IronRuby. I've never really played with IronPython (What about Boo?). Nothing against VB/Python, it's just personal preference and a personal sense of "nice code".

How Did We Come Up With Silverlight?

Read the different names they were considering before settling on Silverlight.

This is amusing. You can clearly see "geek" written all over with some smart ass ones. I seriously think MS needs a shot of "cool". Silverlight is ... well... just alright.

Link to Tim Sneath : How Did We Come Up With Silverlight?

"Clean up sources before packing them" by SBC Packers

I recently did a walkthrough of the Web Service Software Factory for a group of developers. They are considering its use for their Web Services development. I used the accompanying Hands-On-Lab for the exercise and made some minor modifications to make it "fit" their current environment.

After the walkthrough, I needed to send them a copy of the HOL including the changes I made. That should be easy enough, right? Compress and Send. First, I need to delete all the \bin and \obj directories to keep the compressed file's size to a minimum. Problem is, there are about 10 exercises and each of the solution folder is about 3 levels deep in each exercise folder. I'm lazy so I need to find an easier way. I could have used "Clean Sources" but that would mean running away from a good challenge of doing the same thing using PowerShell [:-)].

Here's my PowerShell script for deleting the \bin and \obj directories under all those solution folders.

The canonical version

get-childitem * -recurse | where-object { $_.PSIsContainer -eq $true } | where-object { $_.Name -eq "bin" -or $_.
Name -eq "obj" } | foreach-object { remove-item -path $_.FullName -recurse -whatif }

This should read like this: "Get everything in this directory and its sub-directories. Select Items which are containers (a.k.a. directories). Select folders whose names are "bin" or "obj". For each folder, delete the folder and all the files/folders that it contains.

The "readable" version (using aliases)

dir * -recurse | where { $_.PSIsContainer -eq $true } | where { $_.Name -eq "bin" -or $_.Name -eq
"obj" } | foreach { remove-item -path $_.FullName -recurse -whatif }

BTW, remove the -whatif in the end if you actually want the command to execute. Keeping the -whatif in allows you to "see" what would happen without actually executing the command.

Groove to Snap's I've got the Power [;-)] Man, I'm really showing my age.

PowerShell Links Roundup

Link #1

Scott Hanselman writes about a Reflector add-in that outputs PowerShell Code

The one I've been messing with for the last few weeks is the PowerShell Language Add-in. Reflector can "decompile" (not the correct word) the IL within an assembly and show you the "intent" of that IL in any number of languages like C#, VB, Delphi, etc. Daniel "kzu" Cazzulino has created a PowerShell Language Add-in that, for the most part, shows you what the code would look like in PowerShell.

Reflector Addins and PowerShell Language Support for Reflector

Link #2

Editing PowerShell scripts - Syntax files for PowerShell

Jon Galloway has PowerShell Language Definitions for Notepad++

Peter Provost gives us Windows PowerShell Syntax File for vim