Laurent Kempé

Attending “Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft” PDC2008 Pre-Conference Session

I just registered online to PDC2008 and will attend the following Pre-Conference session:

Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft

Presenter(s): Mary Poppendieck, Grigori Melnik

Agile development is here! During this all-day agile session Mary Poppendieck, author of "Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit" will share profound insights that will optimize your agile processes. The session will focus on best practices and advice to avoid the most common pitfalls for teams practicing or moving towards agile. During the second half of the session, Grigori Melnik, Technical Program Manager in Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, will share the lessons learned his team has acquired over many, many agile projects. The session will close with a panel - including Mary, Grigori, and a few guest speakers - for you to ask your tough questions around agile development.

About the presenter(s):

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both product manager and department manager. After Mary left the corporate world in 1998, she found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book "Lean Software Development” to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, "Implementing Lean Software Development.” A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Grigori Melnik is a Senior Product Planner in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft, leading the Process & Engineering focus area. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, coach and educator with 15+ years of meaningful industrial and research experience. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, software testing and test automation, and software economics. Prior industrial engagements include Microsoft Canada Money and SmallBiz portals, Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal, and The Canadian Agile Network - Le Réseau Agile Canadien. Grigori is an agile enthusiast who has been involved with the agile community since 2000. He is a regular contributor and speaker to software engineering conferences and workshops around the world. Grigori is the Program Chair of the Agile 2008 conference and a member of the IEEE Software Advisory board.

Some month ago I was asked at Innoveo Solutions to introduce some agile project management in the form of Scrum.

So I am delighted to have the opportunity to attend such a full day of Pre-Conference with Mary Poppendieck on this topic.

WCF Add Service Reference issue with Visual Studio 2008 SP1

The other day I faced a strange issue when I wanted to add a service reference to the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool. The code generated wasn’t compiling with errors located in the file Reference.cs.

Drilling down the issue I figured out that the default namespace, TechHeadBrothers.Word, was the issue. It was just added at some place and at other not.

I made then a quick test with another assembly which had no dot in it’s name. That’s was it! The issue was the dot into the Assembly name, Default namespace.

Don’t use . in the name of your Assembly name, Default namespace to get back to normal state, weird!

Giving more memory to Web Performance 3.4 while load testing

First do not trust their documentation! The launch anywhere (lax) file change doesn’t make it.

Do it by your own, with such a command:

"C:\Program Files\Web Performance Suite 3.4\webperformance.exe" -vm "C:\Program Files\Web Performance Suite 3.4\jre\bin\javaw.exe" -vmargs -Xmx512M -Xms512M -jar "C:\Program Files\Web Performance Suite 3.4\startup.jar" -os win32 -ws win32 -arch x86

Thanks Robert for the support.

Video of Tech Head Brothers new authoring tool based on Word 2007

In the following video I present the different features of the new authoring tool for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

First you will see the use of ClickOnce to enable easy installation on the author computer. This will also allow an easy update scenario. A great plus compared to the past.

Then you will see the Word 2007 template using to author the content of an article. It shows:

1. Definition of the Title
2. Definition of the Description
3. Definition of the Keywords
4. Writing of the content of a section of content with bold, italic, list, hyperlink
5. Adding some sample code directly copied from Visual Studio 2008
6. Inserting sample code in a zip
7. Adding a picture captured using SnagIt yo the article
8. Offline preview in Internet Explorer
9. Posting to the Tech Head Brothers web site with Tags selection
10. Online preview of the posted content

Enjoy the video! (Without sound, I couldn’t find a micro at home :()

Meet us at the PDC 2008

I really look forward to see where will head Live Mesh. Some year’s ago I was impressed (and I am not that often impressed) by an application called Groove. Groove is an application, but less known is that it is also a platform on top of which you could develop! It was already an initiative of Ray Ozzie. At that time I enjoyed seeing a Windows application exposing Web Services on your local machine to program against, nice idea. With Live Mesh it is a clear next step. And now thanks to Silverlight your applications can be hosted on your notebook but also on the cloud, so there will be accessible from any device with Internet access. I already have an idea for one application to explore this new architecture.

I look forward to learn more about Cloud Services, Velocity, Oslo, Parallelism, the new version of Workflow… It will be an intensive week!

I hope to see the launch of Silverlight for mobile device, the Live Mesh client for mobile device! And why not a synchronization extension for Zune using Live Mesh (this would be hot !)

If I find the time to finalize my project before October 17, I will also try to participate to the Show Off contest!

I think we might have also a good time at the Tuesday evening party in Universal Studios Hollywood!

And as I am a fan of Mexican food the last post on the PDC blog was really good for me! L.A. Insights: Mexican Food, I hope to have some time to experience some of those different places!

New step in my authoring tool using Word 2007

This evening I took the time to implement a new step on the new version of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

Now I am able to write an article in Word 2007 and post it using Web Services.

The next picture is the result of posting from Word 2007 on the web site using Web Services:

Here is how it looks like in Word:

To insert some source code sample as you can see on the Word 2007 picture or the web site, it is really easy. Go in Visual Studio, copy the code you want in the clipboard. Switch to Word 2007, then use the Source Code button:

To insert a picture, either use Windows Explorer to copy a file into the clipboard and paste it into the Word 2007 document, or use a tool like SnagIt from TechSmith (Thanks for the license by the way!!), make a screen shot, copy result into the clipboard and paste into Word 2007.

Is that easy!

This tool will make the authoring process on Tech Head Brothers so easy.