DSN Query Analyzer

The new office likes FileMaker...  No, seriously, they actually like it.  And for what they use it for, I don't really blame them. 

It didn't take long before I needed to query some data from one of the FileMaker databases.  Now, there are ways to do this from inside FileMaker, but I just wanted to run a simple query. 

Enter the DSN Query Analyzer.  It is a lightweight query analyzer clone that connects to the DSN connections set up on your machine.  It was written by a guy in the Netherlands.  You can check out his website, if you can speak the language.

One note of importance...  System DSN's do not save login information.  That would be a gigantic security hole.  So when you give the analyzer the name of the DSN to point to, you have to also pass in the login information.  Here is the syntax:

MyDSNName;UIS=username;Pwd=password

Sustainable Pace

One of the tenants of Agile development is the concept of "Sustainable Pace".  Let me quote the Agile Manifesto:

"Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."

It turns out that this is just vague enough to leave it open to a wide array of interpretations. 

Many, believe that this means instituting the "40 Hour Work Week", where the team limits the amount of work that it will take on so that no one works more than forty hours per week.  Personally, I think that this is an ideal that is worth working toward, but is usually unachievable in the real world.  Part of "Sustainable Pace" isn't about how much you work, its about the ability to deliver functionality on a regular basis.  Forty hours may not be enough time to pull that off.

I have seen several presenters talk about sprinting and resting.  I like this approach.  Your team would work hard for a few weeks, usually working more than 40 hours in a week, and then have an "off" week.  This doesn't mean that they get a vacation once a month.  It means that they get a week where they aren't 100% committed to the iteration and can spend time on side projects to break the monotony of it all.  Apparently, this works for many teams.  I'd think that you would need a lot of management support for this kind of thing, not to mention the personal discipline to come off the iteration.   It is important that all employees have the time and backing for personal development.  That's the best way for a company to grow in its abilities and increase the value of its employees.

Agile Practices That are Usually Valuable

Our team is starting to look at the principles of Agile development and it won't be long before we get into the practices.  So I thought that I would share some of the knowledge that Steve McConnell bestowed upon me in his keynote address at the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Summit last week.

Steve McConnell's company Construx, has generated a report that relays their experiences with Agile practices.  The results not only come from their experience consulting and training clients ("approximately 1000 companies in the past 5 years"), but also from other published industry reports.  Steve presented the report by breaking down the practices into 3 categories:

Agile practices that are usually valuable

• Short Release Cycles
• Highly Interactive Release Planning
• Timebox Development
• Empowered, Small, Cross-Functional Teams'
• Involvement of Active Management
• Coding Standards
• Frequent Integration and Test
• Automated Regression Tests
• Retrospectives at End of Each Release

Agile practices that have been hit or miss

• Customer-Provided Acceptance Tests
• Daily Stand-up Meetings
• Simple Design
• Test-First Development
• 40-Hour Work Week

Agile practices that tend to be problematic

• System Metaphor
• On-Site Customer
• Collective Code Ownership
• Pair Programming
• Refactoring

I can see at least one practice that my department is trending toward in the "Problematic" list.  This could be "problematic" going forward. :)

Anyway, I encourage you to post your reactions to this list via the comments.  I'd like to know what experiences you guys have had with these practices. Also, if you would like more information about their reasoning for placing a certain practice into a certain category, I'd be happy to oblige.

Microsoft Patterns and Practices Conference - Day Five

The last day of the conference was labeled "Applications".  This, of course, was a pretty loose title.  However, I think that this was one of my favorite days.

Keynote - Scott Hanselman

Hanselman delivers once again.  This wasn't a technology related keynote.  Instead Scott discussed how he came to be employed by Microsoft.  There must have been a lot of money involved. 

