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• Configuring UCM cache to check for external Content Server changes

  - by Martin Deh

  Recently, I was involved in a customer scenario where they were modifying the Content Server's contributor data files directly through Content Server.  This operation of course is completely supported.  However, since the contributor data file was modified through the "backdoor", a running WebCenter Spaces page, which also used the same data file, would not get the updates immediately.  This was due to two reasons.  The first reason is that the Spaces page was using Content Presenter to display the contents of the data file. The second reason is that the Spaces application was using the "cached" version of the data file.  Fortunately, there is a way to configure cache so backdoor changes can be picked up more quickly and automatically. First a brief overview of Content Presenter.  The Content Presenter task flow enables WebCenter Spaces users with Page-Edit permissions to precisely customize the selection and presentation of content in a WebCenter Spaces application.  With Content Presenter, you can select a single item of content, contents under a folder, a list of items, or query for content, and then select a Content Presenter based template to render the content on a page in a Spaces application.  In addition to displaying the folders and the files in a Content Server, Content Presenter integrates with Oracle Site Studio to allow you to create, access, edit, and display Site Studio contributor data files (Content Server Document) in either a Site Studio region template or in a custom Content Presenter display template.  More information about creating Content Presenter Display Template can be found in the OFM Developers Guide for WebCenter Portal. The easiest way to configure the cache is to modify the WebCenter Spaces Content Server service connection setting through Enterprise Manager.  From here, under the Cache Details, there is a section to set the Cache Invalidation Interval.  Basically, this enables the cache to be monitored by the cache "sweeper" utility.  The cache sweeper queries for changes in the Content Server, and then "marks" the object in cache as "dirty".  This causes the application in turn to get a new copy of the document from the Content Server that replaces the cached version.  By default the initial value for the Cache Invalidation Interval is set to 0 (minutes).  This basically means that the sweeper is OFF.  To turn the sweeper ON, just set a value (in minutes).  The mininal value that can be set is 2 (minutes): Just a note.  In some instances, once the value of the Cache Invalidation Interval has been set (and saved) in the Enterprise Manager UI, it becomes "sticky" and the interval value cannot be set back to 0.  The good news is that this value can also be updated throught a WLST command.   The WLST command to run is as follows: setJCRContentServerConnection(appName, name, [socketType, url, serverHost, serverPort, keystoreLocation, keystorePassword, privateKeyAlias, privateKeyPassword, webContextRoot, clientSecurityPolicy, cacheInvalidationInterval, binaryCacheMaxEntrySize, adminUsername, adminPassword, extAppId, timeout, isPrimary, server, applicationVersion]) One way to get the required information for executing the command is to use the listJCRContentServerConnections('webcenter',verbose=true) command.  For example, this is the sample output from the execution: ------------------ UCM ------------------ Connection Name: UCM Connection Type: JCR External Appliction ID: Timeout: (not set) CIS Socket Type: socket CIS Server Hostname: webcenter.oracle.local CIS Server Port: 4444 CIS Keystore Location: CIS Private Key Alias: CIS Web URL: Web Server Context Root: /cs Client Security Policy: Admin User Name: sysadmin Cache Invalidation Interval: 2 Binary Cache Maximum Entry Size: 1024 The Documents primary connection is "UCM" From this information, the completed  setJCRContentServerConnection would be: setJCRContentServerConnection(appName='webcenter',name='UCM', socketType='socket', serverHost='webcenter.oracle.local', serverPort='4444', webContextRoot='/cs', cacheInvalidationInterval='0', binaryCacheMaxEntrySize='1024',adminUsername='sysadmin',isPrimary=1) Note: The Spaces managed server must be restarted for the change to take effect. More information about using WLST for WebCenter can be found here. Once the sweeper is turned ON, only cache objects that have been changed will be invalidated.  To test this out, I will go through a simple scenario.  The first thing to do is configure the Content Server so it can monitor and report on events.  Log into the Content Server console application, and under the Administration menu item, select System Audit Information.  Note: If your console is using the left menu display option, the Administration link will be located there. Under the Tracing Sections Information, add in only "system" and "requestaudit" in the Active Sections.  Check Full Verbose Tracing, check Save, then click the Update button.  Once this is done, select the View Server Output menu option.  This will change the browser view to display the log.  This is all that is needed to configure the Content Server. For example, the following is the View Server Output with the cache invalidation interval set to 2(minutes) Note the time stamp: requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.001  IdcServer-68    GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.016933999955654144(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.010  IdcServer-69    GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.006134999915957451(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.014  IdcServer-70    GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.004271999932825565(secs) ... other trace info ... requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.002  IdcServer-71    GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.020323999226093292(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.011  IdcServer-72    GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.017928000539541245(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.017  IdcServer-73    GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.010185999795794487(secs) Now that the tracing logs are reporting correctly, the next step is set up the Spaces app to test the sweeper. I will use 2 different pages that will use Content Presenter task flows.  Each task flow will use a different custom Content Presenter display template, and will be assign 2 different contributor data files (document that will be in the cache).  The pages at run time appear as follows: Initially, when the Space pages containing the content is loaded in the browser for the first time, you can see the tracing information in the Content Server output viewer. requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:12.030 IdcServer-129 CLEAR_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.029171999543905258(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:12.101 IdcServer-130 GET_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.025721000507473946(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:26.592 IdcServer-131 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=919][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.21525299549102783(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.117 IdcServer-132 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPES [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.5059549808502197(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.146 IdcServer-133 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.03360399976372719(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.169 IdcServer-134 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.008806000463664532(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.204 IdcServer-135 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.013265999965369701(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.384 IdcServer-136 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.18119299411773682(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.533 IdcServer-137 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.1519480049610138(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.634 IdcServer-138 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.10827399790287018(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.687 IdcServer-139 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.059702999889850616(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:28.271 IdcServer-140 GET_USER_PERMISSIONS [dUser=weblogic][IsJava=1] 0.006703000050038099(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:28.285 IdcServer-141 GET_ENVIRONMENT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.010893999598920345(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:30.433 IdcServer-142 GET_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.017318999394774437(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:41.837 IdcServer-143 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=508][dDocName=113_ES][dDocTitle=Landing Home][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.15937699377536774(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:42.781 IdcServer-144 GET_FILE [dID=326][dDocName=WEBCENTERORACL000315][dDocTitle=Duke][dUser=anonymous][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.16288499534130096(secs) The highlighted sections show where the 2 data files DF_UCMCACHETESTER (P1 page) and 113_ES (P2 page) were called by the (Spaces) VCR connection to the Content Server. The most important line to notice is the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME invocation.  On subsequent refreshes of these 2 pages, you will notice (after you refresh the Content Server's View Server Output) that there are no further traces of the same VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME invocations.  This is because the pages are getting the documents from the cache. The next step is to go through the "backdoor" and change one of the documents through the Content Server console.  This operation can be done by first locating the data file document, and from the Content Information page, select Edit Data File menu option.   This invokes the Site Studio Contributor, where the modifications can be made. Refreshing the Content Server View Server Output, the tracing displays the operations perform on the document.  requestaudit/6 08.30 11:56:59.972 IdcServer-255 SS_CHECKOUT_BY_NAME [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public] 0.05558200180530548(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:00.065 IdcServer-256 SS_GET_CONTRIBUTOR_CONFIG [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.08632399886846542(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:00.470 IdcServer-259 DOC_INFO_BY_NAME [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.02268899977207184(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.177 IdcServer-264 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.007652000058442354(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.181 IdcServer-263 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.01868399977684021(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.187 IdcServer-265 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.009367000311613083(secs) (internal)/6 08.30 11:57:26.118 IdcServer-266 File to be removed: /oracle/app/admin/domains/webcenter/ucm/cs/vault/~temp/703253295.xml (internal)/6 08.30 11:57:26.121 IdcServer-266 File to be removed: /oracle/app/admin/domains/webcenter/ucm/cs/vault/~temp/703253295.xml requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:26.122 IdcServer-266 SS_SET_ELEMENT_DATA [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0][StatusCode=0][StatusMessage=Successfully checked in content item 'DF_UCMCACHETESTER'.] 0.3765290081501007(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:30.710 IdcServer-267 DOC_INFO_BY_NAME [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.07942699640989304(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:30.733 IdcServer-268 SS_GET_CONTRIBUTOR_STRINGS [dUser=weblogic] 0.0044570001773536205(secs) After a few moments and refreshing the P1 page, the updates has been applied. Note: The refresh time may very, since the Cache Invalidation Interval (set to 2 minutes) is not determined by when changes happened.  The sweeper just runs every 2 minutes. Refreshing the Content Server View Server Output, the tracing displays the important information. requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.171 IdcServer-270 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.00952600035816431(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.179 IdcServer-271 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.011118999682366848(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.182 IdcServer-272 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.007447000127285719(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:16.885 IdcServer-273 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.0786449983716011(secs) After the specifed interval time the sweeper is invoked, which is noted by the GET_ ... calls.  Since the history has noted the change, the next call is to the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME to retrieve the new version of the (modifed) data file.  Navigating back to the P2 page, and viewing the server output, there are no further VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME to retrieve the data file.  This simply means that this data file was just retrieved from the cache.   Upon further review of the server output, we can see that there was only 1 request for the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME: requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor Request Audit Report over the last 120 Seconds for server webcenteroraclelocal16200****  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor -Num Requests 8 Errors 0 Reqs/sec. 0.06666944175958633 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.02762500010430813 Max Thread Count 2  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 1 Service VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.09200000017881393 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.09200000017881393  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 2 Service GET_PERSONALIZED_JAVASCRIPT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.054999999701976776 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.054999999701976776  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 3 Service GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.028999999165534973 Num requests 2 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.014499999582767487  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 4 Service GET_SERVER_OUTPUT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.017999999225139618 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.017999999225139618  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 5 Service GET_FILE Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.013000000268220901 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.013000000268220901  requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor ****End Audit Report*****  

