One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how our industry has grown to this point. By industry I refer to both the Software Development Industry as well as the cottage industry around agile software development. Throughout Agile 2009 and the Software Craftsmanship North America conferences this week, the two most…
Category: General
TFS Branching Only Subfolders
In TFS, we use a branching model which is pretty in-line with the normal branching models you’ll see out there. It looks like: $/ branches releases 1.0 1.1 trunk Database Managed Unmanaged Test This morning I was trying to create a branch for a release we did over the weekend. I wanted to take the…
A Good Way to Respond on Twitter
Recently there has been a spate of bad stories about companies completely messing up the response to tweets on Twitter. As a user myself I see my share of that. But sometimes good conversations come out of it, as was the case with one of our local news stations. BayNews9 is a local Tampa, FL…
Nominated for the Agile Alliance Board
The official nominations for the Agile Alliance are out, and I’m on the list. My position statement is below, but there are a couple of other things I want to add. There were two key reasons I am interested in being a part of the board. The first is because I am not a consultant,…
Women in Technology
Over the past several months, I’ve seen a resurgence on the various mailing lists I’m on asking a simple question – why aren’t more women in technology, and software development specifically? For example, on the Software Craftsmanship mailing list, Josh Cronemeyer asked the following: I was talking to a colleague about the SCNA conference. When…
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException when opening an ASP.NET Project
This morning I was opening an ASP.NET project on my Win7 box in Visual Studio 2008, when a message popped up which only said: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException If you run into this, there are three things you need to do: Make sure you have IIS installed – This sounds silly, but since I had just rebuilt my…
New Home
You may have noticed a new look and feel around the site. Yes, after just 5 years I’ve finally updated the theme for the site, changing entire hosts and blogging platforms in the process. The whole thing went so smoothly that it still feels wrong. Hosting Providers – I switched from HostMySite.com (still one of…
The Misnomer of Open Space
Recently there has been an explosion of “Open Space” events and sessions at conferences across the world. Suprisingly (or not-so-suprisingly) the results of these aren’t always this wonderful touchy-feely explosion of experience and sharing that open space events are made out to be. Why is that? First, there are actually two types of events labeled…
Exceptions in Constructors: How Reflection Helped Workaround an Oracle Bug
Our application supports both SQL and Oracle users. To do this, there are certain things that we need present at runtime – like an Oracle Provider. But, in our case, we require a certain version or higher due to the API calls we need to make. During testing for our upcoming release, we found a…
Hope is Not a Risk Management Strategy
To many people, software projects are a lot like black magic. You are trying to build something that no one knows the contents of until it’s been built, in a way that responds to change, in some semblance of a reasonable timeframe and budget. Everything from the estimation process, to the status calls, to the…