Future of patterns & practices - Rick Maguire

Rick is "the man" when it comes to the Pattern's and Practices Group, "the trusted source of application development guidance for the Microsoft platform".  Rick gave a high level overview of where the group was heading in the future.  Here are their goals for the future:

• Simplify the Microsoft Application Platform
• Provide solutions/guidance to your problems
• Help you learn and grow

Evolving Client Architecture - Billy Hollis

Billy Hollis gave an interesting talk on how the types of things that we are developing is changing.  He showed that the move to SOA will force us to become better UI designers.  Right now, if our UI sucks, the users don't have a lot of choice except to use it.  In the future, some one else could build a better one on top of an exposed service.  This was a good set up for his later talk about software complexity.

Fresh Cracked CAB - Ward Bell

Ward reminds me of someone that I used to work with.  It was a good presentation on Microsoft's Composite UI Application Block (CAB), which is a windows smart client technology.  A lot of the of patterns could be converted to ASP.NET with a little work.  Ward basically showed how to use one of Microsoft's application blocks to quickly build and extend a window smart client.

Software Complexity - Billy Hollis

Billy Hollis is my new hero.  He shared some of his "outside the box" thoughts on software complexity and the need for simplicity in an increasingly complex technological landscape.  He boldly asserted that instead of making our lives simpler, Microsoft is killing us with complexity as it releases more and more technologies at a pace that no one can keep up with.  Kudos to the Microsoft employees, who had several chances to tackle him and drag him off the stage, yet some how kept their composure.  The talk can really be summed up by Billy's "Simplicity Manifesto V1.0":

• Stop adding features
• Make help helpful
• Fix the bugs
• CRUD for free
• Hide the plumbing
• Get better names

Microsoft Patterns and Practices Conference - Day Four

Today's topic was "Software Factories", but it should have been titled "A bunch of stuff that you'll need VSTS to use".

Keynote - Scott Hanselman

Scott delivered a great presentation on the MVC framework that Microsoft is currently working on.  He went over the plusses of using the framework, like how it provides for clean separation of concerns and how it is extensible and pluggable. We even got a chance to see it in action in Visual Studio.  The framework won't require VSTS and will probably become a very handy development tool.

Domain-Specific Development with VS DSL Tools - Gareth Jones

This talk was about how to build a domain specific language using the graphical modeler in Visual Studio.  What it really boils down to is "How to generate a Modeling Language, using the graphical modeling language in VSTS."

Patterns of Software Factories - Wojtek Kozaczynski

Wojtek went through the Software Factories that the Patterns & Practices group has released and reported some of the common patterns that he found.  Kind of dry stuff that I won't be using anytime soon.

Building Services...Service Factory: Modeling Edition - Bob Brumfield, Ade Miller

Here, we were shown how to use a software factory to generate a modeler that will then generate some code.  Once again, this is a VSTS thing.

Web Client Guidance: Web Client Software Factory - Michael Puleio, Chris Tavares & Blaine Wastell

This was a good discussion of the P&P group's Web Client Guidance.  I've not before seen a simpler and easier to understand diagram that showed the difference between the Model View Presenter pattern and the Model View Controller pattern.  You don't need VSTS to use the guidance bits.  Expect more blog posts about this one.

Using Team Factories - David Trowbridge

Yet another Team System oriented talk.

Build your own Software Factory - Wojtek Kozaczynski, Bob Brumfield, Ade Miller

I've got to admit that this talk was way over my head.  From what I gathered, basically went through what it took to generate the software factories that they have released.  I guess there's a reason that they make the big bucks.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and will be dedicated to "Applications".  Scott Hanselman will give another keynote.

Microsoft Patterns and Practices Conference - Day Three

Today's theme was "Development", but I'm not really sure that was what we talked about for most of the day.  There were some good talks, here's more about them:

Keynote - John Lam

John Lam's presentation, for the most part, centered around IronRuby.  He ran a good code demo inside the ironruby version of irb, on mono, in a linux vm on his mac.  I know, its weird to see a Microsoft employee working off a Mac. But John was not the only presenter doing so.  There was an especially exciting demo of using Ruby to dynamically generate Silverlight objects.  Currently, this is hard to do in C#.  I think that it is really great that IronRuby is a fully open source project that accepts contributions from outside developers.  The team uses Subversion for the code repository and hosts the bits on RubyForge.

