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• What initial modelling/design activities on Agile Projects do you do??

  - by dalton

  When developing an application using agile techniques, what if any initial modelling/architecture activities do you do, and how do you capture that knowledge?? I'm not after a bullet list about XP, Scrum, Crystal, DSDM..etc as I'm familiar with the methodologies. But what do you do above and beyond the guidance given by these. I find I work best by thinking the system through first, but also like the benefits of timeboxing, story cards, pairing, tdd. The closest thing I've seen so far is Scott Ambler's Initial Architecture Modelling, but was wondering what alternatives are used out there?

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• Android: trouble updating to Android SDK Tools, revision 7.

  - by Arhimed

  Currently I have Android SDK 2.1 (+ tools revision 4). I'd like to upgrade to Android SDK 2.2. When I try to do it I'm informed I need to upgrade Android SDK Tools to revision 7 first. So I agree, the process starts and then I get an error: -= warning! =- A folder failed to be renamed or moved. On Windows this typically means that a program Is using that Folder (for example Windows Explorer or your anti-virus software.) Please momentarily deactivate your anti-virus software. Please also close any running programs that may be accessing the directory 'D:\Install\Programming\android-sdk-working-dir\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\too!s'. When ready, press YES to try again. Downloading Android SDK Tools, revision 7 Installing Android SDK Tools, revision 7 Failed to rename directory D:\Install\Programming\android-sdk-working-dir\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\tools to D:\Install\Programming\android-sdk-working-dir\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\temp\ToolPackage.old01. I am aware of http/https and antivirus issues. So I disactivated my AV. I also closed any application that might hold a handle to the folder. Eclipse is also closed (I start the manager via command line). However I still get the same error. Looks like the only app that can hold a handle to the folder is the manager itself, because its starting directory is the one the error complains about ('\tools'). I am on Win XP Pro + SP3. Does anyone have an idea?

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• What single software development tool do you think holds the most value?

  - by Phobis

  Every day I realize how much I love Visual Studio for .NET development.... but, I believe that Resharper, may hold a value that surpasses Visual Studio's (I am using VS 2005 for WPF/WCF development). I decided it would be great to compile a list of the most valuable tools for software development. These can be applications/plug-ins anything that you think holds GREAT value. Also, please explain the benefits of the tool that you are posting. Resharper: Intergrated Unit testing "Camel Hump" code auto completion Find "usings" (inverse of "Go to Deceleration") Code formating and member rearranging Assembly and namespace inclusion (based on your code) Check for common optimizations and possible bugs in code and suggests/rewrites the code for you (things like null checking, redundant delegate creation, inverting if statements, etc...); Tells you when code and be more generic (may suggest things like "use this interface instead" if your code never refers to something specific on an object) Helps you see code that is not being used and will clean any unused members. File structure view helps you jump around the regions of your file (this is really awesome and clean). Class searching (you can use things like camel humps) Asks you which partial file to open once you find a class. It also has it's own plugin support, so you can do things like FxCop, documentation and relfector (all free). This thing has so much I don't think I hit 10% of it yet :) [When I get time, I will try to add more... feel free to help me out]

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• Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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• Error while installing vmware tools v8.8.2 in Ubuntu 12.04 beta

  - by Dipen Patel

  I just upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 from 11.10 using update manager. I use it as virtual machine on VMWare Player 4.xx. As usual I installed vmware tools to enable full screen mode and shared folder functionality. But while installing I got an error while building modules for shared folder and fast networking utilities for vmware tools. Error is ============================================== /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/fsutil.c: In function ‘HgfsChangeFileAttributes’: /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/fsutil.c:610:4: error: assignment of read-only member ‘i_nlink’ make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/fsutil.o] Error 1 make[2]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs.... /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/file.c:128:4: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type [enabled by default] /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/file.c:128:4: warning: (near initialization for ‘HgfsFileFileOperations.fsync’) [enabled by default] /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/tcp.c:53:30: error: expected ‘)’ before numeric constant /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/tcp.c:56:25: error: expected ‘)’ before ‘int’ /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/tcp.c:59:33: error: expected ‘)’ before ‘int’ make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only/tcp.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-22-generic' make: *** [vmhgfs.ko] Error 2 make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmhgfs-only' The filesystem driver (vmhgfs module) is used only for the shared folder feature. The rest of the software provided by VMware Tools is designed to work independently of this feature. Let me know if anyone has encountered and solved this problem. Regards, Dipen Patel

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• make-like build tools for data?

