MSDN Channel 9 Videos

I have a habit of watching Videos, when I am having a cofee and or taking a break:
Microsft Reasearch and Architectural Videos are worth watching, including Framewoks and stuff


What do you think?

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV
http://channel9.msdn.com/

Writing for the Web

Since a large number of E-commerce and Static website requires good amount of English Composition- The process can be frustrating since the objective of writing has no fixed goal.

Are we writing to create an online marketing campaign? Are we creating a Public Relations material that is supposed to create abuzz like strong German Schnups. Or the public relations will be low key like warm Glue Wine of Scandinavian Christmas.
Or are we just trying to create some stupid Web Pages with zillions of CSS so that we get paid and run!

In more technical sense, Are we substantiating an argument? Using persuasion and compare and contrast to establish a point. Are we just trying to educate some factual information? Who is our target audience? Why such person be interested in our website?
Does the end user needs to be entertained? excited? provoked? educated?

Some how the short answer seems to all the above- and that makes it difficult.

I have found a solution. A new book on web content design seems to be immensely practical and useful. I am reading it , right now-Killer Web Content- Garry McGovern . I highly suggest this book to any one involved in web design and content creation.


Reference:

1.0 http://www.useit.com/
2.0 http://websitetips.com/
3.0 Information Architecture- ISBN 0-596-52734-

Continuous Inspection: Sharing A Practice

There are several ways to achieve continuous inspection. Some organisations do it by pair reviewing where one person types and the other is considered suggesting code and design improvements. Some teams have another developer review their code before committing it to the VCS repository. Some follow formal peer reviews, in which a developer's peers watch the code and offer better ideas. And may be few more.

In our case we do it using code reviews, which is more like the second form, I have mentioned in the paragraph above. But we do it after committing to VCS. Not a good thing right? I would elaborate it later. The other way we follow is pair programming which is not exactly the form of continuous inspection, but it helps in some way, if not exactly.


Pair Programming
It something annoyed few of our team mates, including me, in the beginning. Nobody was comfortable when someone is watching while the one programs. But after practicing it for a few weeks things changed. One important thing is we must switch in both ways for example, I watch, you code now you watch, I code; and the other is switching the partners so everybody knows everyones weak and strong points and the style of coding. That brings a drastic personal improvement. We found it as an efficient way for some tasks and bad, not really bad but inappropriate, for others. This works best when its about to train a new developer, to implement something complex or not routine and it helps transferring the skills as well. So, now we don't practice this for every other task.

After getting all these benefits, one benefits which it gives you the code quality and most of the time you don't really need to inspect the code exclusively.

Code Reviews
This is the thing, we merely follow for continuous inspection. In our team we found that most of us are very good in coding but not as good in reviewing other developers code. So, what we did was, we generated code review tickets using hook script provided by our project management system. Its your choice how you want to generate it whether you want the tickets to be assigned randomly or in a particular order. Now, on every commit we have a code review ticket assigned to any of the team mate. He/She needs to review it and then close it after making appropriate changes, if required. This way we got a good improvement in the skill of understanding other developers code and the design pattern we should follow for a particular scenario. We improved on software quality, bug reports, code clarity.

Please share your's in comments. Thanks.

Related Links:
Automation for the people: Continuous Inspection
Paul Duvall on continuous inspection with software inspectors
Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide

Hello Everyone

I would just like to say hello to everyone in the group. This is my first posting on this blog and I look forward to blogging with everyone more. I would just like to share with everyone http://babajob.com/person.htm?user=10001

This is Sean Blagsvedt, a Microsoft alum who left a lucrative job with them to start Babajob and Babalife in Bangalore, the IT Capital of India. I think what he is doing is incredible and I am trying to help spread the word as much as I can because I think that he provides a great example for how empowered we can be if we believe in a cause and have the guts to follow through. Please also see my other blog on Wordpress http://benkross.wordpress.com/. If anyone wants to talk more about this or any other topic, feel free to call me at 212-204-1025 or my cell 914-523-6166. Please reference Blogger so I know where the call is coming from.

Cheers and happy blogging,

Ben Ross
IT Recruiter
Forrest Solutions
212-204-1025
bross@forrestsolutions.com

Jommla, LAMP, Dreamweaver, CSS, PHP and ASP.NET

Trying to understand where Joomla, LAMP, Dreamweaver, CSS, PHP and Asp.net work together for SMB marketplace. More and more customers are asking for web maintenance/update functionalty; can Macromedia Contribute work with these technologies?


As I discover these answers, I will update the Blog.

Push to Test- Google Tech Talk- Must see

Please watch this google tech talk-push to test, some thing new- and better
Push to test video
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4427578441647658650

Micosoft Action Pack

Just received this querters action pack. It is quite a list of software for SMB markets.
I hope to check this out soon. I think I received about 80 DVD. Enough for holidays.
More on this later

SQL Server 2005 Express for Developers

I just Received The book-

1.0 Sql Server 2005 Express for Developers- Apress -ISBN-1-590059-720-6
I will comment about the content, However quite a lot of the stuff is still in MSDN and Code Project.


2.0 Also Picked up the Lion's Commentary on Unix- The classic Text- I always wanted to buy this one but was out of print.

And thirdly

1.0 Execution- The Discipline of Getting Things Done- NYT Best Seller-ISBN- 0-609-61057-0
I definitely need this book. To keep me focused on getting some thing done every hour.( This is true)

Enterprise Architecture

I am just going over the Book
A practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture- ISBN 0-13-141275-2
I am trying out some of the ideas with Ea-7.0 of Sparkworks.
Details on this wll be posted soon.
A side note, some of these books may be avilable in google library, please look into that.