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• Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2008 to 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I am sure you will have seen my posts on upgrading our internal Team Foundation Server from TFS2008 to TFS2010 Beta 2, RC and RTM, but what about a fresh upgrade of TFS2008 to TFS2010 using the RTM version of TFS. One of our clients is taking the plunge with TFS2010, so I have the job of doing the upgrade. It is sometimes very useful to have a team member that starts work when most of the Sydney workers are heading home as I can do the upgrade without impacting them. The down side is that if you have any blockers then you can be pretty sure that everyone that can deal with your problem is asleep I am starting with an existing blank installation of TFS 2010, but Adam Cogan let slip that he was the one that did the install so I thought it prudent to make sure that it was OK. Verifying Team Foundation Server 2010 We need to check that TFS 2010 has been installed correctly. First, check the Admin console and have a root about for any errors. Figure: Even the SQL Setup looks good. I don’t know how Adam did it! Backing up the Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases As we are moving from one server to another (recommended method) we will be taking a backup of our TFS2008 databases and resorting them to the SQL Server for the new TFS2010 Server. Do not just detach and reattach. This will cause problems with the version of the database. If you are running a test migration you just need to create a backup of the TFS 2008 databases, but if you are doing the live migration then you should stop IIS on the TFS 2008 server before you backup the databases. This will stop any inadvertent check-ins or changes to TFS 2008. Figure: Stop IIS before you take a backup to prevent any TFS 2008 changes being written to the database. It is good to leave a little time between taking the TFS 2008 server offline and commencing the upgrade as there is always one developer who has not finished and starts screaming. This time it was John Liu that needed 10 more minutes to make his changes and check-in, so I always give it 30 minutes and see if anyone screams. John Liu [SSW] said:   are you doing something to TFS :-O MrHinsh [SSW UK][VS ALM MVP] said:   I have stopped TFS 2008 as per my emails John Liu [SSW] said:   haven't finish check in @_@   can we have it for 10mins? :) MrHinsh [SSW UK][VS ALM MVP] said:   TFS 2008 has been started John Liu [SSW] said:   I love you! -IM conversation at TFS Upgrade +25 minutes After John confirmed that he had everything done I turned IIS off again and made a cup of tea. There were no more screams so the upgrade can continue. Figure: Backup all of the databases for TFS and include the Reporting Services, just in case.   Figure: Check that all the backups have been taken Once you have your backups, you need to copy them to your new TFS2010 server and restore them. This is a good way to proceed as if we have any problems, or just plain run out of time, then you just turn the TFS 2008 server back on and all you have lost is one upgrade day, and not 10 developer days. As per the rules, you should record the number of files and the total number of areas and iterations before the upgrade so you have something to compare to: TFS2008 File count: Type Count 1 1845 2 15770 Areas & Iterations: 139 You can use this to verify that the upgrade was successful. it should however be noted that the numbers in TFS 2010 will be bigger. This is due to some of the sorting out that TFS does during the upgrade process. Restore Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases Restoring the databases is much more time consuming than just attaching them as you need to do them one at a time. But you may be taking a backup of an operational database and need to restore all your databases to a particular point in time instead of to the latest. I am doing latest unless I encounter any problems. Figure: Restore each of the databases to either a latest or specific point in time.     Figure: Restore all of the required databases Now that all of your databases are restored you now need to upgrade them to Team Foundation Server 2010. Upgrade Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases This is probably the easiest part of the process. You need to call a fire and forget command that will go off to the database specified, find the TFS 2008 databases and upgrade them to 2010. During this process all of the 6 main TFS 2008 databases are merged into the TfsVersionControl database, upgraded and then the database is renamed to TFS_[CollectionName]. The rename is only the database and not the physical files, so it is worth going back and renaming the physical file as well. This keeps everything neat and tidy. If you plan to keep the old TFS 2008 server around, for example if you are doing a test migration first, then you will need to change the TFS GUID. This GUID is unique to each TFS instance and is preserved when you upgrade. This GUID is used by the clients and they can get a little confused if there are two servers with the same one. To kick of the upgrade you need to open a command prompt and change the path to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools” and run the “import” command in  “tfsconfig”. TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:<Previous TFS Data Tier>                  /collectionName:<Collection Name>                  /confirmed Imports a TFS 2005 or 2008 data tier as a new project collection. Important: This command should only be executed after adequate backups have been performed. After you import, you will need to configure portal and reporting settings via the administration console. EXAMPLES -------- TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:tfs2008sql /collectionName:imported /confirmed TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:tfs2008sql\Instance /collectionName:imported /confirmed OPTIONS: -------- sqlinstance         The sql instance of the TFS 2005 or 2008 data tier. The TFS databases at that location will be modified directly and will no longer be usable as previous version databases.  Ensure you have back-ups. collectionName      The name of the new Team Project Collection. confirmed           Confirm that you have backed-up databases before importing. This command will automatically look for the TfsIntegration database and verify that all the other required databases exist. In this case it took around 5 minutes to complete the upgrade as the total database size was under 700MB. This was unlike the upgrade of SSW’s production database with over 17GB of data which took a few hours. At the end of the process you should get no errors and no warnings. The Upgrade operation on the ApplicationTier feature has completed. There were 0 errors and 0 warnings. As this is a new server and not a pure upgrade there should not be a problem with the GUID. If you think at any point you will be doing this more than once, for example doing a test migration, or merging many TFS 2008 instances into a single one, then you should go back and rename the physical TfsVersionControl.mdf file to the same as the new collection. This will avoid confusion later down the line. To do this, detach the new collection from the server and rename the physical files. Then reattach and change the physical file locations to match the new name. You can follow http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1122 for a more detailed explanation of how to do this. Figure: Stop the collection so TFS does not take a wobbly when we detach the database. When you try to start the new collection again you will get a conflict with project names and will require to remove the Test Upgrade collection. This is fine and it just needs detached. Figure: Detaching the test upgrade from the new Team Foundation Server 2010 so we can start the new Collection again. You will now be able to start the new upgraded collection and you are ready for testing. Do you remember the stats we took off the TFS 2008 server? TFS2008 File count: Type Count 1 1845 2 15770 Areas & Iterations: 139 Well, now we need to compare them to the TFS 2010 stats, remembering that there will probably be more files under source control. TFS2010 File count: Type Count 1 19288 Areas & Iterations: 139 Lovely, the number of iterations are the same, and the number of files is bigger. Just what we were looking for. Testing the upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 Project Collection Can we connect to the new collection and project? Figure: We can connect to the new collection and project.   Figure: make sure you can connect to The upgraded projects and that you can see all of the files. Figure: Team Web Access is there and working. Note that for Team Web Access you now use the same port and URL as for TFS 2010. So in this case as I am running on the local box you need to use http://localhost:8080/tfs which will redirect you to http://localhost:8080/tfs/web for the web access. If you need to connect with a Visual Studio 2008 client you will need to use the full path of the new collection, http://[servername]/tfs/[collectionname] and this will work with all of your collections. With Visual Studio 2005 you will only be able to connect to the Default collection and in both VS2008 and VS2005 you will need to install the forward compatibility updates. Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 To make sure that you have everything up to date, make sure that you run SSW Diagnostics and get all green ticks. Upgrade Done! At this point you can send out a notice to everyone that the upgrade is complete and and give them the connection details. You need to remember that at this stage we have 2008 project upgraded to run under TFS 2010 but it is still running under that same process template that it was running before. You can only “enable” 2010 features in a process template you can’t upgrade. So what to do? Well, you need to create a new project and migrate things you want to keep across. Souse code is easy, you can move or Branch, but Work Items are more difficult as you can’t move them between projects. This instance is complicated more as the old project uses the Conchango/EMC Scrum for Team System template and I will need to write a script/application to get the work items across with their attachments in tact. That is my next task! Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,TFS 2008,VS ALM