  - by miku

  Make is a standard tools for building software. But make decides whether a target needs to be regenerated by comparing file modification times. Are there any proven, preferably small tools that handle builds not for software but for data? Something that regenerates targets not only on mod times but on certain other properties (e.g. completeness). (Or alternatively some paper that describes such a tool.) As illustration: I'd like to automate the following process: get data (e.g. a tarball) from some regularly updated source copy somewhere if it's not there (based e.g. on some filename-scheme) convert the files to different format (but only if there aren't successfully converted ones there - e.g. from a previous attempt - custom comparison routine) for each file find a certain data element and fetch some additional file from say an URL, but only if that hasn't been downloaded yet (decide on existence of file and file "freshness") finally compute something (e.g. word count for something identifiable and store it in the database, but only if the DB does not have an entry for that exact ID yet) Observations: there are different stages each stage is usually simple to compute or implement in isolation each stage may be simple, but the data volume may be large each stage may produce a few errors each stage may have different signals, on when (re)processing is needed Requirements: builds should be interruptable and idempotent (== robust) when interrupted, already processed objects should be reused to speedup the next run data paths should be easy to adjust (simple syntax, nothing new to learn, internal dsl would be ok) some form of dependency graph, that describes the process would be nice for later visualizations should leverage existing programs, if possible I've done some research on make alternatives like rake and have worked a lot with ant and maven in the past. All these tools naturally focus on code and software build, not on data builds. A system we have in place now for a task similar to the above is pretty much just shell scripts, which are compact (and are a ok glue for a variety of other programs written in other languages), so I wonder if worse is better?

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• Tools of the Trade

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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• Application Lifecycle Management Tools

  - by John K. Hines

  Leading a team comprised of three former teams means that we have three of everything.  Three places to gather requirements, three (actually eight or nine) places for customers to submit support requests, three places to plan and track work. We’ve been looking into tools that combine these features into a single product.  Not just Agile planning tools, but those that allow us to look in a single place for requirements, work items, and reports. One of the interesting choices is Software Planner by Automated QA (the makers of Test Complete).  It's a lovely tool with real end-to-end process support.  We’re probably not going to use it for one reason – cost.  I’m sure our company could get a discount, but it’s on a concurrent user license that isn’t cheap for a large number of users.  Some initial guesswork had us paying over $6,000 for 3 concurrent users just to get started with the Enterprise version.  Still, it’s intuitive, has great Agile capabilities, and has a reputation for excellent customer support. At the moment we’re digging deeper into Rational Team Concert by IBM.  Reading the docs on this product makes me want to submit my resume to Big Blue.  Not only does RTC integrate everything we need, but it’s free for up to 10 developers.  It has beautiful support for all phases of Scrum.  We’re going to bring the sales representative in for a demo. This marks one of the few times that we’re trying to resist the temptation to write our own tool.  And I think this is the first time that something so complex may actually be capably provided by an external source.   Hooray for less work! Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Tools

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• Using Scrum on small projects where Owner doesn't want to be involved

  - by Andrej Mohar

  Recently I've been reading and learning quite a lot about scrum and I like it a lot. However, I do have a couple of likely scenarios in my head to which I don't know the solution. So let's say that I might want to organize an agile team of (for instance) four web developers (one of them UI/UX designer). This team would operate on scrum principles. Initially we would probably be working on projects like landing pages for ordinary people's small businesses, like renting apartments, selling cookies... Such customers simply can't be set with Product Owner role (IMHO), because they usually expect to hire a company, give them the overall project goal with some details, and then expect the job to be done (including a lot of decision making) with as little of their involvement as possible (in their opinion, they have more important things to do). Let's say I'd like to engage myself in a developer/scrum master role (I know that even that is debatable, being a team member and scrum master at once), so I simply shouldn't take the role of the product owner as well. So as for my questions: If I'm my company's business owner, do I simply need to be a product owner as well (do these roles include each other)? Can I employ a sales person which might have the product owner role? Would it be better if it is an experienced developer instead of a sales person? Is this even a smart move? Lastly, is there another agile approach that might better suit my position? EDIT: Thank you everyone for good inputs. I added some comments, any aditional info will be greatly appreciated.