I have the objective to keep this blog FAT-Free. Please let me know if you would like to publish and participate in postings.

Building Large Systems at Google

This is a must see Web cast- building Large systems at Google.

1.0 Building Large Systems at Google
2.0 Making Great Decisions
3.0 Developing Applications with Ajax( Next Generation Asp.net)


I would like to have your feedbacks on these webcasts.

Google Maps: Is the Earth a Sphere or Ellipsoid?

Google Maps sees the Earth as a Spheroid, not an Ellipsoid. This came up through a discussion on the PROJ mailing list and I thought it was interesting to point out how Open Source can even handle projected lat/long systems (such as Google Maps) using a very familiar tool called cs2cs.

Christoper Schmidt wrote about it on his blog and also on his blog he points out the EPSG code to use. The magical number for the Google Mercator Projection (of a lat/long grid based on a sphere) is: 900913

Now onto the fun, showing how we can use Open Source to have our data show within a KML project and Google Maps.

Quoting from Frank's FAQ, he provides an excellent example, we see the following the use of cs2cs:

"cs2cs +proj=latlong +datum=WGS84
+to +proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0.0 +lon_0=0.0
+x_0=0.0 +y_0=0 +k=1.0 +units=m +no_defs"

Notice the sphere is being used? a=b

Because we are dealing with a sphere, the Y values will be greatly different from those on an ellipsoid (30 to 100 metres or more).

Quoting Frank again:

"In this case, and many other cases using spherical projections, the desired approach is to actually treat the lat/long locations on the sphere as if they were on WGS84 without any adjustments when using them for converting to other coordinate systems. The solution is to "trick" PROJ.4 into applying no change to the lat/long values when going to (and through) WGS84. This can be accomplished by asking PROJ to use a null grid shift file for switching from your spherical lat/long coordinates to WGS84.

cs2cs +proj=latlong +datum=WGS84
+to +proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0.0 +lon_0=0.0
+x_0=0.0 +y_0=0 +k=1.0 +units=m +nadgrids=@null +no_defs

Note the strategic addition of +nadgrids=@null to the spherical projection definition"

As you can see the value of Open Source and the mailing list and Open Source software is that people are sharing knowledge - whether it be via blogs, lists, or some other means of communication. There is a community out there that supports each other. These are actual users facing everyday problems and looking for solutions. The answers do exist, just the question has to be asked, and the community comes together to help.

Why not share experiences?

Hi blog members,
Our count is reached to 31, thats why sharing our day to day experiences in any field of Software Engineering would be very beneficial to all of us and to other blog readers.

I shall soon start writing my experiences over here, hope you too will do the same.

Regards.

Software Metrics: function points and lines of code

I have read a lot of papers and books that try to relate funtion points and lines of code.
The final step is always a big table with the lines of code for function point in every language.

Then the thesys is that is possible to derive the "effort" in man/month, given the fp count and the derived program dimension.

I think that there is a big mistake. In my experience to deliver 1M of lines of code I have to develop 1.5M of lines, and as my program get older, I still deliver 1M of LOCS, continuing to produce new lines that replace the old one.

A stronger example: as I develop new lines to correct errors, the User Manual (and the user interface) is always the same!

The real effort is related to LoC that I write, that are more then LoC that I deliver.

Agile Testing Video on You Tube

I think these are interesting videos on agile/model/scrum based testing.
1.0 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3054974855576235846
2.0 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5521890509476590796
3.0 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011&q=scrum&total=936&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0


I am working on a larger topic of testing and agile-testing in particular. Any technical contribution and direction will be appreciated.

Open Source Managed Services

Is there any open source Managed Services Software to maintain software at client computer, or deliver tutorial at customer's site. Any pointers will be appreciated.

I have tried VNC and Tight VNC, they are great but requires firewall changes, anything that will not involve touching fire wall will be great.

Membership to This Blog

Send me Email if you want to join this Blog. My email is keensoftware@gmail.com.
I would also like your views on management and posting.
I personally would like a balance between academic world and Implementation world.

Linkedin Software Engineering Blog

What are the most important topics tht we should discuss in Linkedin Software Engineering Topics.
Should we have different format/blogsite for this.
We need to discuss these in details

Agile Developmt- XP and Scrum

Agile Developmet is the defacto way of developing software for small business in my view. Heavy duty modeling and CMMI compliance is good but may not be practical for small development teams.

There are couple of things to consider if you are working on an agile development, if some of your team are out-sourced to India and Romania. How do you keep the communication open and yet get development done a reasonable pace.
The answer to this is to adopt SCRUM methodology and use a tool such as JIRI and Ontract Software Development tools.

More on this later.

Ecommerce and ASP.NET 2.0

I just picked up a a couple of books from apress and looking through the MSDN webcasts of the ASP.NET related stuff.

Couple of them that I like are:
http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/Default.aspx

http://www.cristiandarie.ro/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/learningpath/

I still have issues related ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 working on the same machine. Actually I am looking at some of the solutions in www.codeproject.com


Incidentally summer is here and today it is 19 degree centigrade.

Macromedia Studio 8 Suite of tools

We just installed amcromedia 8 suite of tools.
and right after that, I upgraded the IE6 to I& and macromedia contribute stopped working.
Luckily , adobe had a work around.

Also I am not too happy to see that Freehand has been droped from MX to version 8.
more on this later.