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• 12.04 Unity 3D Not working where as Unity 2D works fine

  - by Stephen Martin

  I updated from 11.10 to 12.04 using the distribution upgrade, after that I couldn't log into using the Unity 3D desktop after logging in I would either never get unity's launcher or I would get the launcher and once I tried to do anything the windows lost their decoration and nothing would respond. If I use Unity 2D it works fine and in fact I'm using it to type this. I managed to get some info out of dmesg that looks like it's the route of whats happening. dmesg: [ 109.160165] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung [ 109.160180] [drm] capturing error event; look for more information in /debug/dri/0/i915_error_state [ 109.167587] [drm:i915_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 1226 at 1218, next 1227) [ 109.672273] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip. output of lspci | grep vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) output of /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p IN 12.04 OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300) OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.2 Not software rendered: no Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: no The same command in 11.10: stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11 Not software rendered: yes Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: yes stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 12.770] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2176x800 stride 8704, tiled [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 33.310] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-93A39E9580D1D5B855D779F4595485C2CC66E0CF.xkm [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 41.519] [mi] Increasing EQ size to 512 to prevent dropped events. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_state from debugfs and the full dmesg. [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 51.052] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch I know im using the beta version so I'm not expecting it to work but does any one know what the problem may be or even why they Unity compatibility test is describing my video card as vmware when its an intel i915 and Ubuntu is running on the metal not virtualised. Unity 3D worked fine in 11.10

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• Unity 3D Not working where as Unity 2D works fine [closed]

  - by Stephen Martin

  I updated from 11.10 to 12.04 using the distribution upgrade, after that I couldn't log into using the Unity 3D desktop after logging in I would either never get unity's launcher or I would get the launcher and once I tried to do anything the windows lost their decoration and nothing would respond. If I use Unity 2D it works fine and in fact I'm using it to type this. I managed to get some info out of dmesg that looks like it's the route of whats happening. dmesg: [ 109.160165] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung [ 109.160180] [drm] capturing error event; look for more information in /debug/dri/0/i915_error_state [ 109.167587] [drm:i915_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 1226 at 1218, next 1227) [ 109.672273] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip. output of lspci | grep vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) output of /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p IN 12.04 OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300) OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.2 Not software rendered: no Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: no The same command in 11.10: stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11 Not software rendered: yes Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: yes stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 12.770] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2176x800 stride 8704, tiled [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 33.310] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-93A39E9580D1D5B855D779F4595485C2CC66E0CF.xkm [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 41.519] [mi] Increasing EQ size to 512 to prevent dropped events. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_state from debugfs and the full dmesg. [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 51.052] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch I know im using the beta version so I'm not expecting it to work but does any one know what the problem may be or even why they Unity compatibility test is describing my video card as vmware when its an intel i915 and Ubuntu is running on the metal not virtualised. Unity 3D worked fine in 11.10

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• GLSL - one-pass gaussian blur

  - by martin pilch

  It is possible to implement fragment shader to do one-pass gaussian blur? I have found lot of implementation of two-pass blur (gaussian and box blur): http://callumhay.blogspot.com/2010/09/gaussian-blur-shader-glsl.html http://www.gamerendering.com/2008/10/11/gaussian-blur-filter-shader/ http://www.geeks3d.com/20100909/shader-library-gaussian-blur-post-processing-filter-in-glsl/ and so on. I have been thinking of implementing gaussian blur as convolution (in fact, it is the convolution, the examples above are just aproximations): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur

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• Stark Expo Needs You

  - by [email protected]

  Train to Become a Master Cloud Operative Can't wait until September to get your Oracle fix? Then come visit us at the Stark Expo now. Marvel Entertainment has turned itself into one of the hottest media companies of the digital age, and at the heart of Marvel's growth and transformation is Oracle technology. Now, this successful collaboration finds its way to the big screen, as Oracle joins forces with Marvel to launch a special showcase Website and movie trailer for the upcoming Iron Man 2. In Iron Man 2, Oracle is a proud sponsor of Stark Expo, a world-class tradeshow that depends on a cloud computing architecture to ensure that systems are free from overload. Starting today, visitors to the showcase Website are invited to become Master Cloud Operatives and keep Stark Expo up and running. Complete your training, test your troubleshooting skills in the Oracle Pavilion, and qualify to receive a free movie poster.

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• OpenGL ES 2/3 vs OpenGL 3 (and 4)

  - by Martin Perry

  I have migrated my code from OpenGL ES 2/3 to OpenGL 3 (I added bunch of defines and abstract classes to encapsulate both versions, so I have both in one project and compile only one or another). All I need to change was context initialization and glClearDepth. I dont have any errors. This was kind of strange to me. Even shaders are working correctly (some of them are GL ES 3 - with #version 300 es in their header) Is this a kind of good solution, or should I rewrite something more, before I start adding another functionality like geometry shaders, performance tools etc ?