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• Which tools you use for development in your company?…Please be exact [closed]

  - by predrag.music

  If you are a professional php/(my/postgre/?)sql/? developer and working in a professional team ... I would like to know which tools you use for development in your company. I do not care which tool is better or worse, but "which tools you use", if it is not a TOP SECRET :) For example, these are just some of the tools i/we use (first those used most (in general)): Pen, paper lots of cofee, cola ... let me think ... mmmm ... yeah more cofee :) All kinds of books (a lots of books) OS: Win / MacOS X Server: Hosted (CentOS )/ At work Mac OS X Dev server: XAMPP / MAMP / LAMP Editor: Notepad++ IDE: Netbeans / Zend Studio / Eclipse Version Control System: Mercurial / SVN FTP: Filezilla mostly / ... Passwords: KeePass js / ajax: jQuery / pure js / jQuery UI Framework:CI / Zend / pure php Database: MySQL / Other ORM: Framework layer db (Not an ORM I know but...) / Doctrine (2) / no ORM Debugging: Xdebug (PHP) / firebug (ajax/js/html/css/...) / framework profiler (stuff) / ... (x) Dreaming: About... Thinking: Not about chaos in ? direction .... n Anything else that comes to mind n+1 Zilion other stuff i know but i can't remember ... 8 some other stuff i (don't) remember i forgot, give up, delete, lost, said to myself never again, i haven't had time stuff, have on computer stuff but can't find or don't even know i have it on my computer at least 2-3 or more times, stuff I said to myself i'll check later and never checked again for all sort of "perfectly justified" reasons (time, memory, wife :), whatever,...), ... what is the reason i'm asking this?:) 8 and beyond looking forward to see a lot of answers ?

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• Dealing with selfish team member(s)

  - by thegreendroid

  My team is facing a difficult quandary, a couple of team members are essentially selfish (not to be confused with dominant!) and are cherry-picking stories/tasks that will give them the most recognition within the company (at sprint reviews etc. when all the stakeholders are present). These team members are very good at what they do and are fully aware of what they are doing. When we first started using agile about a year ago, I can say I was quite selfish too (coming from a very individual-focused past). I took ownership of certain stories and didn't involve anyone else in it, which in hindsight wasn't the right thing to do and I learnt from that experience almost immediately. We are a young team of very ambitious twenty somethings so I can understand the selfishness to some extent (after all everyone should be ambitious!). But the level to which this selfishness has reached of late has started to bother me and a few others within my team. The way I see it, agile/scrum is all about the team and not individuals. We should be looking out for each other and helping each other improve. I made this quite clear during our last retrospective, that we should be fair and give everyone a chance. I'll wait and see what comes out of it in the next few sprints. In the meantime, what are some of the troubles that you have faced with selfish members and how did you overcome them?

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• SQL Rally Pre-Con: Data Warehouse Modeling – Making the Right Choices

