Free (reg-ware) ebook of the day - “Scrum and XP from the Trenches”

InfoQ - Scrum and XP from the Trenches

 

“The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year's time.

…

This book includes:

• Practical tips and tricks for most Scrum and XP practices
• Typical pitfalls and how they were addressed
• Diagrams and photos illustrating day-to-day work
• Testing and test-driven development
• Scaling and coordinating multiple teams
• Dealing with resistance from inside and outside the team
• Planning and time estimation techniques
• Forwards by Jeff Sutherland and Mike Cohn

…”

Ah… some Scrum reading material for the weekend… ;)

(via John Hines' Code Blog - Getting Started with Scrum)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Scrum Resources

Still trying to wrap your head around Team Foundation Server workspaces? Here’s a quick primer…

Continuously Integrating - Workspaces in Team Foundation Server - Part 1

“One of the reasons they can do this is because they are somewhat out of sight, out of mind and can be created without any intervention of the user.

First a primer on what they are and how they work. A workspace represents a user (Larry) working on a specific computer (Workstation1) with a selection of files from Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC), maybe it is all of the files stored in the “BigApplication” project ($BigApplication), that are copied to my workstation in a specific location, perhaps to D:\DevelopmentProjects\BigApplication. This data represents four distinct pieces of information; who, what workstation, which server files/directories, where are the server files mapped to on the workstation.

All of this information is stored on the Team Foundation Server.

When a user first connects to TFVC and gets files from the server to their workstation the user is asked where to copy the files on the workstation. This creates the “which” and “where” elements of the four pieces of information, by simply connecting to TFS the user and workstation (“who” and “what”) are identified to the server. Once the user has told TFS where to copy the files TFS automatically creates a workspace with the relevant information. Using the example above I would have a workspace with the following information:

…

In my next post on this subject I will look at managing workspaces from the command line as well as some recommended best practices.”

I don’t know what it was (probably a brain patterns built from using MS Delta –> SourceSafe) but TFS Work Spaces was  one of the harder things for me to “get” with TFS.

In the above post, Larry has put together a nice primer and introduction to TFS workspaces. What I liked about it was that it went beyond “This is a workspace… this is how you create one… etc” and toward more real world like multiple developer interactions with an application beyond “Hello world”

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Team Foundation Server Workspaces 101

Remote Desktop/Terminal Services and the Highly Graphical Application – Tips and Reg Tweaks

Ask the Performance Team - Terminal Services and Graphically Intensive Applications

“Hello AskPerf, my name is Subheet Rastogi and I am a Technical Lead on the Performance team in Bangalore.  Today, we’re going to take a quick look at issues that typically arise when using graphic intensive applications or media streaming in a Remote Desktop Session.  Some common examples where you might encounter issues in an RDP session include Java applets embedded into web pages, Adobe Breeze, CAD-type programs and of course – playing games.  Why?  Because RDP was oroginally designed to flush the video frame buffer to the client about once every 100 milliseconds.  While this is fine for most Windows GDI applications, graphic intensive applications, 3D applications and applications requiring audio / video synchronization don’t fare so well.  With respect to streaming media in particular, RDP is only meant to cache the bitmap files (compressed) not the audio which is uncompressed over the wire.

…

Regardless of whether or not you are using graphic intensive applications or streaming media across RDP, there are some things that you can do that may provide some performance benefits in your environment:

…”

A few cool tips, tricks and reg tweaks to help when doing Presentation Virtualization (i.e. Remote Desktop/Terminal Services) with a "graphically intensive” application.

Been doing RD for a while and I think the reg tweaks were news to me, so well worth a capture for future reference.

“One Billion” Bytes of SQL Server 2008 Training PPTX’s, Videos, Hands on Lab’s and VPC’s, for the Dev, BI and IT crowds (reg-ware)

Dave does Data - SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart Materials – very detailed training, now FREE to download.

“This post is a pointer to a lot of in-depth training on SQL 2008. It includes Virtual PC’s with Demo Scripts, Lab Exercises & a lot of PowerPoint's with notes.