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• Microsoft, please help me diagnose TFS Administration permission issues!

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a fun time trying to debug a permission issue I ran into using TFS 2010’s TfsConfig. Update 5th March 2010 – In its style of true excellence my company has added rant to its “Suggestions for Better TFS”. <rant> I was trying to run the TfsConfig tool and I kept getting the message: “TF55038: You don't have sufficient privileges to run this tool. Contact your Team Foundation system administrator." This message made me think that it was something to do with the Install permissions as it is always recommended to use a single account to do every install of TFS. I did not install the original TFS on our network and my account was not used to do the TFS2010 install. But I did do the upgrade from 2010 beta 2 to 2010 RC with my current account. So I proceeded to do some checking: Am I in the administrators group on the server? Figure: Yes, I am in the administrators group on the server Am I in the Administration Console users list? Figure: Yes, I am in the Administration Console users list Have I reapplied the permissions in the Administration Console users list ticking all the options? Figure: Make sure you check all of the boxed if you want to have all the admin options Figure: Yes, I have made sure that all my options are correct. Am I in the Team Foundation administrators group? Figure: Yes, I am in the Team Foundation Administrators group Is my account explicitly SysAdmin on the Database server? Figure: Yes, I do have explicit SysAdmin on the database Can you guess what the problem was? The command line window was not running as the administrator! As with most other applications there should be an explicit error message that states: "You are not currently running in administrator mode; please restart the command line with elevated privileges!" This would have saved me 30 minutes, although I agree that I should change my name to Muppet and just be done with it. </rant>   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,Administration,Team Foundation Server Admin Console,TFS Admin Console

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• When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Well, it depends…. If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control. But what if you are not… Update 9th March 2010 Michael Fourie gave me some feedback which I have integrated. Ed Blankenship via @edblankenship offered encouragement and a nice quote. Ewald Hofman gave me a couple of Cons, and maybe a few more soon. Ewald’s company, Avanade, currently uses Areas, but it looks like the manual management is getting too much and the project is getting cluttered. What if you are likely to have hundreds of projects, possibly with a multitude of internal and external projects? You might have 1 project for a customer or 10. This is the situation that most consultancies find themselves in and thus they need a more sustainable and maintainable option. What I am advocating is that we should have 1 “Team Project” per customer, and use areas to create “sub projects” within that single “Team Project”. "What you describe is what we generally do internally and what we recommend. We make very heavy use of area path to categorize the work within a larger project." - Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow & Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server   "We tend to use areas to segregate multiple projects in the same team project and it works well." - Tiago Pascoal, Visual Studio ALM MVP   "In general, I believe this approach provides consistency [to multi-product engagements] and lowers the administration and maintenance costs. All good." - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   “@MrHinsh BTW, I'm very much a fan of very large, if not huge, team projects in TFS. Just FYI :) Use Areas & Iterations.” Ed Blankenship, Visual Studio ALM MVP   This would mean that SSW would have a single Team Project called “SSW” that contains all of our internal projects and consequently all of the Areas and Iteration move down one hierarchy to accommodate this. Where we would have had “\SSW\Sprint 1” we now have “\SSW\SqlDeploy\Sprint1” with “SqlDeploy” being our internal project. At the moment SSW has over 70 internal projects and more than 170 total projects in TFS. This method has long term benefits that help to simplify the support model for companies that often have limited internal support time and many projects. But, there are implications as TFS does not provide this model “out-of-the-box”. These implications stretch across Areas, Iterations, Queries, Project Portal and Version Control. Michael made a good comment, he said: I agree with your approach, assuming that in a multi-product engagement with a client, they are happy to adopt the same process template across all products. If they are not, then it’ll either be easy to convince them or there is a valid reason for having a different template - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   At SSW we have a standard template that we use and this is applied across the board, to all of our projects. We even apply any changes to the core process template to all of our existing projects as well. If you have multiple projects for the same clients on multiple templates and you want to keep it that way, then this approach will not work for you. However, if you want to standardise as we have at SSW then this approach may benefit you as well. Implications around Areas Areas should be used for topological classification/isolation of work items. You can think of this as architecture areas, organisational areas or even the main features of your application. In our scenario there is an additional top level item that represents the Project / Product that we want to chop our Team Project into. Figure: Creating a sub area to represent a product/project is easy. <teamproject> <teamproject>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Becomes: <teamproject> <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\ <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Implications around Iterations Iterations should be used for chronological classification/isolation of work items. This could include isolated time boxes, milestones or release timelines and really depends on the logical flow of your project or projects. Due to the new level in Area we need to add the same level to Iteration. This is primarily because it is unlikely that the sprints in each of your projects/products will start and end at the same time. This is just a reality of managing multiple projects. Figure: Adding the same Area value to Iteration as the top level item adds flexibility to Iteration. <teamproject>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Implications around Queries Queries are used to filter your work items based on a specified level of granularity. There are a number of queries that are built into a project created using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, but we now have multiple projects and it would be a pain to have to edit all of the work items every time we changed project, and that would only allow one team to work on one project at a time.   Figure: The Queries that are created in a normal MSF Agile 5.0 project do not quite suit our new needs. In order for project contributors to be able to query based on their project we need a couple of things. The first thing I did was to create an “_Area Template” folder that has a copy of the project layout with all the queries setup to filter based on the “_Area Template” Area and the “_Sprint template” you can see in the Area and Iteration views. Figure: The template is currently easily drag and drop, but you then need to edit the queries to point at the right Area and Iteration. This needs a tool. I then created an “Areas” folder to hold all of the area specific queries. So, when you go to create a new TFS Sub-Project you just drag “_Area Template” while holding “Ctrl” and drop it onto “Areas”. There is a little setup here. That said I managed it in around 10 minutes which is not so bad, and I can imagine it being quite easy to build a tool to create these queries Figure: These new queries can be configured in around 10 minutes, which includes setting up the Area and Iteration as well. Version Control What about your source code? Well, that is the easiest of the lot. Just create a sub folder for each of your projects/products.   Figure: Creating sub folders in source control is easy as “Right click | Create new folder”. <teamproject>\DEV\Main\ Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\DEV\Main\ Conclusion I think it is up to each company to make a call on how you want to configure your Team Projects and it depends completely on how many projects/products you are going to have for each customer including yourself. If we decide to utilise this route it will require some configuration to get our 170+ projects into this format, and I will probably be writing some tools to help. Pros You only have one project to upgrade when a process template changes – After going through an upgrade of over 170 project prior to the changes in the RC I can tell you that that many projects is no fun. Standardises your Process Template – You will always have the same Process implementation across projects/products without exception You get tighter control over the permissions – Yes, you can do this on a standard Team Project, but it gets a lot easier with practice. You can “move” work items from one “product” to another – Have we not always wanted to do that. You can rename your projects – Wahoo: everyone wants to do this, now you can. One set of Reporting Services reports to manage – You set an area and iteration to run reports anyway, so you may as well set both. Simplified Check-In Policies– There is only one set of check-in policies per client. This simplifies administration of policies. Simplified Alerts – As alerts are applied across multiple projects this simplifies your alert rules as per client. Cons All of these cons could be mitigated by a custom tool that helps automate creation of “Sub-projects” within Team Projects. This custom tool could create areas, Iteration, permissions, SharePoint and queries. It just does not exist yet :) You need to configure the Areas and Iterations You need to configure the permissions You may need to configure sub sites for SharePoint (depends on your requirement) – If you have two projects/products in the same Team Project then you will not see the burn down for each one out-of-the-box, but rather a cumulative for the Team Project. This is not really that much of a problem as you would have to configure your burndown graphs for your current iteration anyway. note: When you create a sub site to a TFS linked portal it will inherit the settings of its parent site :) This is fantastic as it means that you can easily create sub sites and then set the Area and Iteration path in each of the reports to be the correct one. Every team wants their own customization (via Ewald Hofman) - small teams of 2 persons against teams of 30 – or even outsourcing – need their own process, you cannot allow that because everybody gets the same work item types. note: Luckily at SSW this is not a problem as our template is standardised across all projects and customers. Large list of builds (via Ewald Hofman) – As the build list in Team Explorer is just a flat list it can get very cluttered. note: I would mitigate this by removing any build that has not been run in over 30 days. The build template and workflow will still be available in version control, but it will clean the list. Feedback Now that I have explained this method, what do you think? What other pros and cons can you see? What do you think of this approach? Will you be using it? What tools would you like to support you?   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,TFS Administration,TFS,Team Foundation Server,Project Planning,TFS Customisation

