A great commercial for XBox 360 did not make it onto American National TV for some reason. I find it so funny however, I just had to mention it here. You can find the commercial here, but if it's not there, get the torrent link here. Read about it here.
[Update] : The video was pulled off of the first site I mentioned. It was on MSN Video, but also there it got pulled. You can still go view it on the much more excellent Google Video service.
FIT is definitely something I have to dig into in the near future. I’m trying really hard to make the shift to, and understand Test-Driven Development. FIT is something that will definitely come in handy in persuading customers to see the benefits of TDD. FIT is used for collaboration and communication. The current implementations are based on a specific wiki, where customers, testers and programmers learn what their software should do, and to automatically compare that to what it actually does do. It compares customers' expectations to actual results. It's an invaluable way to collaborate on complicated problems (and get them right) early in development, according to James Shore.
In simple words, imagine yourself a html page with explanation of what some part of the application should do. Then imagine a table with a short sentence, an expected result and the actual result. Just like in your (nUnit) unit tests. This works really great for customers, as they can see for themselves what’s happening in their application. And it’s also great as being a part of the customer’s acceptance tests.
FitNess is the .NET implementation and Cory Foy has written a basic tutorial to give you an idea of what should be done. I don’t think it was explained this clearly before, including screenshots. So it’s definitely a good start to get an idea, if you can’t get through the multiple pages of info on the FitNess site.
The people behind Enterprise Library will be doing a webcast about Agile and eXtreme Programming.
Join this patterns & practices webcast with the Enterprise Library development team to learn about their experiences doing agile development in a collaborative forum. Experts will share lessons learned, what works best, and what not to do. Hear how patterns & practices distributed teams work with contributors all over the world and the techniques they found most effective for staying together as an agile team.
Peter Provost will be doing the presentation. It will be shown live December 8th, at 10AM Pacific Time. For me in The Netherlands, that’s a difference of 9 hours, which means it’ll start here at 19:00 hours.
[update] : Rescheduled to december 1st, same time.
Google has been at it again. As far as I know, they released it kind of silently, but they now offer statistics for your website.
After you've signed up for an account, you get a little javascript you have to add to every page. It then start to register visitors and follows them through the site, or registers them as returning visitors. And it registers or logs a lot, and provides all this information in many more reports then you and I can probably think of. And what I haven't seen before with Google products, in a really nice and clean user interface, with small characters and (flash) graphics like pie-charts and the likes.
A great part is that you can view information as an executive, marketeer or webmaster. Executive don't get to see which browser types are used, or what resolution your page is viewed with. As a webmaster, you can also view information like entry-points and much more information like that. When you're for example seeing that default.aspx is a page a lot of people visit, you can dig deeper into the information. View data over time, or see some pie-chart about what countries those visitors come from. When looking at resolutions, I noticed the 1280x800 resolution. I assumed those all came from Chi Wai, who bought a nice screen a few months ago. But someone from England is also using that resolution. That's really usefull information! ;-)
But as far as I can tell, this is a really nice replacement for NedStat, who recently were sold to/taken over by some ugly company who's doing a lot of ugly things to the once so nice NedStat. Nice about Google Analytics is also that you can add users (with a Google Account) who can then view your reports as well. A nice additional feature we can offer to our bloggers. Too bad Community Server has its MasterPages setup kind of weird, so I still have to alter every skin support at BloggingAbout.NET, to be able to register everything happening there. Scott Watermasysk immediatly added the feature to support Google Analytics. So when in december CommunityServer 2.0 is released, this is added a lot easier.
For the client I'm currently at, I was looking for some Microsoft documents on what they say about running multiple versions next to each other and what version will be loaded. A lot of this information seems very logical and is something you just presume, but to me was never proven by real documents. And clients still like real documents over my word. I have to work on that! :-)
One thing that may seem very obvious, but I saw being asked for over and over again, is : can you create .NET 1.1 applications in Visual Studio 2005?
NO, you cannot develop .NET 1.1 applications in Visual Studio 2005!!!
I'll keep away from discussions like if it should be able to do so. As well as about the fact that you probably would be able, after you'd convert everything back to a .NET 1.1 standard (on projects and files, etc) with some home-brew tool or something. Forget it. I won't.
Other things that could be interesting.
So there you have it. Now let Google do the work. Let's help Google a bit : running multiple versions framework clr .net 1.0 1.1 2.0
I was a bit confused by Dan Fernandez's post about the Microsoft Express products being free for a year. I thought they'd all be free forever. Especially SQL-Server Express (where's the 2005 in there?) which would be the replacement for the ever free MSDE.
After first posting a comment with this question, I figured I'd search a little better in the Express FAQ. No information about SQL Express being free forever. I thought I'd go look at the pricing questions, if I could see what the product would cost after a year. There it was, the magical paragraph:
Note that we are also offering SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a free download, and that this offer is not limited to the same promotional pricing period as Visual Studio Express.
So now you know. :-) Look at this post by Alex Thissen for more info on SQL-Express. For the other Express products, they actually are free downloads for one year. Good thing is, download 'm now, be able to use them forever.
Anko Duizer, who will be my colleague (and boss ;-) in a couple of weeks, has entered the Blogosphere. He'll mostly cover his experiences at Class-A, and already has a topic about a SODA course that'll be delivered by SQLSkills' Bob Beauchemin.
As Anko says, it'll be an interesting and fun event. One I can't visit! :-(
Rob Howard is 'surprised' to find out about the Slashdot mentality. They and especially a lot of their visitors seem to think that DotNetNuke isn't open source. The source is definitely open, but it uses SQL-Server. And because SQL-Server isn't open, it's not pure open source, and therefor doesn't count.
His advice: who cares! And he's right, at least about the point if DNN is open source or not. What I find amusing though, and kind of do care about, is all these people that are so full of themselves. It cannot be the software, it cannot be the user friendliness of the software, how fast it runs, how often it crashes or not. It's just, it's Microsoft. And that is what bugs them.
Some user replies that IIS 6.0 is more secure then Apache, and he replies that that's because secunia.com has registered 28 security advisories on Apache, of which 2 are still unpatched. IIS 6.0 has had only 2, of whitch both are patched. Then one of those kids that think linux is sexy because it's not Microsoft, says you can't compare them that way. First, because secunia isn't registering everything. I can't tell. Second, because Apache source can be viewed and IIS 6.0 its source cannot. Then because Apache has been used by beautiful people for almost 6 years now. And IIS 6.0 by people that don't understand computers for only a year.
Unfortunately IIS 6.0 has many more users, IIS 6.0 is therefor much more interesting for hackers, because of the bigger audience they can attack, and also because all those hackers are kids that still run Linux. And who'd want to hack those 4 Apache servers still running? ;-) Besides that, IIS 6.0 hosts lots of lovely websites for almost 4 years now.
I'd just like to conclude as Rob Howard did and go on with a pleasant life, instead of just arguing with those kids on arguments that proof nothing, from both sides.
What a bunch of idiots...