Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint with a free full license for bloggers – ISerializable – Roy Osherove’s Blog

We’re just now starting a huge Sharepoint project and this new edition of Isolator might be good for that project. I’ll need to try it out!

And they’re even giving it away for free! 50 licenses anyways. I’m hoping there’s one for me! For that to happen I have to include this text:

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint with a free full license

So that’s cool! So, if I do happen to get a free license I’ll tell you all about it, right here!

for bloggers – ISerializable – Roy Osherove’s Blog

Update on Silverlight 2 – and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 – ScottGu’s Blog

Holy cow! Silverlight 2 was just released and ScottGu mentions some of the improvements coming in the next major versjon; Silverlight 3.

Next year we will ship our next major Silverlight release — Silverlight 3.

Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements – we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer.

Looks like Microsoft is pouring a lot of resources into Silverlight. I’d have no issues betting the farm on Silverlight.

Update on Silverlight 2 – and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 – ScottGu’s Blog

James Shore: Successful Software

So today I read two blog posts on Agile that talks about the failures of Agile. Basically what they’re saying is that Agile+SCRUM is HARD and a lot of teams are failing hard and fast with it.

There are a lot of teams right now failing with Agile. These teams are working in short cycles. The increased planning frequency has given them more control over their work and they’re discovering and fixing some problems. They feel good, and they really are seeing more success than they were before.

But they aren’t working in shared workspaces or emphasizing high-bandwidth communication. They’re don’t have on-site customers or work in cross-functional teams. They don’t even finish all of their stories by the end of each Sprint, let alone deliver releasable software, and they certainly don’t use good engineering practices.

I’ve always been a firm believer that the four most important aspects of agile software development are:

1. Short iterations
2. On-site customer voice
3. Best engineering practices
4. Process review

Ken Schwaber, one of the Scrum Fathers, said at NDC2008 that a SCRUM development process will never be complete, it should always evolve and become better. I think a lot of teams are forgetting this, they just churn out code and every 3-6 weeks they evaluate on what to do next. This is not scrum and it is not being truly agile. It’s just being sloppy if you ask me… 🙂

James Shore: Successful Software
The Decline and Fall of Agile and How Scrum Makes it Hurt More

Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction : Rob Conery

So Rob Conery wrote a really cool post the other day that I just had to comment on.

Here’s my thought for you: What if you used an OODB for development ONLY and implemented SQL Server later, when you know what you need to create.

It made me wonder; how many applications really, really need a full on RDBMS (Oracle, Sql Server etc.) as backend? I wouldn’t know, but if I were to guess I’d say; not all. Vague, I know… 😉 But I do know this; my next project will use Db4O! I just have to try this stuff out! 🙂

Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction : Rob Conery

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Tips for Preparing for a Technical Presentation

 

I thought I did a good job, with 72 slides and 8 demos in 75 minutes and only one person said it felt rushed in the comments. 😉 Of course, I had about 9 hours of content, but I did prepare in specific ways in order to pull it off.

Scott, you did an amazing job! Unfortunately I was not able to attend PDF2008, but I watched you presentation, back to back; good stuff! 🙂

Also I’ll be using your tips for my “TFS Build – More than code” presentation @ NNUG tonight.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Tips for Preparing for a Technical Presentation

Gamerscore Blog : Dead Space – A Horror Lover’s First Impressions

I’m not much for shooter (excluding GoW) nor Horrors (excluding 7th Guest), but DirtyDivas short review of Dead Space was funny. It ended with this priceless quote:

The onslaught of games has begun. I need better time management skills. This whole work thing and that sleeping thing is not conducive to my gaming time.

Gamerscore Blog : Dead Space – A Horror Lover’s First Impressions

Mass Transit – Part 1 of N – Tim Barcz

This looks interesting! I’ll have to follow the next n parts of this!

This system started small but gradually had increased demands in the form of new features clients wanted added. Pretty soon, when you clicked the save button multiple things were happening; a database row would be updated, an email would be sent, a new file would be written, another status file would be updated. These were all executed when the user clicked the button, therefore every action was a blocking action, the server couldn’t move on until it was done servicing that particular request.

The quote above is from the blog post and sort of sums up my experience with a CMS-like application (Synergi), where we once did a Save, Send Mail, Commit we ended up with something like this after a few years; Save, Mail, Mail, Mail, Update Table X, Update Table Y, Mail, Commit. So a solution, like the one proposed in the blog post, could work very well for Synergi. Interesting.

Mass Transit – Part 1 of N – Tim Barcz

Engineering Windows 7 : Windows Desktop Search

A good overview of Windows Search, which I find to be one of the best features of Vista. It’ll be interesting to see where they take it in Windows 7.

Engineering Windows 7 : Windows Desktop Search

Yossi Dahan [BizTalk]: Fun with Message Creation in BizTalk

Creating messages is a mess in BizTalk, I really can’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t have a better story on this subject. But at least now we all know which is the most efficient (fast) way to create a message. Well done Yossi.

Yossi Dahan [BizTalk]: Fun with Message Creation in BizTalk

Paul Stovell says& » Architecture: Five tips for Low Friction Projects

Oh yes! 🙂 In my previous job we did a huge refactoring job at the beginning of a new version. We went from 25 projects to 11 in just 2 days! It was a huge undertaking, with code more than 8 years old and written by developers who didn’t know C#, .Net or anything about OOP… But it was a huge success! Our local build time was cut in half.

Another good article from 

Paul Stovell says& » Architecture: Five tips for Low Friction Projects