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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• Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. Although I had no errors on my main computer, my netbook did have problems. Although I am not ready to call it a Service Pack problem just yet! Update 2011-03-10 – Running the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack 1 install a second time worked As per Brian's post I am installing the Team Foundation Server Service Pack first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. This however does not affect you if you are running Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server on separate computers as is normal in a production deployment. Main workhorse I will be installing the service pack first on my main computer as I want to actually use it here. Figure: My main workhorse I will also be installing this on my netbook which is obviously of significantly lower spec, but I will do that one after. Although, as always I had my fingers crossed, I was not really worried. Figure: KB2182621 Compared to Visual Studio there are not really a lot of components to update. Figure: TFS 2010 and SQL 2008 are the main things to update There is no “web” installer for the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack, but that is ok as most people will be installing it on a production server and will want to have everything local. I would have liked a Web installer, but the added complexity for the product team is not work the capability for a 500mb patch. Figure: There is currently no way to roll SP1 and RTM together Figure: No problems with the file verification, phew Figure: Although the install took a while, it progressed smoothly   Figure: I always like a success screen Well, as far as the install is concerned everything is OK, but what about TFS? Can I still connect and can I still administer it. Figure: Service Pack 1 is reflected correctly in the Administration Console I am confident that there are no major problems with TFS on my system and that it has been updated to SP1. I can do all of the things that I used before with ease, and with the new features detailed by Brian I think I will be happy. Netbook The great god Murphy has stuck, and my poor wee laptop spat the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack 1 out so fast it hit me on the back of the head. That will teach me for not looking… Figure: “Installation did not succeed” I am pretty sure should not be all caps! On examining the file I found that everything worked, except the actual Team Foundation Server 2010 serving step. Action: System Requirement Checks... Action complete Action: Downloading and/or Verifying Items c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp: Verifying signature for VS10-KB2182621.msp c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp Signature verified successfully for VS10-KB2182621.msp c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACFramework_enu.msi: Verifying signature for DACFramework_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACFramework_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for DACFramework_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi: Verifying signature for DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi Exists: evaluating Exists evaluated to false c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi: Verifying signature for TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SetupUtility.exe: Verifying signature for SetupUtility.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SetupUtility.exe Signature verified successfully for SetupUtility.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\NDP40-KB2468871.exe: Verifying signature for NDP40-KB2468871.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\NDP40-KB2468871.exe Signature verified successfully for NDP40-KB2468871.exe Action complete Action: Performing actions on all Items Entering Function: BaseMspInstallerT >::PerformAction Action: Performing Install on MSP: c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp targetting Product: Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WebAccess.WorkItemTracking,version="10.0.0.0",publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a",processorArchitecture="MSIL",fileVersion="10.0.40219.1",culture="neutral"'. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0x80070005. ] Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Error 1712.One or more of the files required to restore your computer to its previous state could not be found. Restoration will not be possible.] Patch (c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp) Install failed on product (Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU). Msi Log: MSI returned 0x643 Entering Function: MspInstallerT >::Rollback Action Rollback changes PerformMsiOperation returned 0x643 PerformMsiOperation returned 0x643 OnFailureBehavior for this item is to Rollback. Action complete Final Result: Installation failed with error code: (0x80070643), "Fatal error during installation. " (Elapsed time: 0 00:14:09). Figure: Error log for Team Foundation Server 2010 install shows a failure As there is really no information in this log as to why the installation failed so I checked the event log on that box. Figure: There are hundreds of errors and it actually looks like there are more problems than a failed Service Pack I am going to just run it again and see if it was because the netbook was slow to catch on to the update. Hears hoping, but even if it fails, I would question the installation of Windows (PDC laptop original install) before I question the Service Pack Figure: Second run through was successful I don’t know if the laptop was just slow, or what… Did you get this error? If you did I will push this to the product team as a problem, but unless more people have this sort of error, I will just look to write this off as a corrupted install of Windows and reinstall.

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• Kaiden and the Arachnoid Cyst

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Some of you may remember when my son Kaiden was born I posted pictures of him and his sister. Kaiden is now 15 months old and is progressing perfectly in every area except that and we had been worried that he was not walking yet. We were only really concerned as his sister was walking at 8 months. Figure: Kai as his usual self   Jadie and I were concerned over that and that he had a rather large head (noggin) so we talked to various GP’s and our health visitor who immediately dismissed our concerns every time. That was until about two months ago when we happened to get a GP whose daughter had Hyper Mobility and she recognised the symptoms immediately. We were referred to the Southbank clinic who were lovely and the paediatrician confirmed that he had Hyper Mobility after testing all of his faculties. This just means that his joints are overly mobile and would need a little physiotherapy to help him out. At the end the paediatrician remarked offhand that he has a rather large head and wanted to measure it. Sure enough he was a good margin above the highest percentile mark for his height and weight. The paediatrician showed the measurements to a paediatric consultant who, as a precautionary measure, referred us for an MRI at Yorkhill Children's hospital. Now, Yorkhill has always been fantastic to us, and this was no exception. You know we have NEVER had a correct diagnosis for the kids (with the exception of the above) from a GP and indeed twice have been proscribed incorrect medication that made the kids sicker! We now always go strait to Yorkhill to save them having to fix GP mistakes as well. Monday 24th May, 7pm The scan went fantastically, with Kaiden sleeping in the MRI machine for all but 5 minutes at the end where he waited patiently for it to finish. We were not expecting anything to be wrong as this was just a precautionary scan to make sure that nothing in his head was affecting his gross motor skills. After the scan we were told to expect a call towards the end of the week… Tuesday 25th May, 12pm The very next day we got a call from Southbank who said that they has found an Arachnoid Cyst and could we come in the next day to see a Consultant and that Kai would need an operation. Wednesday 26th May, 12:30pm We went into the Southbank clinic and spoke to the paediatric consultant who assured us that it was operable but that it was taking up considerable space in Kai’s head. Cerebrospinal fluid is building up as a cyst is blocking the channels it uses to drain. Thankfully they told us that prospects were good and that Kai would expect to make a full recovery before showing us the MRI pictures. Figure: Normal brain MRI cross section. This normal scan shows the spaces in the middle of the brain that contain and produce the Cerebrospinal fluid. Figure: Normal Cerebrospinal Flow This fluid is needed by the brain but is drained in the middle down the spinal column. Figure: Kai’s cyst blocking the four channels. I do not think that I need to explain the difference between the healthy picture and Kai’s picture. However you can see in this first picture the faint outline of the cyst in the middle that is blocking the four channels from draining. After seeing the scans a Neurosurgeon has decided that he is not acute, but needs an operation to unblock the flow. Figure: OMFG! You can see in the second picture the effect of the build up of fluid. If I was not horrified by the first picture I was seriously horrified by this one. What next? Kai is not presenting the symptoms of vomiting or listlessness that would show an immediate problem and as such we will get an appointment to see the Paediatric Neurosurgeon at the Southern General hospital in about 4 weeks. This timescale is based on the Neurosurgeon seeing the scans. After that Kai will need an operation to release the pressure and either remove the cyst completely or put in a permanent shunt (tube from brain to stomach) to bypass the blockage. We have updated his notes for the referral with additional recent information on top of the scan that the consultant things will help improve the timescales, but that is just a guess.   All we can do now is wait and see, and be watchful for tell tail signs of listlessness, eye problems and vomiting that would signify a worsening of his condition.   Technorati Tags: Personal

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• WPF vs. WinForms - a Delphi programmer's perspective?

