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- Upcoming classesJanuary 5
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We’ll be teaching several classes on the West side in the next few months, including C#/.NET and Practical .NET Debugging.
The C#/.NET class covers the new features in VS 2008/C# 3.0, including LINQ, automatic properties, the new initializer syntax and the var type, as well as the rest of C# and a solid foundation in .NET 3.5 including XML processing, threading, App Domains, etc.
The Practical .NET Debugging class covers real-world debugging techniques for .NET including the VS 2008 debugger and using WinDbg on .NET code from a practical perspective.
For scheduling details or to register, see our training site.
The posts on this weblog are provided AS IS with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. - IEnumerable<T> can be tricky…December 16 2008
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This took me quite a while to figure out, so I thought I’d post it. :)
I’ve got a Silverlight application that calls a web service, that gets some data from SQL Server via LINQ. The LINQ statement returns an IEnumerable<QuestionCategory>, and each QuestionCategory has a property which is IEnumerable<Question>:
publicclassQuestionCategory
{
publicstring CategoryName { get; set; }
publicint CategoryId { get; set; }
publicint Order { get; set; }
publicIEnumerable<Question> Questions { get; set; }
}
publicclassQuestion
{
publicstring Text { get; set; }
publicScaledAnswer? Answer { get; set; }
}
- Classes, classes, classes…December 12 2008
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I finished up on a customer project this week, and now it’s full time on Education. We’ve got a ton of new stuff coming with the new year, including some exciting events (details hopefully next week) and some new classes. We’ll be teaching WPF, Practical .NET Debugging, and some new Silverlight classes in Q1, plus whatever your organization needs delivered at your facility or ours. If your organization needs any custom training, or you have questions about course offerings, please drop me a line at education@sftsrc.com.
The posts on this weblog are provided AS IS with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. - Scrum in the EnterpriseNovember 8 2008
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After the Scrum class last I got a chance to attend a talk hosted by SolutionsIQ on Adopting Scrum in the Enterprise. Chris Kinsman gave a very interesting talk on his experience adopting Scrum in his organization, how executive sponsorship made a key difference, and how the adoption has proceeded. I was particularly taken with the idea of a Sustaining Engineering scrum team. In Chris’s organization, they run 4 scrum teams, and every sprint one of them does the sustaining engineering, fixing customer issues and releasing hotfixes, etc. Every sprint they rotate the duty, so the sustaining work is spread around and nobody has to bear the burden all the time. It also means that everyone gets a better understanding of how the code works and what customer’s are concerned with. Passing the buck on sustaining was a big issue at Corillian, and I know that I at least really didn’t like being on the hook carrying the support phone for a week at a time.
Since Agile often gets adopted from the “grassroots” with the development team advocating for it, it was interesting to hear about a successful top-down adoption. It poses some interesting challenges, but if done correctly the executive sponsorship could really make a big difference to making Scrum successful.
The biggest advantage I can see to a top-down adoption is that you can work on changing
- Scrum classNovember 8 2008
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Last week I got the opportunity to take a Certified ScrumMaster class from SolutionsIQ in Seattle. It was a very good class, and I came away with a deeper understanding of how Scrum is supposed to work. I’ve actually been working on (nominally) Scrum projects for a while, but the class gave me a chance to catch up on the formal vocabulary and practice the range of skills involved in running a Scrum project.
Scrum takes a fair amount of discipline to do successfully, I think, but if you can pull it off it provides (in my experience so far) the best way to run a small development team working on a business application. One of the things that I think hinders Agile adoption is lack of training. It’s easy to declare a project agile, when what you really mean is “we don’t have a plan”, or “we don’t write anything down” but that’s not likely to achieve the same level of success. :-) There’s a fair amount of work involved in running a Scrum project, and from that perspective I don’t think it’s any less work than running a traditional waterfall project, you just end up with (hopefully) better results in terms of building working software that meets your product owner’s requirements.
To that end, I think it’s very valuable to get the team trained on the formal methodology around Scrum (