RIF Notes #31

"…business staff think we can load up technical debt because they never truly see the consequences. But those consequences are there…they are just never expressed in a way that the business staff can engage with" -Steve McConnell

• WCF is Dead.  Long live WCF! – Low budget recording of Monty’s (IDesign) presentation to a user group on simplifying WCF and the “the message is the application”.
• Solving the database deployment problem with Database Lifecycle Management – I’m intrigued.
• Scott Hanselman's Complete List of Productivity Tips
• What the f*** were they thinking?! Crazy website biases exposed by naughty words lists (the NSFW version) – Troy Hunt identify sites weird attempts to prevent offensive words in passwords.
• Code Hoarders – Uncle Bob identifies more about unclean coding practices.
• Personal Productivity: Business vs. busyness vs. laziness - "Excessive busy-ness is a common form of laziness."
• Secrets of Handling Support in an Agile Team
• The Hidden Cost Of Estimation – This post expresses my own inclinations with regard to how much effort should be spent on estimation.
  • “Precise estimates are costly, and you won’t get a benefit from making them more precise. In fact, as a product manager, I wouldn’t ask for precise estimates, because they cost me money and time not being spent on actual delivery"
• How to Compute PERT Estimation – But there is a mathematical formula for estimating.
• Stand-ups are Broken, but Should They be Fixed? – Eric Smith thinks Scrums aren’t scrums but are more often status reports, but maybe that’s what everyone wants.

RIF Notes #30

“Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.” —Decluttering the company [The Economist]

• SlowCheetah is going into maintenance mode
• How to run Background Tasks in ASP.NET – Hanselman points out a few utilities that can be used to run background jobs on an interval within an ASP.NET app.
• Introducing Azure DocumentDB – Microsoft’s fully managed NoSQL document database service
  • Azure DocumentDB – Ayende of RavenDB assesses the technology.
• The <%: mystring %> syntax in ASP.NET 4 is equivalent to <%= Server.HtmlEncode (mystring) %>
• Dangers of Violating SOLID Principles in C#
• Unit and Integration Testing of SSIS Packages – Charlie, I’m looking at you.
• #NoEstimates - Really? – Udi Dahan (of NServiceBus) addresses the NoEstimates ‘movement’, but further describes estimations value, how to go about it and the realities of dysfunction.
  • “Let me say this differently – until you are as rigorous in evaluating the predicted value of a given initiative as you are in estimating its cost, with that rigor increasing with the size of the initiative, you have no business starting to work on it.”
• Personal Productivity: Business vs. busyness vs. laziness – “Excessive busy-ness is a common form of laziness."
• Hordes Of Novices – Uncle Bob asks discusses question “Is the software problem really a raw manpower problem”
• Using Razor Pages with WebForms Master Pages
• Redmond's Remarkable Reversal – “A company that topped the list of obvious casualties in the post-PC era has thrived due to surprising changes to the way it does things. Most especially, how it works with developers”
• StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers, and It's All About Performance – This is kind of an interesting yet odd analysis of Stackoverflow’s solutions to scale and performance.  It mentions static classes a bunch of times(e.g. “ Stack Overflow doesn't use many unit tests because of their active community and heavy usage of static code”)

eXtreme Programming: Days of future past

Going back, maybe ten years ago, when I first read Kent Becks Extreme Programming I found it compelling. Most of the practices made immediate intuitive sense.  I especially liked the practices:  coding standards, unit testing, refactoring, continuous integration, collective code ownership, code reviews and maintaining a sustainable pace. They are now engrained in the way we operate.  What was appealing about them was that they were directly applicable to the practice of programming.  I could and did begin adopting them in some part as an individual to develop my own development skills, quality and productivity.  There was no need for a formal organizational structure or project management philosophy overhaul required in order to just start doing some of the practices and benefitting from the discipline.  Extreme programming is a methodology as the name implies, for programmers. 

Later, as I became more aware of broader Agile, the myriad of Agile practices felt like watered down versions of XP or at least less concrete.  The Agile manifesto’s vague generalities weren’t prescriptive enough, for me, I never really got it.  If fact, I have seen them used to vindicate code-like hell as being agile.  I was disappointed when XP fell out of favor.

