Microsoft unveiled how we’re going to be building apps for the Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight, Visual Studio, and Expression Blend.
Orville from the Visual Studio Marketing team has blogged a quick walkthrough on what the experience is like (including some screenshots)
http://blogs.msdn.com/orville/archive/2010/03/15/discovering-windows-phone-developer-tools.aspx
ekeepo LLC had the pleasure of building and delivering a sample ASP.NET application for the Amazon Web Services team which uses Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB as a backend for the application. If you’re a Windows/ASP.NET Developer and are trying to figure out what the cloud means for you, download this sample. The opportunity is significant and it’s really simple to get started.
One of my favorite parts of this sample is a ASP.NET Membership implementation using SimpleDB as the backend. Yes, simple concept/idea, but just pretty cool.
Grab the bits at: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=3592
Enjoy!
Using Microsoft Test Manager (which is part of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional) you can run tests inside Microsoft Test Manager and record IntelliTrace (iTrace files) data on the instance of IIS which is running your ASP.NET web site. There’s quite a bit of excitement around the IntelliTrace functionality and this scenario is a big deal when it comes to solving the ‘no repro’ problem when web site testing. You can learn more about Microsoft Test Manager at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385901(VS.100).aspx.
Since I spent quite a bit of time on this on this week, hope this saves you some time:
If you’re capturing IntelliTrace data from Microsoft Test Manager on IIS, make sure to run Microsoft Test Manager as Administrator. MTM needs to be admin to reset IIS in order to capture data from IIS. If you do not run MTM as Administrator, MTM will not provide an error and will not add the iTrace file to the test run.
Happy Friday!
After watching (http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html) Daniel Kahneman, I couldn’t help and wonder about how experience and memory impacts my world of Project Management and Business.
To summarize the talk (which I highly recommend you watch), we have two independent perspectives, the now (experience) and the past (memory), which we use as a measure for a series of feelings. In other words, we feel stuff as a result of both: what is happening now and what happened in the past. What complicates things is that we quickly forget what happened a few minutes ago and are left with the memory which is a subset of the actual event.
It may seem at first like this is splitting hairs, but when I started to think about this from the perspective of teams working together I saw a conflict that arises in business and projects. Goals in projects are often written in the form of “when we’re done with this project we have (insert result here).” These types of goals are written from the ‘memory’ perspective and are results or event oriented. For example, the goal ‘Acquire 3 new customers this month’ says nothing about day 14 of the month and what needs to be done that day to succeed per the defined goal. As Mike Cohn writes (http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/advantages-of-the-as-a-user-i-want-user-story-template) a user story in Agile Software Development is often in the form of “As a <type of user>, I want to <some goal> so that <some reason>”. Both these models are great, they just don’t consider the experience perspective of getting to the result.
On the other hand, the experience perspective is very relevant to the person accomplishing the goal. It’s what makes every day ‘fun’ and has a huge impact on how we spend our time. I’m a huge believer that if something isn’t fun (or at least worth the effort), it’s probably not sustainable.
Kahneman doesn’t make any assertions as to the right amount of experience or memory. He merely states that we should consider both. In software projects, if we omit either of these perspectives we’re doomed. If we’re not satisfying the business objectives or memory perspective, we lose the funding and the reason to solve interesting problems. If we’re not satisfying the experience perspective, we lose the great people that are working on the project who care about interesting problems.
Agile solves this challenge by, on the memory side, defining user stories, and on the experience side, providing the time in a sprint/iteration to implement the functionality to enable a set of user stories. This provides an operating model for the team to implement the user stories. The solution architecture provides the operating environment for the user stories. Both the operating model and the operating environment provide infrastructure for a better experience for the team which increases the probability of a successful project.