The Right Tools for the Right Job - Rocky Lhotka

Rocky started off by reminding us that Object-Oriented Design isn't dead.  He gave a in depth comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of OO, SOA, and Workflow design.  It was really enlightening to see his take that your can see aspects of OOP in all of these design architectures. 

Model Based Design - David Trowbridge

This turned out to be a demonstration of how to use the class builder, and some new modeling interfaces, to generate code.  It's a shame that we will need Team System Architecure edition to actualize any of the examples.  Maybe our team can win the lottery one day.

Dependency Injection Frameworks - Peter Provost, Scott Densmore

Have you ever wanted to know how to roll your own Dependency Injection into your application?  I thought I did.  Sure, it was very interesting.  However, if they were pitching it for my application, I'd have gone out and bought a license for typemock by the second example.  Let's just say there is a lot of work that Typemock(or other mocking frameworks) do for you automatically.

Designing for Workflow - Ted Neward

Once again, Ted delivers a great presentation, full of poignant wit.  Ted makes the argument that Workflow, as we know it in the realm of recent Microsoft tools, hasn't really been around long enough for us to declare any best practices.  Of course he offers his point of view, which left no time for the audience to chime in.

Panel: The Future of Design Patterns - Dragos Manolescu, Wojtek Kozaczynski, Ade Miller, Jason Hogg

This was strange.  They gave the guys on the panel toy guns that shot little foam discs so they could shoot each other when they were in disagreement.  They then discussed the failure of a patterns web site and debated whether we should be generating more documentation and collaboration around patterns or whether we should just build them into development tools.  I like the gun idea, no pattern or practice would truly be complete without firearms.  I think I'll try it out at our next team meeting.

EntLib Devolved - Scott Densmore

EntLib is short for Enterprise Library. Entlib is a collection of general purpose application blocks addressing enterprise scenarios. For example, there is an application block for logging.  Scott Densmore, one of the developers, gave a quick overview of the blocks and elicited feedback from those that had used it.  I have never used it, but it looks cool.

So, tomorrow's theme is "Software Factories" and the keynote is by Scott Hanselman.  It should be a very interesting day! 

Microsoft Patterns and Practices Conference - Day Two

Today was dedicated to Agile practices and Methodologies.  Here's a rundown of the talks.

Keynote - Steve McConnell

Steve provided a wonderful overview of the Agile methodology.  He went into a lot of detail about the agile practices and relied on his companies experiences to rate them based on how they work in the real world.  For example, short release cycle tend to work very well, while pair programming tends to be problematic. The jet lag hit me pretty hard this morning and Steve is a soft speaker, but it was really interesting.

Agile is more than monkey-see-monkey-do - Peter Provost

First off, Peter Provost is very engaging speaker that highly encourages audience participation.  I highly recommend watching one of his presentations.  This one started as a comparison of two fictitious companies and how they implemented Agile methodology. One with great success and one with terrible tragedy. It then moved onto how teams can figure out how to implement agile practices.  He also spent a good amount of time discussing how to get a team that has strayed back to the agile path.

Empirical Evidence of Agile Methods - Grigori Melnick

Grigori tried to show that there are actually people out there using agile methods.  Apparently, there isn't must documented evidence.  The topic by its very definition is pretty dry.  That's all I have to say about that.

What's new in Rosario process templates? - Alan Riddlhoover

Alan gave an informative, but extremely slow paced presentation on the new features found in the next version of Visual Studio Team System.
It looks like they have a replacement for Caliber that integrates with MS Project.  Our team doesn't have VSTS, so a lot of the stuff that was demo'd won't really matter.

Lessons Learned in Unit Testing - Jim Newkirk

Now this was a good talk.  Jim is one of the original authors of NUnit and has now moved on to run Codeplex. In his talk, Jim relays 7 lessons that he has learned over his 8+ years of doing unit testing.  The lessons are listed below. 