Unsurprisingly, I found the project management aspects of XP less interesting personally.  Nevertheless, those are the aspects that Agile became synonymous with.  Teams that are ‘agile’ more often than not refer to their project process rather than their engineering discipline.  Initially I was intrigued by Scrum.   It appeared to be somewhat prescriptive, albeit around the process rather than the programming .  It had a structure which vague Agile didn’t (which may be true of Lean and Kanban too).  In my experience, however, Scrum tends not to be all that prescriptive and molds to the team rather than the other way around.  While agility is great and desirable, Agile still seems to be all over the place meaning everything and nothing all at once.

When I came across Uncle Bob’s Extreme Programming, a Reflection recently and recalled Martin Fowler’s similar criticism of Flaccid Scrum (Scrum without technical practices), I was encouraged to know that I wasn’t alone in my nostalgia for XP.

I recommend going back, re-familiarizing with XP and reclaiming what was lost.

RIF Notes #29

“Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a [sic] frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded [sic] detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.”—Linds Redding

 

• ASP.NET vNext: the future of .NET on the Server
• Announcing the Release of ASP.NET MVC 5.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1
• ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory – An ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory
• Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype – Dino Esposito outlines the four aspects of Caching with a good explanation of each.
• Top "Must Know" Frameworks for .NET web developers
• foc.us is a tDCS headset for gamers – “Overclock your brain using transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to increase the plasticity of your brain. Make your synapses fire faster”
• Sharing Code From WinForms To IOS – Rocky Lohtka’s brief look at Xamarin.Forms.
• Test a website's performance
• 8 ways to improve ASP.NET Web API performance
• Entity Framework and AsNoTracking – The AsNotTracking method is supposed to have a dramatic effect on EF performance.  Running a few quick tests I didn’t see much difference but its good to be aware of.

RIF Notes #28

“Quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care—not just of any great method that descends from the heavens. That these acts are simple doesn’t mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy” – Uncle Bob

• Error logging and tracking done right with Raygun.io – Troy Hunt reviews RayGun.io
• Benefits of Continuous Deployment
• Technology Radar – This is extremely informative. Thoughworks evaluates technology based on whether they think its ready to adopt, trial (almost ready), assess (evaluate), or hold (not ready for use).  Interestingly, TFS is a Hold.
• Use Frequent Branches to Tell a Story and Simplify Code Reviews – Sounds familiar.
• Avoid the pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern – This also sounds familiar, in that it was something we abandon long ago.
• Unusual Ways of Boosting Up App Performance. Strings
• The JavaScript Alternatives – About things like CoffeeScript, TypeScript and Dart to make javascript easier and cleaner.
• Largest collection of FREE Microsoft eBooks ever, including: Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Office 2013, Office 365, Office 2010, SharePoint 2013, Dynamics CRM, PowerShell, Exchange Server, Lync 2013, System Center, Azure, Cloud, SQL Server, and much more – Lots of free ebooks provide by microsoft.
• “Out Of Memory” Does Not Refer to Physical Memory – Clarification on a misleading error we recently had on the Continuous integration server.
  • “An “out of memory” error almost never happens because there’s not enough storage available; as we’ve seen, storage is disk space, and disks are huge these days. Rather, an “out of memory” error happens because the process is unable to find a large enough section of contiguous unused pages in its virtual address space to do the requested mapping”

RIF Notes #27

“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” – Melvin Conway

• Revisiting Conway's law – “if you want cohesive and decoupled systems, put different teams at work on each of them, so that the communication structures of the teams resemble what you want to achieve with projects…Segregation of responsibilities starts by our own work organization"
  • Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: "A Test of the "Mirroring" Hypothesis – Harvard Business school study.
• Software Structure Can Reduce Costs and Time-to-Market – “the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…when the structure of the code base significantly impedes the time of subsequent deliveries of the right features, a business’s competitive agility is lost and the Return on Investment on the software goes wobbly”
• Why Projects Don't Make Sense – Projects with discreet beginning and end dates is challenged.  Acknowledging that software is never done suggests that ‘projects’ are not a good match whereas a standing teams might be better.
• The Corruption of Agile – Suggesting that the productized and cultish practices of Agile have led it astray.
• Secrets of Handling Support in an Agile Team – “Reserving capacity is not enough. So the dev team dedicates one developer per iteration for support work. The developer handles all support tasks”
• Hordes Of Novices – Uncle Bob asks “Do you really get software built faster and better by throwing ever more barely competent bodies at it? Is the software problem really a raw manpower problem? Is coding the same as bricklaying? More bricklayers means more bricks and more coders mean more code; but is more code what we want?”