  - by Robert Oschler

  I have read most of the major threads on WPF vs. WinForms and I find myself stuck in the unfortunate ambivalence you can fall into when deciding between the tried and true previous tech (Winforms), and it's successor (WPF). I am a veteran Delphi programmer of many years that is finally making the jump to C#. My fellow Delphi programmers out there will understand that I am excited to know that Anders Hejlsberg, of Delphi fame, was the architect behind C#. I have a strong addiction to Delphi's VCL custom components, especially those involved in making multi-step Wizards and components that act as a container for child components. With that background, I am hoping that those of you that switched from Delphi to C# can help me with my WinForms vs. WPF decision for writing my initial applications. Note, I am very impatient when coding and things like full fledged auto-complete and proper debugger support can make or break a project for me, including being able to find readily available information on API features and calls and even more so, workarounds for bugs. The SO threads and comments in the early 2009 date range give me great concern over WPF when it comes to potential frustrations that could mar my C# UI development coding. On the other hand, spending an inordinate amount of time learning an API tech that is, even if it is not abandoned, soon to be replaced (WinForms), is equally troubling and I do find the GPU support in WPF tantalizing. Hence my ambivalence. Since I haven't learned either tech yet I have a rare opportunity to get a fresh start and not have to face the big "unlearning" curve I've seen people mention in various threads when a WinForms programmer makes the move to WPF. On the other hand, if using WPF will just be too frustrating or have other major negative consequences for an impatient RAD developer like myself, then I'll just stick with WinForms until WPF reaches the same level of support and ease of use. To give you a concrete example into my psychology as a programmer, I used VB and subsequently Delphi to completely avoid altogether the very real pain of coding with MFC, a Windows UI library that many developers suffered through while developing early Windows apps. I have never regretted my luck in avoiding MFC. It would also be comforting to know if Anders Hejlsberg had a hand in the architecture of WPF and/or WinForms, and if there are any disparities in the creative vision and ease of use embodied in either code base. Finally, for the Delphi programmers again, let me know how much "IDE schock" I'm in for when using WPF as opposed to WinForms, especially when it comes to debugger support. Any job market comments updated for 2011 would be appreciated too. -- roschler

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• WPF vs. WinForms - a Delphi programmer's perspective?

  - by Robert Oschler

  Hello all. I have read most of the major threads on WPF vs. WinForms and I find myself stuck in the unfortunate ambivalence you can fall into when deciding between the tried and true previous tech (Winforms), and it's successor (WPF). I am a veteran Delphi programmer of many years that is finally making the jump to C#. My fellow Delphi programmers out there will understand that I am excited to know that Anders Hejlsberg, of Delphi fame, was the architect behind C#. I have a strong addiction to Delphi's VCL custom components, especially those involved in making multi-step Wizards and components that act as a container for child components. With that background, I am hoping that those of you that switched from Delphi to C# can help me with my WinForms vs. WPF decision for writing my initial applications. Note, I am very impatient when coding and things like full fledged auto-complete and proper debugger support can make or break a project for me, including being able to find readily available information on API features and calls and even more so, workarounds for bugs. The SO threads and comments in the early 2009 date range give me great concern over WPF when it comes to potential frustrations that could mar my C# UI development coding. On the other hand, spending an inordinate amount of time learning an API tech that is, even if it is not abandoned, soon to be replaced (WinForms), is equally troubling and I do find the GPU support in WPF tantalizing. Hence my ambivalence. Since I haven't learned either tech yet I have a rare opportunity to get a fresh start and not have to face the big "unlearning" curve I've seen people mention in various threads when a WinForms programmer makes the move to WPF. On the other hand, if using WPF will just be too frustrating or have other major negative consequences for an impatient RAD developer like myself, then I'll just stick with WinForms until WPF reaches the same level of support and ease of use. To give you a concrete example into my psychology as a programmer, I used VB and subsequently Delphi to completely avoid altogether the very real pain of coding with MFC, a Windows UI library that many developers suffered through while developing early Windows apps. I have never regretted my luck in avoiding MFC. It would also be comforting to know if Anders Hejlsberg had a hand in the architecture of WPF and/or WinForms, and if there are any disparities in the creative vision and ease of use embodied in either code base. Finally, for the Delphi programmers again, let me know how much "IDE schock" I'm in for when using WPF as opposed to WinForms, especially when it comes to debugger support. Any job market comments updated for 2011 would be appreciated too. -- roschler

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• Protecting a WebCenter app with OAM 11g - the Webcenter side