  - by Davide Mauri

  As you may have already learned from my old post or Adam’s or Kalen’s posts, there will be two SQL Rally in North Europe. In the Stockholm SQL Rally, with my friend Thomas Kejser, I’ll be delivering a pre-con on Data Warehouse Modeling: Data warehouses play a central role in any BI solution. It's the back end upon which everything in years to come will be created. For this reason, it must be rock solid and yet flexible at the same time. To develop such a data warehouse, you must have a clear idea of its architecture, a thorough understanding of the concepts of Measures and Dimensions, and a proven engineered way to build it so that quality and stability can go hand-in-hand with cost reduction and scalability. In this workshop, Thomas Kejser and Davide Mauri will share all the information they learned since they started working with data warehouses, giving you the guidance and tips you need to start your BI project in the best way possible?avoiding errors, making implementation effective and efficient, paving the way for a winning Agile approach, and helping you define how your team should work so that your BI solution will stand the test of time. You'll learn: Data warehouse architecture and justification Agile methodology Dimensional modeling, including Kimball vs. Inmon, SCD1/SCD2/SCD3, Junk and Degenerate Dimensions, and Huge Dimensions Best practices, naming conventions, and lessons learned Loading the data warehouse, including loading Dimensions, loading Facts (Full Load, Incremental Load, Partitioned Load) Data warehouses and Big Data (Hadoop) Unit testing Tracking historical changes and managing large sizes With all the Self-Service BI hype, Data Warehouse is become more and more central every day, since if everyone will be able to analyze data using self-service tools, it’s better for him/her to rely on correct, uniform and coherent data. Already 50 people registered from the workshop and seats are limited so don’t miss this unique opportunity to attend to this workshop that is really a unique combination of years and years of experience! http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2013/nordic/Agenda/PreconferenceSeminars.aspx See you there!

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• Code Measuring and Metrics Tools?

  - by David

  I'm in the process of setting up a build server for personal projects. This server will handle all the normal CI stuff, including running large suites of tests (unit, integration, automated UI). While I'm working out the kinks for including code coverage output with MSTest, it occurs to me that there may be lots of tools out there which give me additional metrics other than just code coverage. FxCop comes to mind as an example. Though I'm sure there are others. Anything that can generate useful reportable data and metrics would be good. Whether it's class dependency charts (looking for Law of Demeter violations, for example), analyses of the uses of classes/functions (looking for a function that isn't used in the system other than just the tests, for example), and so on. I'm not sure the right way to formulate the question, since polling questions or "What's your favorite code analysis tool" aren't very good. But I'm essentially just looking for recommendations on what metrics to gather and the tools that can gather them. The eventual vision for something like this is to have the CI server run a bunch of automated tests and analysis tools and track performance metrics over time. Imagine a dashboard full of graphs plotting these metrics over time. The lines should all relatively be at an equilibrium, and if one starts to stray toward the negative then it's an early indication of problems with the code. In the age old struggle to quantify code quality with management, this sounds like a potentially helpful means of doing just that.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Architecture Tools

  - by MikeParks

  Jennifer Marsman (Microsoft Evangelist) and Cameron Skinner (Microsoft Visual Studio Product Unit Manager) recently stopped by our office while they were passing through Louisville on their tour to give us a presentation on the new Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Architecture Tools. I checked out these new features when Visual Studio 2010 Beta versions originally rolled out and have been really impressed with this stuff ever since then. So it was pretty cool to actually learn some new techniques from Cameron himself since he helped write the actual code behind some of those features. If you've upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 recently I would highly recommend using the Architecture tools. They're awesome. If you want to make improvements to it, they even have their own SDK for it. There are plenty of blogs out there to show you how to use it. I've been waiting to find a tool that works like this where I can really analyze the code in solutions and projects and see how everything ties together. It's really handy if you're asked to work on a new project and aren't familiar with how it works. Just run the tools, analyze the DLL's, learn how everything works, and then you'll be ready to implement new code! It's a great tool to learn new systems quick and easy and it's all housed within the Visual Studio IDE. I just wanted to write a blog to brag about it a little bit, so I figured I'd throw this up here. It's a must have tool for Developers/Architects. Here's some screenshots of when I was using it earlier:   Thanks everyone! - Mike

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• YouTube: Chrome Dev Tools Integration with NetBeans IDE!

  - by Geertjan

  Some time ago my colleague David Konecny discussed the question "What works better for you? NetBeans IDE or Chrome Developer Tools?". It's a good read. David highlights the point that it's not a question of either/or but both, since the two tools are like the apple/pear dichotmoy. However, good news! The two worlds are not divided in NetBeans IDE 7.4. Changes you make in Chrome Developer Tools (CDT) are automatically persisted to the related files in NetBeans IDE, as you can see in a new YouTube clip I made today. The new integration of CDT with NetBeans IDE has been mentioned in the NetBeans IDE 7.4 New & Noteworthy, while on Twitter this was sighted yesterday: Watch the movie above and within 5 minutes you too will see the simplicity and power of CDT integration with NetBeans IDE. In other news. I consider the above to be my favorite (though it's a tough choice, since there are so many new features in NetBeans IDE 7.4) new feature, for the article "What is your favorite new NetBeans IDE 7.4 feature?"

