Archives

• Introducing Pair Programming at Cinci Day Of Agile

  Mar 30 2011 10:23 AM

  Comments

  Last weekend I presented at the Cincinnati Day of Agile event on Introducing Pair Programming (see on slideshare).  The event was nearly sold out with about 240 people in attendance, a mix of devs and PMs.  The content and (other) speakers I thought were great – Phil and his team did a great job.  I took a few pictures during the event, which you can see below: Phil and Joel Semeniuk Brian Prince James Bender Jim Holmes   The event went very well, logistically, and the content was an interesting mix of topics.  It was interesting to me viewing agile practices through the lens of project managers, versus developers.  It was also interesting to hear … more

• How To Fix Visual Studio File Templates

  Mar 25 2011 7:48 AM

  Comments

  When you create a new project in Visual Studio, it will usually include some files as part of the project.  Most of the time, these are pretty useless, but if it’s your first time working with said template, they may help you get going.  In VS2010, the Test Project, for example, has been improved over prior versions by eliminating a useless text file describing tests and a useless Manual Test file that I never once used.  It still includes a unit test file, which I think is fine, with the name that will never be correct, UnitTest1.cs (though I understand it would be a tough problem to guess a name that might be correct).  Let’s look at the default file created: I do … more

• Visual Studio 2010 Unlimited Load Test Virtual Users

  Mar 22 2011 9:17 AM

  Comments

  You may have heard the recent announcement that Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and MSDN subscribers now have access to the Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack, which enables load testing of applications with unlimited virtual users.  Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear at first, at least to me, how to get this to work if you’ve simply installed VS2010 Ultimate and now want to take advantage of this.  The first thing you will find in MSDN is the Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack Deployment Guide, which is just a PDF: Of course, it’s a PDF wrapped in an EXE which only extracts but doesn’t open the resulting files.  One you’ve extracted it, there’s not a lot to … more

• Complex Technical Demos Using Local Source Control

  Mar 2 2011 12:31 PM

  Comments

  Last summer at the Software Engineering 101 event put on by NimblePros in Cleveland, I saw Kevin Kuebler do a demo using git or Mercurial to iterate from phase of the project he was building to the next.  It worked amazingly well and I thought I would document how to set this up yourself, so that when you’re giving a technical presentation that involves a somewhat complex set of changes to a project, you can easily step through the updates without having to resort to a lot of on-stage typing, code snippets in multiple files, or switching between different projects/folders. For this example, I’m going to be using as a base a stock ASP.NET MVC 3 web project, but that choice was made … more