Lesson #1 - Just Do It
Lesson #2 - Write Tests using the 3A Pattern(Arrange, Act, Assert)
Lesson #3 - Keep your tests close
Lesson #4 - Use Alternatives to ExpectedException
Lesson #5 - Small Fixtures
Lesson #6 - Don't use Setup and TearDown
Lesson #7 - Improve Testability with Inversion of Control

Some of the stuff he was talking about seems to go against what I've been learning from the internet and architecture.  I'm hoping to talk with Jim tomorrow to get some more insight.  Expect more in the future.

The Agile Security Development Lifecycle - David LeBlanc

David stressed the importance of considering security from the beginning of a project's SDLC.  He stressed that developers on an agile team need to be educated about security. "If they understand what a security mistake looks like, they are less likely to put it into the code."  He also pointed out how some of the agile practices enhance security.  For example, Peer Programming is not only effective for finding bugs but also for finding security issues.

"Yet Another Agile Talk on Agility" - Peter Provost

Peter ran this talk like an agile project.  There were 4, fifteen minute iterations where the first five minutes where used to gather issues about Agile that the audience was interested in and prioritize them.  The next ten minutes where dedicated to tackling the issues/questions based on their priority.  When the next iteration came around, we were given the ability to add new questions and re-prioritize them with the rest of the open questions.  Peter kept a count down timer running on the big screen to make sure that we stuck to the schedule.  It really drew you into the conversation and was a lot of fun.

 

Tomorrow looks like a good day.  It will be dedicated to development and the keynote speaker will be John Lam of IronPython fame.  Night, night for now kiddies.

Microsoft Patterns and Practices Conference - Day One

All this week, I and a few of my cohorts are attending a Patterns & Practices summit in Redmond.  I'll be giving a breakdown of the sessions this week and will go into more detail in future posts about the topics that I find most interesting.

Here is a quick breakdown of the topics and speakers, each followed by a brief description.

Keynote - Anders Hejlsberg

This wasn't as much a keynote address as it was a LINQ demo.  Anders is awesome and gave a great and detailed demonstration.  You can expect a lot more about this one in future posts.

A Software Patterns Study - Dragos Manolescu

This wasn't what I expected.  Apparently this guy did a survey about Patterns and how much they were used in current enterprises.  It turned out to be a plea for help from the community to help build a modern platform for collaboration on patterns.

Architecture of the Microsoft ESB Guidance - Marty Masznicky

I didn't get a lot from this talk because it was all about extensions for BizTalk, which I have zero experience with.  However, I will give the speaker credit for giving an hour long presentation with gauze stuffed into one of his cheeks.  Don't ask.  Sadly, I couldn't conjecture what ESB stood for until halfway through the presentation when the guy in front of me Googled it.  ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus and provides a way to do a lot of stuff that should have been integrated into Biztalk by default.

Pragmatic Architecture - Ted Neward

Ted is a excellent speaker with a great sense of humor.  He spoke about our need to be able to determine the best architecture for our solutions.  Apparently, not every architecture solution is right for all applications.

Architecting a Scalable Platform - Chris Brown

This was an interesting look at building globally scalable applications.  We're talking things like Amazon.com.  Global level scalability relies on horizontal scaling. 

Grid Security - Jason Hogg

Jason gave a great talk about the Security Policy Assertion Language (SecPAL).  SecPAL was designed to address security for large scale applications, such as computing grids.  The security rules are easily read as English sentences with a restricted grammar.  You can find out more here.

Moving Beyond Industrial Software - Harry Pierson

Harry talked about the Industrial age's influence on modern programming.  Just as the Industrial age has given way to a new information age, so our programming methodologies must give way to something more practical.  The main point of his talk was that things that are simple and empower the users will be the applications of the future.

Well kids, that's all for now.  See you tomorrow.