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• What are the common mistakes in 'tailored Scrum approaches'?

  - by Clark Gable

  I have seen this before. Management wants to be agile and be scrummified, but does not want to step out of the status quo. My latest observation is no different; here, the Scrum is 'tailored' to the organization; specifically into a weird many-people-process. The diagram showing the different participants. I am putting together a document listing why this will not work. Here are the obvious ones: 1. There are product owner agents (an obvious WTF), who report to the product owner: causing dilution of decision making capability 2. There is a role that looks similar to a manager in the traditional approach - development manager: an obvious attempt at command-and-control model 3. The ScrumMaster's role includes collecting timesheets, which are used to track progress instead of burndown charts: detrimental to agile's efforts to build teams with motivated individuals Leaving the question "how would you convince the management?", my question is more at, "what else do you see as failures in this/similar 'tailored Scrum approaches'? EDIT: The diagram might use a few more details 1. The development manager is not part of the development team, with not very clearly defined responsibilities, except: developer performance assessemnt, recruitment, etc., 2. There are more than two teams (with ScrumMaster+development manager+dev team) with the same product owner for all teams!

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• At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

  - by MeshMan

  I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my development of software became that I would never drop them out of principle. Until...I was offered a contracting role that doubled my take home pay for the year. The company I joined didn't follow any specific methodology, the team hadn't heard of anything like code smells, SOLID, etc., and I certainly wasn't going to get away with spending time doing TDD if the team had never even seen unit testing in practice. Am I a sell out? No, not completely... Code will always been written "cleanly" (as per Uncle Bob's teachings) and the principles of SOLID will always be applied to the code that I write as they are needed. Testing was dropped for me though, the company couldn't afford to have such a unknown handed to the team who quite frankly, even I did create test frameworks, they would never use/maintain the test framework correctly. Using that as an example, what point would you say a developer should never drop his craftsmanship principles for the sake of money/other benefits to them personally? I understand that this can be a very personal opinion on how concerned one is to their own needs, business needs, and the sake of craftsmanship etc. But one can consider that for example testing can be dropped if the company decided they would rather have a test team, than rather understand unit testing in programming, would that be something you could forgive yourself for like I did? So given that there is something you would drop, there usually should be an equal cost in the business that makes up for what you drop - hopefully, unless of course you are pretty much out for lining your own pockets and not community/social collaborating ;). Double your money, go back to RAD? Or walk on, and look for someone doing Agile, and never look back...

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• Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote

  - by Burhan Ali

  I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation? Some facts that may be relevant: We all work in a single open plan room. We use Skype in our company. We don't have any video conferencing capability. We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved. The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week. Things we have tried: Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting. Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio. Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning. I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems. What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?

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• What is the value of workflow tools?

  - by user16549

  I'm new to Workflow developement, and I don't think I'm really getting the "big picture". Or perhaps to put it differently, these tools don't currently "click" in my head. So it seems that companies like to create business drawings to describe processes, and at some point someone decided that they could use a state machine like program to actually control processes from a line and boxes like diagram. Ten years later, these tools are huge, extremely complicated (my company is currently playing around with WebSphere, and I've attended some of the training, its a monster, even the so called "minimalist" versions of these workflow tools like Activiti are huge and complicated although not nearly as complicated as the beast that is WebSphere afaict). What is the great benefit in doing it this way? I can kind of understand the simple lines and boxes diagrams being useful, but these things, as far as I can tell, are visual programming languages at this point, complete with conditionals and loops. Programmers here appear to be doing a significant amount of work in the lines and boxes layer, which to me just looks like a really crappy, really basic visual programming language. If you're going to go that far, why not just use some sort of scripting language? Have people thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this? Has the lines and boxes thing been taken to an absurd level, or am I just not understanding the value in all this? I'd really like to see arguments in defense of this by people that have worked with this technology and understand why its useful. I don't see the value in it, but I recognize that I'm new to this as well and may not quite get it yet.