  - by Martin Deh

  Recently, there was a customer requirment to enable a WebCenter custom portal application to have multiple login-type pages and have the authentication be handle through Oracle Access Manager (OAM) As my security colleagues would tell me, this is fully supported through OAM.  Basically, all that would have to be done is to define in OAM individual resources (directories, URLS , .etc) that needed to be secured. Once that was done, OAM would handle the rest and the user would typically then be prompted by a login page, which was provided by OAM.  I am not going to discuss talking about OAM security in this blog.  In addition, my colleague Chris Johnson (ATEAM security) has already blogged his side of the story here:  http://fusionsecurity.blogspot.com/2012/06/protecting-webcenter-app-with-oam-11g.html .  What I am going to cover is what was done on the WebCenter/ADF side of things. In the test application, basically the structure of pages defined in the pages.xml are as follows:  In this screenshot, notice that "Delegated Security" has been selected, and of the absence for the anonymous-role for the "secured" page (A - B is the same)  This essentially in the WebCenter world means that each of these pages are protected, and only accessible by those define by the applications "role".  For more information on how WebCenter handles security, which by the way extends from ADF security, please refer to the documentation.  The (default) navigation model was configured.  You can see that with this set up, a user will be able to view the "links", where the links define navigation to the respective page:   Note from this dialog, you could also set some security on each link via the "visible" property.  However, the recommended best practice is to set the permissions through the page hierarchy (pages.xml).  Now based on this set up, the expected behavior is that I could only see the link for secured A page only if I was already authenticated (logged in).  But, this is not the use case of the requirement, since any user (anonymous) should be able to view (and click on the link).  So how is this accomplished?  There is now a patch that enables this.  In addition, the portal application's web.xml will need an additional context parameter: <context-param>     <param-name>oracle.webcenter.navigationframework.SECURITY_LEVEL</param-name>     <param-value>public</param-value>  </context-param>  As Chris mentions in his part of the blog, the code that is responsible for displaying the "links" is based upon the retrieval of the navigation model "node" prettyURL.  The prettyURL is a generated URL that also includes the adf.ctrl-state token, which is very important to the ADF framework runtime.  URLs that are void of this token, get new tokens from the ADF runtime.  This can lead to potential memory issues.  <af:forEach var="node" varStatus="vs"    items="#{navigationContext.defaultNavigationModel.listModel['startNode=/,includeStartNode=false']}">                 <af:spacer width="10" height="10" id="s1"/>                 <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl2" layout="vertical"                                      inlineStyle="border:blue solid 1px">                   <af:goLink id="pt_gl1" text="#{node.title}"                              destination="#{node.goLinkPrettyUrl}"                              targetFrame="#{node.attributes['Target']}"                              inlineStyle="font-size:large;#{node.selected ? 'font-weight:bold;' : ''}"/>                   <af:spacer width="10" height="10" id="s2"/>                   <af:outputText value="#{node.goLinkPrettyUrl}" id="ot2"                                  inlineStyle="font-size:medium; font-weight:bold;"/>                 </af:panelGroupLayout>               </af:forEach>  So now that the links are visible to all, clicking on a secure link will be intercepted by OAM.  Since the OAM can also configure in the Authentication Scheme, the challenging URL (the login page(s)) can also come from anywhere.  In this case the each login page have been defined in the custom portal application.  This was another requirement as well, since this login page also needed to have ADF based content.  This would not be possible if the login page came from OAM.  The following is the example login page: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1"           xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"           xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"           xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich">   <jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>   <f:view>     <af:document title="Settings" id="d1">       <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" layout="vertical"/>       <af:outputText value="LOGIN FORM FOR A" id="ot1"/>       <form id="loginform" name="loginform" method="POST"             action="XXXXXXXX:14100/oam/server/auth_cred_submit">         <table>           <tr>             <td align="right">username:</td>             <td align="left">               <input name="username" type="text"/>             </td>           </tr>                      <tr>             <td align="right">password:</td>             <td align="left">               <input name="password" type="password"/>             </td>           </tr>                      <tr>             <td colspan="2" align="center">               <input value=" login " type="submit"/>             </td>           </tr>         </table>         <input name="request_id" type="hidden" value="${param['request_id']}"                id="itsss"/>       </form>     </af:document>   </f:view> </jsp:root> As you can see the code is pretty straight forward.  The most important section is in the form tag, where the submit is a POST to the OAM server.  This example page is mostly HTML, however, it is valid to have adf tags mixed in as well.  As a side note, this solution is really to tailored for a specific requirement.  Normally, there would be only one login page (or dialog/popup), and the OAM challenge resource would be /adfAuthentication.  This maps to the adfAuthentication servlet.  Please see the documentation for more about ADF security here. 

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• Objective-C or C++ for iOS games?

  - by Martin Wickman

  I'm pretty confident programming in Objective-C and C++, but I find Objective-C to be somewhat easier to use and more flexible and dynamic in nature. What would be the pros and cons when using C++ instead of Obj-C for writing games in iOS? Or rather, are there any known problems with using Obj-C as compared to C++? For instance, I suspect there might be performance issues with Obj-C compared to code written in C/C++.

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• Messing with the Team

  - by Robert May

  Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be.  Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team.  If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs.  Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you.  Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration.  First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope.  To do this, they’ll tell the team what functionality that they want to see in a feature.  Then, after the feature is developed, the Product Owner will decide that they don’t really like how the functionality behaves.  To change it, rather than creating a new story, they’ll add a defect.  The functionality is correct, as designed, but the Product Owner doesn’t like it.  By creating the defect, the Product Owner destroys the trust that the team has of the product owner.  They may not be able to count the story, because the Product Owner changed the story in the iteration, and the team then ends up looking like they have low velocity for something over which they have no control.  This is bad.  One way to deal with this is to add “Product Owner Time” to the iteration.  This will slow the velocity, but then the ScrumMaster can tell stake holders that this time is strictly in place to deal with bad behavior of the Product Owner. Another mechanism often used to inject Scope is the concept of directed development.  Outside of planning, stand-ups, or any other meeting, the Product Owner will take a developer aside and ask them to complete a task for them.  This is bad!  The team should be allocating all of their time to development.  If the Product Owner asks for a favor, then time that would normally be used for development will be used for a pet project of the Product Owner and the team will not get credit for this work.  Selfish product owners do this, and I typically see people who were “managers” do this behavior.  Authoritarian command and control development environments also see this happen.  The best thing that can happen is for the team member to report the issue to the ScrumMaster and the ScrumMaster to get very aggressive with management and the Product Owner to try and stop the behavior.  This may result in the ScrumMaster being fired, but if the behavior continues, Scrum is doomed.  This problem is especially bad in cases where the team member’s direct supervisor is the Product Owner.  I don’t recommend that the Product Owner or ScrumMaster have a direct report relationship with team members, since team members need the ability to say no.  To work around this issue, team members need to say no.  If that fails, team members need to add extra time to the iteration to deal with the scope creep injection and accept the lower velocity. As discussed above, another mechanism for injecting scope is by changing acceptance tests after the work is complete.  This is similar to adding defects to change scope and is bad.  To get around, add time for Product Owner uncertainty to the iteration and make sure that stakeholders are aware of the need to add this time because of the Product Owner. Refusing to Prioritize Refusing to prioritize causes chaos for the team.  From the team’s perspective, things that are not important will be worked on while things that the team knows are vital will be ignored.  A poor Product Owner will often pick the stories for the iteration on a whim.  This leads to the team working on many different aspects of the product and results in a lower velocity, since each iteration the team must switch context to the new area of development. The team will also experience confusion about priorities.  In one iteration, Feature X was the highest priority and had to be done.  Then, the following iteration, even though parts of Feature X still need to be completed, no stories to address them will be in the iteration.  However, three iterations later, Feature X will again become high priority. This will cause the team to not trust the Product Owner, and eventually, they’ll stop caring about the features they implement.  They won’t know what is important, so to insulate themselves from the ever changing chaos, they’ll become apathetic to all features.  Team members are some of the most creative people in a company.  By losing their engagement, the company is going to have a substandard product because the passion for the product won’t be in the team. Other signs that the Product Owner refuses to prioritize is that no one outside of the product owner will be consulted on priorities.  Additionally, the product, release, and iteration backlogs will be weak or non-existent. Dealing with this issue is not easy.  This really isn’t something the team can fix, short of taking over the role of Product Owner themselves.  An appeal to the stake holders might work, but only if the Product Owner isn’t a “manager” themselves.  The ScrumMaster needs to protect the team and do what they can to either get the Product Owner to prioritize or have the Product Owner replaced. Managing the Team A Product Owner that is also the “boss” of team members is a Scrum team that is waiting to fail.  If your boss tells you to do something, failing to do that something can cause you to be fired.  The team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner NO.  If the product owner introduces scope creep, the team has a responsibility to tell the Product Owner no.  If the Product Owner tries to get the team to commit to more than they can accomplish in an iteration, the team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner no. If the Product Owner is your boss and determines your pay increases, you’re probably not going to ever tell them no, and Scrum will likely fail.  The team can’t do much in this situation. Another aspect of “managing the team” that often happens is the Product Owner tries to tell the team how to develop the stories that are in the iteration.  This is one reason why I recommend that Product Owners are NOT technical people.  That way, the team can come up with the tasks that are needed to accomplish the stories and the Product Owner won’t know better.  If the Product Owner is technical, the ScrumMaster will need to take great care to protect the team from the ScrumMaster changing how the team thinks they need to implement the stories. Product Owners can also try to manage the team by their body language.  If the team says a task is going to take 6 hours to complete, and the Product Owner disagrees, they will use some kind of sour body language to indicate this disagreement.  In weak teams, this may cause the team to revise their estimate down, which will result in them taking longer than estimated and may result in them missing the iteration.  The ScrumMaster will need to make sure that the Product Owner doesn’t send such messages and that the team ignores them and estimates what they REALLY think it will take to complete the tasks.  Forcing the team to deal with such items in the retrospective can be helpful. Absenteeism The team is completely dependent upon the Product Owner to develop features for the customer.  The Product Owner IS the voice of the customer and without them, the team will lack direction.  Being the Product Owner is a full time job!  If the Product Owner cannot dedicate daily time with the team, a different product owner should be found. The Product Owner needs to attend every stand-up, planning meeting, showcase, and retrospective that the team has.  The team also must be able to have instant communication with the product owner.  They must not be required to schedule meetings to speak with their product owner.  The team must be the highest priority task that the Product Owner has. The best way to work around an absent Product Owner is to appoint a new Product Owner in the team.  This person will be responsible for making the decisions that the Product Owner should be making and to act as the liaison to the absent Product Owner.  If the delegate Product Owner doesn’t have authority to make decisions for the team, Scrum will fail.  If the Product Owner is absent, the ScrumMaster should seek to have that Product Owner replaced by someone who has the time and ability to be a real Product Owner. Making it Personal Too often Product Owners will become convinced that their ideas are the ones that matter and that anyone who disagrees is making a personal attack on them.  Remember that Product Owners will inherently be at odds with many people, simply because they have the need to prioritize.  Others will frequently question prioritization because they only see part of the picture that Product Owners face. Product Owners must have a thick skin and think egos.  If they don’t, they tend to make things personal, which causes them to become emotional and causes them to take actions that can destroy the trust that team members have in the Product Owner. If a Product Owner is making things person, the best thing that team members can do is reassure them that its not personal, but be firm about doing what is best for the Company and for the users.  The ScrumMaster should also spend significant time coaching the Product Owner on how to not react emotionally and how to accept criticism without becoming defensive. Conclusion I’m sure there are other ways that a Product Owner can mess with the team, but these are the most common that I’ve seen.  I would encourage all Product Owners to seek to be a good Product Owner.  If you find yourself behaving in any of the bad product owner ways, change your behavior today!  Your team will thank you. Remember, being Product Owner is very difficult!  Product Owner is one of the most difficult roles in Scrum.  However, it can also be one of the most rewarding roles in Scrum, since Product Owners literally see their ideas brought to life on the computer screen.  Product Owners need to be very patient, even in the face of criticism and need to be willing to make tough decisions on priority, but then not become offended when others disagree with those decisions.  Companies should spend the time needed to find the right product owners for their teams.  Doing so will only help the company to write better software. Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• What's In Storage?