RIF Notes #27

“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” – Melvin Conway

• Revisiting Conway's law – “if you want cohesive and decoupled systems, put different teams at work on each of them, so that the communication structures of the teams resemble what you want to achieve with projects…Segregation of responsibilities starts by our own work organization"
• Software Structure Can Reduce Costs and Time-to-Market – “the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…when the structure of the code base significantly impedes the time of subsequent deliveries of the right features, a business’s competitive agility is lost and the Return on Investment on the software goes wobbly”
• Why Projects Don't Make Sense – Projects with discreet beginning and end dates is challenged.  Acknowledging that software is never done suggests that ‘projects’ are not a good match whereas a standing teams might be better.
• The Corruption of Agile – Suggesting that the productized and cultish practices of Agile have led it astray.
• Secrets of Handling Support in an Agile Team – “Reserving capacity is not enough. So the dev team dedicates one developer per iteration for support work. The developer handles all support tasks”
• Hordes Of Novices – Uncle Bob asks “Do you really get software built faster and better by throwing ever more barely competent bodies at it? Is the software problem really a raw manpower problem? Is coding the same as bricklaying? More bricklayers means more bricks and more coders mean more code; but is more code what we want?”

RIF Notes #26

“Quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care—not just of any great method that descends from the heavens. That these acts are simple doesn’t mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy” – Uncle Bob

 

1. What's culture got to do with it – Looks like Cooper is offering a Culture Master class. This training aims to help people intentionally approach their team or organizational culture.
2. An Overview of Project Katana - Whereas both the OWIN specification and Owin.dll are community owned and community run open source efforts, the Katana project represents the set of OWIN components that, while still open source, are built and released by Microsoft. These components include both infrastructure components, such as hosts and servers, as well as functional components, such as authentication components and bindings to frameworks such as SignalR and  ASP.NET Web API.
3. Microsoft claims Azure now used by half of the Fortune 500
4. Duplicate Finder, Part of ReSharper Command Line Tools
5. Running Javascript inside PowerShell with PowerShellJS
6. Introducing Windows Azure WebJobs -  there's not yet been a good solution under web sites for doing regular jobs and batch work in the background. Now Azure Web Sites support a thing  called "Azure WebJobs" to solve this problem simply.
7. On The Coexistence of ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI
8. CORS Support in ASP.NET Web API 2- Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification (commonly considered part of HTML5) that lets JavaScript overcome the same-origin policy security restriction imposed by browsers
9. SSRS Reports as a Data Source in Excel 2013 – “I became intrigued by the possibility of using an SSRS report directly as a data source for Excel”
10. Dev tools essential for building the modern web.

RIF Notes #25

“Most managers want good code, even when they are obsessing about the schedule. They may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that’s their job. It’s your job to defend the code with equal passion” – Bob Martin

• IE -Tracking Protection Lists- IE has the a bunch of tracking prevention providers.
• What’s the Problem with Mobile HTML5-“A recent research concludes that contrary to the general belief performance is not the main problem with HTML5 but rather the missing of profiling and debugging tools and the lack of certain APIs”
• Organization Antipattern: Project Teams – This post explored the “No Project” movement and compares the Project team vs. Product Team construction.
• Is College Worth It?
• The New Turbo Button - Balancing Power Management and Performance on Windows Servers-“Recently Mike Harder, a development manager, noticed that stuff he does every day was taking longer on the "Balanced" power option than the "High Performance" option”
• Consumer vs Business Apps – “So then is there any meaningful difference between consumer and business apps?….If I’m writing a business app (like something to manage my inventory or schedule my manufacturing workload) the cost to build software for each type of device continues to exist, but there’s zero increased revenue (well, zero revenue period). There’s no interest in delighting users, we just need them to be productive, and if they can’t be productive that just increases cost. So it is all cost, cost, cost. As a result, if I can figure out a way to use a common codebase, even if the result doesn’t “feel native” on any platform, I still win because my employees can be productive and I’ve radically reduced my costs vs writing and maintaining the app multiple times.”
• Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask)
• Tell us about your shitty commute- More 37Signals advocating for remote work.