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• Project compilation requires a class that is not used anywhere

  - by Susei

  When I build with ant my project that uses libgdx, I get a strange error. It says that a class com.google.gwt.dom.client.ImageElement is not found, but it isn't used at all in the code. How can I find what makes this class necessary? Even searching over the whole project doesn't give any results. It says that error is at PixmapTextureAtlas.java:16 (class source), but there is no code that uses that ImageElement class. Adding the library containing com.google.gwt.dom.client.ImageElement class helps, of course, but I'd like to figure out why this class in needed. Here is the place in ant log that tells of the actual error: Compiling 3 source files to /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/bin /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/src/org/tendiwa/client/PixmapTextureAtlas.java:16: error: cannot access ImageElement class file for com.google.gwt.dom.client.ImageElement not found Here is the whole ant log: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/bin/java -Xmx128m -Xss2m -Dant.home=/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant -Dant.library.dir=/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -classpath /opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-regexp.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-swing.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-xalan2.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-jdepend.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-resolver.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-jsch.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-testutil.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-launcher.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-bsf.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-commons-logging.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-netrexx.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-junit.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-commons-net.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-bcel.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-antlr.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-log4j.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-jai.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-apache-oro.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-jmf.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/ant/lib/ant-javamail.jar:/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/lib/tools.jar:/opt/intellijidea/lib/idea_rt.jar com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.AntMain2 -logger com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.IdeaAntLogger2 -inputhandler com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.IdeaInputHandler -buildfile /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/build.xml jar build.xml property path description compile ant property property property description compile mkdir javac jar ant property description _core_src_available available ontology antcall property description _core_src_available available _build_core ant property property compile echo /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client mkdir javac jar jar Building jar: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/MainModule.jar description tempfile mkdir Created dir: /tmp/tendiwa373148820 unjar Expanding: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/MainModule.jar into /tmp/tendiwa373148820 Expanding: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/tendiwa-backend.jar into /tmp/tendiwa373148820 Expanding: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/tendiwa-ontology.jar into /tmp/tendiwa373148820 copy Copying 1 file to /tmp/tendiwa373148820 java Created item short_sword Created item short_bow Created item bucket Created item boot Created item steel_morningstar Created item rifle_ammo Created item handAxe Created item iron_armor Created item steel_mace Created item jacket Created item fedora Created item wooden_arrow Saving sources to /tmp/tendiwa373148820/ontology/src tendiwa/resources/SoundTypes.java tendiwa/resources/CharacterTypes.java tendiwa/resources/ObjectTypes.java tendiwa/resources/FloorTypes.java tendiwa/resources/ItemTypes.java tendiwa/resources/MaterialTypes.java mkdir mkdir mkdir Created dir: /tmp/tendiwa373148820/ontology/bin javac jar Building jar: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/tendiwa-ontology.jar echo Resources source code generated ant property property compile echo /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client mkdir javac jar jar jar Building jar: /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/MainModule.jar mkdir javac /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/build.xml:25: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details. at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.compile(Javac.java:1150) at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.execute(Javac.java:912) at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor4.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106) at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:390) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:411) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368) at org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:809) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.start(Main.java:180) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.main(Main.java:268) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.AntMain2.main(AntMain2.java:30) /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/build.xml (25:46)'includeantruntime' was not set, defaulting to build.sysclasspath=last; set to false for repeatable builds Compiling 3 source files to /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/bin /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/src/org/tendiwa/client/PixmapTextureAtlas.java:16: error: cannot access ImageElement class file for com.google.gwt.dom.client.ImageElement not found 1 error /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/build.xml:25: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details. at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.compile(Javac.java:1150) at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.execute(Javac.java:912) at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor4.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106) at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:390) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:411) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368) at org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:809) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.start(Main.java:180) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.main(Main.java:268) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.AntMain2.main(AntMain2.java:30) /home/suseika/Projects/tendiwa/client/build.xml:25: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details. at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.compile(Javac.java:1150) at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Javac.execute(Javac.java:912) at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor4.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106) at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:390) at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:411) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368) at org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41) at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:809) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.start(Main.java:180) at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.main(Main.java:268) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606) at com.intellij.rt.ant.execution.AntMain2.main(AntMain2.java:30) Ant build completed with 3 errors one warning in 4s at 10/30/13 3:09 AM Here is a part of ant file where this error appears: <path id="tendiwa.jars"> <fileset dir="../libs"> <include name="**/*.jar"/> </fileset> <pathelement path="../tendiwa-backend.jar"/> <pathelement path="../tendiwa-ontology.jar"/> <!--<fileset dir="/usr/share/java" includes="gwt*.jar"/>--> </path> <target name="compile"> <ant dir="../MainModule" target="jar"/> <mkdir dir="bin"/> <javac destdir="bin" failonerror="true"> <classpath> <path refid="tendiwa.jars"/> <!--temporary--> <pathelement path="../tendiwa-ontology.jar"/> <!--temporary--> <pathelement path="../MainModule.jar"/> <fileset dir="../libs" includes="**/*.jar"/> </classpath> <src> <pathelement path="Desktop/src"/> <pathelement path="src"/> </src> </javac> </target>

