We're still fighting the comment spam here, but over at LonghornBlogs they've implemented Google banners, known as AdSense, to spam their users with commercial ads. In your favorite reader it would look something like you see below.
AdSense seems to work pretty well, as this was the announcement about the rss implementation. Others about Bill Gates and AMD offer you Windows 2000 on AMD hardware. But still, they're ads and you're being spammed!
How would you feel about AdSense in all your feeds?
At our company we have these meetings, where people from the same competence in a region come together to talk about all kinds of stuff, from business related to more fun related stuff. Because I went to the Dutch Developer Days 2005 with Edwin Waegemakers, we were asked to do a little presentation. We decided to give three small presentations, one about Team System, one about integration strategy and one about Agile Development. I would do first and last.
I've written about the Agile presentation at DevDays before and planned to use it in my own presentation, but a little less on the archetypes and a little more my personal experience. The plan was to bring it lightly and at the same time trigger our RUP 'specialists' as an Agile hooligan, and I can say it worked pretty well. I placed Agile strongly against RUP, although in practice this of course isn't the case. Or at least not as hard as I had put it.
Agile vs. RUPFor a lot of developers documentation can be a drag to write. I have a personal experience on a project I joined, where they over-used RUP. Normally you get a pile of documentation of about 2" high. On the project, I got a pile of about 10" high. If I wanted to read that through, before actually doing something useful. The project had just started, and there wasn't anything in it like functional specs. Just project guidelines and rules and technical visions, etc, etc, etc. So I used that in the presentation, with the Agile tenet to produce working software over extensive documentation. I highlighted extensive, as some people got the idea Agile has no documentation at all. That triggered some reactions!
Fun thing was, that our director just had seen a presentation last week, where RUP was presented as thé answer to all problems in projects, sort of speak. This week I presented it as if RUP was about just documentation, and Agile development would really work. His conclusion was that now he knows he's getting old, as he had never seen (technological) advancements update so fast. Last week RUP was everything, now it's already outdated and replaced. ;-)
Project swingOf course Agile isn't a replacement for RUP and you cannot appoint one as a clear winner. I don't think that's necessary either. I think RUP is great, but you have to have experienced people doing RUP projects as you don't want to overload everyone with documentation, but also have to carefully look at what the customer wants. RUP also uses iterations, but for some reason I have the feeling Agile development can better understand and react to what the customers needs, not what he thinks he wants. That comes to show in this funny picture of a swing. It's funny to see how everyone within a project has (or can have) a different view on the swing. I think it's hard to get the same swing in every picture. But my believe is, it's much harder to retrieve from a customer to what he really wants and needs. To get the same picture in how a customer explains it and what a customer really needed, you need good iterations and a lot of communication. For some reason, I have the feeling communication in RUP is more through documents where as in Agile it's face to face communcation between the customer and the entire team. And I think that's an important difference.
Of course everything should still be managed, also documentation. ;-)I'm particullary interested in how to manage the customer and/or final deadline. Once the customer gets the hang of changing and adding functionality, how can we manage them and the project so that we can deliver what we promised up front, and still meet some final deadline. Where is the line, between making agreements with a customer, and kind of just see what happens?
For those who want to know more about Agile Development :
I have always tried applications or tools like TweakUI and it's alt-tab replacement. With it, while you alt-tab through your applications, you see a small screenshot of that application. That way, it's much more clear which applications you're alt-tabbing through. Even better is the hotspot in the bottom-right corner, or any other corner you set it up for. You just move the mouse there, all applications become visible and you get to select one.
Now Scott Hanselman blogged about a tool called TopDesk. The idea seems to come from Mac OS X Expose, but now for Windows and written in Direct X. Where Tweak UI is really slow, TopDesk is blazing fast on computers that don't even have a nice Direct3D card. You can check out how it works in this video by Scott.
The Enterprise Library team recently became aware of a memory leak issue in the Configuration Application Block, which is used by all other blocks in Enterprise Library. Patch 1475, available in the Releases section of the site, contains a fix to the issue. Because the issue has the potential to impact many applications that use Enterprise Library, Microsoft strongly advises all users of Enterprise Library (January 2005) to install this patch and recompile all applications that use any of the application blocks.
So it seems important enough to spam this over hundreds of blogs! ;-)
You can find the download here.
[Via Ohad]
In the fight for comment spam I've installed Chrissy LeMaire her MTBlackList triggers. This means in the database everything will be caught, without really touching any of the tables. For me this means I can upgrade to 0.96 or Community Server in the future. For now, there should be no more comments with about 10 links in it to casino sites or something. It still means however that bloggers will get email that a comment has been placed with the spam.
I'm still thinking about wether to upgrade to 0.96 and remove the many reference-not-set-to-an-instance problems, upgrade to CommunityServer once 1.1 is released or stick to the current 0.95 version. I don't think the last one is an option though. And sticking to 0.96 will probably cost me a huge amount of work. I can almost better create my own .NET 2.0 version ;-)I'm also thinking about putting up captcha controls or other ways to stop people from comment spamming us. Whatever it takes, you'll hear more in the future. Bah, sometimes I just hate commercial business. Even more the fact that still about 30% of all people respond to those casino, viagra and other e-mails.
Have a nice weekend!
According to this post by Miguel Jimenez, there will be another version released that will contain all tools combined from the seperate Architect, Developer and tester versions. That's for the occasional user who has more then one role during the day. ;-)
Anyway, I think that's good to hear, because I believe 99% of the time, people that do use Visual Studio.NET 2005 will at least require two versions of Team System. As said earlier, for the developing architect, or the testing developer.
But that raises another question, why do I have to make a choice for one of the versions, when there's also going to be version for the jack-of-all-trades?