   

RIF Notes #24

-“The best way to motivate geeks is to not demotivate them”

• BoundedContext-Martin Fowler explains the concept of the Bounded Context.
• Clean Code Cheet Sheet- A cheat sheet for all of the principles and guidance for righting Clean Code.
• Applying the 80:20 Rule in Software Development- Various ways the 80/20 rule applies to software development.
• Technical Disobedience – “In software, it is far to easy to accept the system around you as status quo. It is harder to realize that software is soft, and that systems can be soft as well. There are many small rules you can try and hack around to get things done.”
• The future of the business desktop- Rocky’s thoughts on the desktop PC and its position within the enterprise and what that means as a platform for enterprise developers.
• Why teams don't work- Harvard Business journal about team dynamics.
• Victory Lap for Ask Patents – Joel Spolsky’s anti patent troll effort.
• Singing the Password Blues-“Passwords are so 1999, and dual-factor authentication is torture”
• 5 ways to tackle an insufficient HTTPS implementation – from Troy Hunt
• Scattered Meeting Day Syndrome – “I have observed that the most unproductive day would be to have scattered meetings all throughout the day”
• Cloud Server Performance: A Comparative Analysis of 5 Large Cloud IaaS Providers – “Though Amazon EC2 has the lowest price advantage over the other 4 providers at $0.12 per hour (tied with Windows Azure), the lowest cost does not always mean the best value for a customer looking for maximized performance. Also, while Amazon EC2 had the lowest performance, due to its cost, it did not score lowest on the price-performance value measurement, the CloudSpecs score; in fact, while Rackspace performed 1.5 times better than Amazon EC2 on the Unixbench tests, its higher price dropped it lower than Amazon EC2 in the CloudSpecs score.”

RIF Notes #23

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” - C.A.R. Hoare (British computer scientist, winner of the 1980 Turing Award)

• On Types – Ted Neward makes in interesting suggestion about how types should be handled.

  As a suggestion, then, I throw out this idea: Ensure that all of your domain classes never expose primitive types to the user of the system. In other words, Name never exposes an “int” for Age, but only an “Age” type. C# makes this easy via “using” declarations, like so:

  using FirstName = System.String;
  using LastName = System.String;

• Web Developer Checklist – This is a very handy and thorough checklist of items to be checked on you website for quality, security, usability, etc.
• ';--have i been pwned? – Troy Hunt has set up a sight that allows you to see if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.
• Healthy benefits for the long run- 37Signals encourages employees to get out of the office.
  • “Instead we focus on benefits that get people out of the office as much as possible. 37signals is in it for the long term, and we designed our benefits system to reflect that. One of the absolute keys to going the distance, and not burning out in the process, is going at a sustainable pace”
• Monaco- Monaco appears to be some sort of Visual Studio Online tool.
• Yahoo Adopted One Of Microsoft's Worst Ideas, Just As Microsoft Killed It Off
  • ‘Microsoft told employees on Tuesday that it's ending its so-called "stack-ranking" system. Under Microsoft's infamous system, workers were ranked on a curve, and those at the low end would be fired or dealt with in some way. The goal in stopping these rankings is to focus more "on teamwork and collaboration…Stack ranking certainly didn't do Microsoft any favors over the years, breeding resentment and distrust among employees. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees’
• Good Windows 8 Sales – Rocky Lohtka perspective on how Windows 8 Sales will impact developers “In summary: good Windows 8 sales today means that betting on WPF for smart client development should be pretty safe, and will hopefully have a decent migration path to WinRT in 2-3 years.”
• What’s culture got to do with it? – Cooper asks “Does your work culture make it challenging for your team or organization to do great work? “
• Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think – A discussion of “black swan” projects.
  • A $5 million project that leads to an almost $200 million loss is a classic “black swan.” The term was coined by our colleague Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe high-impact events that are rare and unpredictable but in retrospect seem not so improbable