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• SQL SERVER – Installing SQL Server Data Tools and SSRS

  - by Pinal Dave

  This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. If you have installed SQL Server, but are missing the Data Tools or Reporting Services Double-click the SQL Server 2012 installation media. Click the Installation link on the left to view the Installation options. Click the top link New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation. Follow the SQL Server Setup wizard until you get to the Installation Type screen. At that screen, select Add features to an existing instance of SQL Server 2012. Click Next to move to the Feature Selection page. Select Reporting Services – Native and SQL Server Data Tools. If the Management Tools have not been installed, go ahead and choose them as well. Continue through the wizard and reboot the computer at the end of the installation if instructed to do so. Configure Reporting Services If you installed Reporting Services during the installation of the SQL Server instance, SSRS will be configured automatically for you. If you install SSRS later, then you will have to go back and configure it as a subsequent step. Click Start > All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2012 > Configuration Tools > Reporting Services Configuration Manager > Connect on the Reporting Services Configuration Connection dialog box. On the left-hand side of the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, click Database. Click the Change Database button on the right side of the screen. Select Create a new report server database and click Next. Click through the rest of the wizard accepting the defaults. This wizard creates two databases: ReportServer, used to store report definitions and security, and ReportServerTempDB which is used as scratch space when preparing reports for user requests. Now click Web Service URL on the left-hand side of the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. Click the Apply button to accept the defaults. If the Apply button has been grayed out, move on to the next step. This step sets up the SSRS web service. The web service is the program that runs in the background that communicates between the web page, which you will set up next, and the databases. The final configuration step is to select the Report Manager URL link on the left. Accept the default settings and click Apply. If the Apply button was already grayed out, this means the SSRS was already configured. This step sets up the Report Manager web site where you will publish reports. You may be wondering if you also must install a web server on your computer. SQL Server does not require that the Internet Information Server (IIS), the Microsoft web server, be installed to run Report Manager. Click Exit to dismiss the Reporting Services Configuration Manager dialog box. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to create your first report using the Report Wizard. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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• Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download.  Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that).  The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well.  It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.  For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object.  For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control.  In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control.  For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property).  Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services.  It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight.  It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication.  WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server.  It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server  It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them.    The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications.  All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

  The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download.  Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• What tools provide burndown charts to Bugzilla or Mylyn?

  - by Daniel Jomphe

  My team and I need to work on a project whose bugs are filed in Bugzilla, using Mylyn. Do you know of any tool or plug-in that provides scrum-inspired burndown charts to Bugzilla or Mylyn? Hopefully, this tool would be free for commercial usage, but we're not closed to commercial tools. Update: 4 hours of research allowed me to find very few free tools. Looks like bugzilla isn't popular in agile teams! And obviously, it's not the best fit.

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