To get access to it all click here SQL Server 2008 Training. It is free but you do need to register as helps us to cost justify developing this type of material.

What is it?

As SQL 2008 was being developed. The team at corp ran a number of workshops with the bigger S/W development companies (Independent S/W Vendors (ISV’s)). It was intended to help them optimise their product for the new platform & to expose them to the new features they may be able to use to gain a competitive advantage.

This material has a lot of very useful detail on the changes.

To help you decide if it is relevant to you, I’ve listed, below, the Sessions that we ran over several days.

…”

Here’s one of the Track pages;

Here’s about a metric ton of cool SQL Server 2008 Training materials, VPC’s, videos, presentations and such… All in all, videos, VPC’s, etc, I’d say about 15-20GB’ish of data and materials.

One beef I have is that the VPC’s are configured in such a way as to be a major pain to download (even with FDM). I don’t mind major gigs to download, but I do hate having to download one rar that’s broken into 62 download pieces (and again there’s no simple way that I can see to feed them all to FDM… but I could be having a brain cramp too ;)

Mocking introduction for the Discerning Dev Dude - Spaghetti Code Talks Mocking with Donn Felker

Spaghetti Code Podcasts - Donn Felker Talks Mocking

“Spaghetti Code Talks with Donn Felker about how developers can use mocking in their unit tests and some of the approaches to being successful.

…”

Mocking/Isolation is something I’m interested in yet I’ve not made the leap. Why? Well I understood the concept and reason (and like it) but still felt I wasn’t really “getting it”.

After listening to this cool cast, the light has begun to come on (you know how those CFC’s take a while to light… ;)

If you’re interested in mocking and want to get a feel for just what it’s about, all in 45 minutes or less, check out this podcast.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Isolation Framework, are you Mocking me?
Mocking is good thing… when unit testing at least – Intro to Mocking

More MS Press Free eBooks (available for a short time only) - “Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion (Pro—Administrator's Companion)” & “Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!”

Born to Learn - Free E-book Offer Is Back for April – April 15-22

“…

The two books for April are:

• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion (Pro—Administrator's Companion) by Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford
• Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! by Patrice Pelland

…”

 

Because it’s been well DAYS since I’ve blogged about a free ebook… ;)

These books are available now, a day earlier than expected. Remember they will only be available for a few days, so get them while you can.

From a blank canvas to cool icon, a Expression Studio tutorial that even I can follow… (Greg != Graphic Designer)

Designing for .NET - Creating Great Looking Icons with Expression Studio

“Before I start this tutorial, I would just say that there are a lot of aspects to consider when creating great user interface elements and iconography. I will  walk through an example in creating a standard icon using Expression Design. However before doing so I have compiled a list of reference links that I believe you should spend the time reading through and understanding. It is also necessary to have some historic perspective on icon design in the past and how it applied to different versions of operating systems.

…

Where to start…

Let’s look at some design tenants that were introduced with Windows XP via the XP user experience team and later expanded with Windows Vista..

• The angle and perspective should be equal between the images (and objects within the image)
• Edges and corners of objects are soft and slightly rounded
• Light source is coming from the upper left-hand corner
• The images should have a drop shadow
• Outlines provide definition, objects should be drawn in a stroke pen of sufficient thickness that outlines the objects.
• Use colors from the primary icon color palette (not such a requirement anymore at least inside of a WPF or Silverlight application), more related to backward compatibility with older versions of Windows and windows OS icons.)
• The icon color palette is luckily fully documented as a set of 31 RGB color specifications
• System Icons need to be provided in standard system sizes and palette colors (see the MSDN article I referred to above).

Expression Design

Let’s open up Expression Design and create some layers..

 

…

…

…

Anyway that’s my tutorial on creating ICONS. With a little background and some really quick and easy tools you can have top notch UI elements quite quickly..”

I’d love to be able to craft/design graphic’s, but it just doesn’t click for me. Funny how the mind works. So anyway, any time I find a cool tutorial I like to capture it and work through them, just to see if it’s the spark I need.

Also make sure you click through as Don has included a number of links to related and like resources.

 

(via Visual Studio Hacks - Visual Studio Links #111)