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Flies South for Storage Networking Event Storage Networking World (now simply called SNW) is the place you'll find the most-comprehensive education on storage, infrastructure, and the datacenter in the spring of 2010. It's also the place where you'll see Oracle. During the April 12-15 event in Orlando, Florida, the industry's premiere presentations on storage trends and best practices are combined with hands-on labs covering storage management and IP storage. You'll also have the opportunity to learn about Oracle's Sun storage solutions, from Flash and open storage to enterprise disk and tape. Plus, if you stop by booth 207 in the expo hall, you might walk away with a bookish prize: an Amazon Kindle, courtesy of Oracle. Proving, once again, that education can be quite rewarding.

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• Do abstractions have to reduce code readability?

  - by Martin Blore

  A good developer I work with told me recently about some difficulty he had in implementing a feature in some code we had inherited; he said the problem was that the code was difficult to follow. From that, I looked deeper into the product and realised how difficult it was to see the code path. It used so many interfaces and abstract layers, that trying to understand where things began and ended was quite difficult. It got me thinking about the times I had looked at past projects (before I was so aware of clean code principles) and found it extremely difficult to get around in the project, mainly because my code navigation tools would always land me at an interface. It would take a lot of extra effort to find the concrete implementation or where something was wired up in some plugin type architecture. I know some developers strictly turn down dependency injection containers for this very reason. It confuses the path of the software so much that the difficulty of code navigation is exponentially increased. My question is: when a framework or pattern introduces so much overhead like this, is it worth it? Is it a symptom of a poorly implemented pattern? I guess a developer should look to the bigger picture of what that abstractions brings to the project to help them get through the frustration. Usually though, it's difficult to make them see that big picture. I know I've failed to sell the needs of IOC and DI with TDD. For those developers, use of those tools just cramps code readability far too much.

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• Scottish Visual Studio 2010 Launch event with Jason Zander

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Microsoft are hosting a launch event for Visual Studio 2010 on Friday 16th April in Edinburgh. The have managed to convince one of the head honchos from the Visual Studio product team to come to Scotland. With Scott Guthrie last week in Glasgow and now Jason Zander, Global General Manager for Visual Studio will be arriving in Edinburgh for the Launch event. There will be two speakers for the event, Jason will be up first and will be doing a session on Windows, Web, Cloud and Windows Phone 7 development with Visual Studio 2010. Second up is Giles Davis the UK’s Technical Specialist for Visual Studio ALM (formally Visual Studio Team System) who will be introducing the new Visual Studio 2010 Developer and tester collaboration features. LAUNCH AGENDA: 9.30am – 10.00am Arrival 10.00am - 11.30am Keynote & Q&A - Jason Zander, Global GM for Visual Studio 11.30am - 12.00pm Break 12.00pm - 1.00pm Developer & Tester Collaboration with Visual Studio 2010 - Giles Davies, Technical Specialist 1.00pm - 1.30pm Lunch DATE:              Friday, 16th April 2010 LOCATION: Microsoft Edinburgh, Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG I think Jason will be hanging out for the afternoon to answer questions and meet everyone. f you would like to attend, please email Nathan Davies on [email protected] with your name, company and email address   Technorati Tags: VS2010,TFS2010,Visual Studio,Visual Studio 2010

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• How can I sync with an iPod Nano 6G?

  - by Martin

  I'm having no luck at all with this iPod Nano. I've tried the following software: Banshee - The iPod shows up and files seem to be copied, but they don't show up on the iPod. Rhythmbox - Same as Banshee. Claims to sync but no files available on the iPod gPodder - At first it wouldn't even recognize the device even though I set the mount point and device type. After syncing one file to the iPod from iTunes on my mac it now behaves as Banshee and Rythmbox. gtkpod - Again: Copies the files but they are inacessible on the iPod. Hipo - Doesn't even recognize the iPod Amarok - What is this, I don't even... So to summarize: After some fiddling I can get most of these apps to recognize the iPod and copy files to it, but they are not accessible on the iPod which sort of defeats the whole purpose. Help me out here. My continued harmonic love life depends on it. (Yes, it's the girlfriends iPod and laptop)

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• Stopping by the Store

  - by [email protected]

  Registrants Get Online Savings on Oracle Products Have you heard about the Oracle Store? It's the one-stop online shop for buying Oracle software and support at significant savings. Better yet, when you register for Oracle OpenWorld 2010 by April 30, you can get an additional 10% off your next purchase. The 10% discount applies to a one-time "click and buy" checkout, so load up as many items as you can. To get started, you'll need to visit the Oracle OpenWorld registration page to get more information about the promotion, including the promo code and link. It's another great way to turn your early bird registration into a long-term gain for your organization.

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