Monday April 24th, 5:30 - Agile Vancouver presentation
1177 West Hastings Street (map), Suite 2500
Space is limited, so RSVP's are required (agilevancouver@spc.ca)
1st Hour - Who is Managing Lunch and other parables of Lean Project Management
There are lessons about good project management all around us. There are ways of incorporating Lean ideas in to project management and often we see these ideas in other domains and think of them as just common sense. We are always doing projects in our personal lives. Often we’re better at them than we are at work. Why? David Anderson explores the common everyday ideas that you can pull together to create a coherent Lean project management methodology.
2nd Hour - Feature Driven Development 101
Feature Driven Development is one of the original agile methods. David Anderson will explain the history of Feature Driven Development and its predecessor The Coad Method. Show how it came to represented in the Agile Manifesto, explain the principles and elements of FDD and show some examples from real projects to explain how it works and how it differs from extreme programming and scrum.
Date: Apr 12, 2006 - 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Location: SFU Downtown Campus, 515 West Hastings, Rooms 1400-1410 Main Floor, Vancouver
Registration:
http://www.mollyguard.com/event/26617614 Keith Pleas (Guided Design) will be presenting on the .NET Enterprise Library. Keith is one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and is the Editorial Chair for VSLive 2003. He is also a Contributing Editor to "Visual Studio Magazine", has developed Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith also serves as an advisor to the INETA board and is the liaison for the INETA Speakers Bureau.
Chad Ernst gives you the 13 steps needed to convert your Visual Source Safe (VSS) repository over to Subversion (svn).
Now do it!
Title: What is new in ADO.NET 2.0?
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 5 2006, 7:00 PM [Welcome Time: 6:30 PM]
Location: Building SW5 room 1840, BCIT Burnaby Campus, 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC, V5G 3H2
Sponsors: This event is sponsored by INETA (International .NET Association).
Session Overview:
In this session youll learn what is new in ADO.NET 2.0. Well start off with a review of ADO.NET 1.x and then drill down on each new ADO.NET 2.0 feature. In particular, well review ADO.NET 2.0 support for user-defined types (UDT), asynchronous database operations, XML data types, large value types, snapshot isolation, and new attributes that allow applications to support multiple active result sets (MARS) with SQL Server 2005. Lots of code samples will be provided. Come see what the future of data programming looks like - today!
Speaker:
Carl Prothman is a Microsoft ASP.NET Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He holds a Certified Computer Professional (CCP) from Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP). As an internationally known NET training and lecturer, Carl has spoken at several major conferences such as VSLive, VBITS, TechEd, and also to several local Users groups such as the Seattle .NET Users group and the .NET Developers Association in Redmond, Washington. Carl teaches ADO.NET and ASP.NET over at Bellevue Community College (BCC). He holds a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics (BSAA) degree from the University of Washington. Carl has work for customers such as Microsoft, Boeing, and Rockwell International. For more information, please visit Carl's web site
http://www.CarlProthman.NET. Snacks: Pizza and Pop (sponsored by INETA) will be served at 6:30 PM and the meeting will start at 7:00 PM.
Brace yourself for some great door prizes.
The Vancouver .netBC Users Group is a community organization established on 03/03/03. Our sponsors are Microsoft, BCIT, INETA (
www.ineta.org), Pacific Online, and BCJobs.com. We focus on software development. There are no fees for attending and all are welcome. Please invite anyone you know who might be interested. The users group registration site is located at www.netbc.ca. To unsubscribe, go to www.netbc.ca, login, click on "edit profile", uncheck "Notify me of events" checkbox, then click "Update" button. E-Mail address: members@netbc.ca
So you want to have some sort of funky lights display the status of your builds via CruiseControl.NET. Here is a quick shopping list of the things you will need to pick up.
The first thing that you need to consider is that if your machine has a (physical) serial port or not. My laptop doesn’t (I use it for testing the X10 stuff) so I needed to buy a USB to Serial Port adapter.
Next you need to pick up a few X10 Modules. To review, the signal flow of the X10 signal communication is as follows:
Firecracker (CM17A)->(Radio Frequency)->
Transceiver (TM751)->(Electrical wires)->
Modules (AM466, LM15A, etc.)->
Lights
Here is your shopping list:
1. 
Firecracker module (CM17A, Required). That plugs into the serial port.
2. 
Transceiver Module (TM751, Required). The firecracker sends signals via RF to the Transceiver module. Then the Transceiver will relay those signals out over your house/office electrical wires to all the other devices. It also allows you to control one device with it, and typically only has the House setting on it; it will default to whatever house code, and device code 1.
3. 
Appliance Module (AM15A, AM486, AM466, etc.)
3a.
Socket Rocket (LM15A). An alternative to the appliance module.
3b. Any other X10 module for the device/light/whatever you need to control.
So since you need to control 2 or 3 lights, you need at least one extra appliance module or some other module for your additional lights. Its always good to have a few extra on hand, I have found that out of 10 that there is bound to be one module that is dead.
Also you should consider 
getting a remote, doesn’t matter which one. It’s a nice to have when you need to shut that device on or off quickly and for testing purposes.
Be sure to look for a package deal.
Lastly you just need to get a bunch of lamps or funky lights together and plug it all in. I personally recommend a rotating beacon light for when the build breaks and a soft blue lava lamp/light for when the build is good.
An Ambient Orb is a cool idea as well
Software is the next big item. There has been some work put into CCTray which will allow you to control X10 devices and I will be working with the CC team to get my X10 stuff put into the trunk for project, its just a matter of time. Right now I have a custom solution for our needs at work. It is essentially CCTray without the remoting (uses HTTP to get the status, etc.); and it has a plug-in architecture based on a few simple events.
Links:
http://www.pragmaticautomation.com/cgi-bin/pragauto.cgi/Monitor/Devices/BubbleBubbleBuildsInTrouble.rdochttp://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/articles/169058.aspx http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware/magazine.asp?fn=cifea&id=58
Last night I finally got around to it and posted up the photos on the site via a niftly flash gadget from flickr.com.
Here is the direct flickr set.
If you have more to add feel free and let me know. I will post them up.
So lately I bitched about the documentation for Atlas lacking a simple browser compatibility matrix (example here). List the browser, version, os (and version) which Atlas is currently supported on -of course I'm talking about the client side of things here.
Here is a comment via email from Richard Ersek from MSFT:
"I think a partial answer to the problem is that we haven't done the testing you'd need to get that matrix in the first place, and I don't think it would make sense to do so until the preview stabilizes As aggressive as we are with Atlas, this is all still pre-beta stuff."
Again, the reason why I feel so strongly about forcing this piece of documentation from MSFT is so that I personally (in any organization I want to use Atlas with) dont have to do any of the testing of their software. I want to be able to rely on their documentation when I bring that peice of technology to the table.