Category: Product Reviews

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Winforms DevExpress Grid

In the current agile sprint for the dev team I manage, we decided to start replacing ListViews (custom ones at that) and grids with the XtraGrid from DevExpress.

Now, normally I shy away from 3rd party controls, or want to vet them, but I knew there was no way we could do the same functionality in the default grid in .NET. One of the guys on the team did a story the sprint before to do a proof of concept comparing various grids and showing the pros and cons. DevExpress came out ahead, functionality and performance.

What we are seeing now is huge gains. We can use the new grid and functionality we couldn’t even begin to think of, is there by default. Grouping, searching, filtering, FAST performance, print preview and formatting, etc, etc, etc. Tons of options.

In fact, there are TOO many options. It makes it hard for us to digest all the possibilities in what we want to turn off, or how to integrate with existing forms, etc. A good problem to have.

All I know, is if you are doing any serious .NET work (Winforms, WPF, even Web/Silverlight) – it might make some sense to take a look at DevExpress. Focus on your business rules and integrating other parts of your systems, not reinventing the wheel with a crazy custom grid.

In the coming months I will try to talk about other areas that you can “outsource” to 3rd parties, where it makes sense. (And no, I don’t get anything from DevExpress for this post. Just calling it how I see it).

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Windows Phone – Samsung Focus

Picked up a Samsung Focus yesterday, device only, no contract. Testing it out. Going to do some development and what not. More to come on this front, but after using it for the first few hours..

1. Can’t connect to hidden wifi networks.

If you have your wireless network hidden, you are out of luck, you need to have the SSID broadcast

2. Facebook Sync doesn’t work (or work well) when you have Facebook account settings set to HTTPS

I can see this happening right now as Facebook just turned that on recently and the phone doesn’t know how to handle, but it should.

3. It’s light.

Can hardly feel it in my pocket

4. I like the UI but seems very “jumpy”

seems like you bounce around a lot.

Other than that, still getting to know it. I haven’t moved my SIM card over yet (btw, the iPhone 4 is a mini SIM, so you need an adapter), but I might, we will see.


Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

UserVoice: Using A Customer Service Tool To Democratize Technical Debt

Not sure if you anyone has heard of or used “UserVoice” – It is a site that allows you to create “forums” for your products and then submit ideas, give users votes and they can vote them up, and an admin can say things are started, merge ideas, or mark when the idea has been completed (and the votes go back to the users).

UserVoice is (sorta) along the same lines as GetSatisfaction (another cool customer service 2.0 app). Pretty cool tools. If I was in a customer service role, especially with any type of user based or public product, I would be running these tools to gather ideas and feedback from my users.

I am in a technical role, so what I decided to do was “democratize” the development area of our product one of my teams is working on. We have a ton of technical debt (as do most teams, it is just a matter of what level of debt you have) – but what should we work on next from a technical perspective?

In comes UserVoice. Let’s throw out ideas on UserVoice, give everyone 50 votes, and the ideas that bubble to the top will become our next set of things to work on. One “idea” may become several “user stories” (we are agile). Our goal is to have 20-25% of our stories focused in on paying down our technical debt. If we didn’t, the debt would never get down to a low enough point to where we are very comfortable.

What is cool is that it really shows what the team wants to focus on next. People can have others vote up their ideas, etc. Also, getting the votes back at the completion of an idea is key. As you can imagine, our forum is private. The one cool thing about UserVoice is you can create multiple forums, with different ranges of settings, so you could also have a public forum, or a different private forum for a select group of users, etc.

One thing I wish I could do is maybe give different # of votes to different users. Integration out of the box with TFS or other systems would be nice too, I haven’t looked to much into that though.

If you have a team that ranges from medium to large, I would suggest checking out UserVoice to get the ideas and opinions of the members out on the table regarding your technical debt. You may be surprised as to what gets voted to the top!

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools

One nice thing released for VS2010 recently is the “Productivity Power Tools”. If you are using VS2010 I would recommend installing it.

Once installed, you can see the options under Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools

 

image

One feature I really like is the “Fix Mixed Tabs” feature.

image

When you open a code file it will analyze and tell you if need to “Tabify” – convert spaces to tabs, the old developers argument of tabs vs spaces solved. BTW, they should be tabs!

Check out the tools and learn the other features, there are some good things in there to help your code and get around in VS2010.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Using Beyond Compare for Compares in TFS and SVN

I love Beyond Compare. Why? First off, their parent company Scooter Software is based in Madison, WI – so that is cool. Second, it is the best damn compare tool I have ever used. I use it for comparing every type of file, folders, folders to FTP, whatever. I love it. Best 30 dollars spent on software. I wish it did more, I could make a wish list.. anyways, to use it to do your source control compares for TFS and SVN? pretty easy.

TFS 2010/Visual Studio 2010

Open VS2010, Tools->Options->Source Control->Visual Studio Team Foundation Server… Click the “Configure User Tools” button

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Click Add, and the settings for Compare.. I do .*, and then choose your Beyond Compare locations, and then the args like below

%1 %2 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

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TortoiseSVN:

Right click anywhere in Windows Explorer, TortoiseSVN->Settings->External Programs->Diff Viewer

Choose External and then

"C:Program Files (x86)Beyond Compare 3BComp.exe" %base %mine /title1=%bname /title2=%yname /leftreadonly

 

(remove the x86 if you are on 32 bit, add it for 64 bit)

 

And.. there you go!

Categories
Life Product Reviews

Vacationing with the iPhone and iPad

Was just on vacation since Sept 3rd through today.. Drove up to Nisswa to drop the little one off, then down to the Twin Cities for 4 nights, then back up to get the little one in Pierz, then back down to Eau Claire for 2 nights, then back home for 2 nights.. fun time. I didn’t really connect to work (only to extend my holiday by 2 days!) but I was still *connected* to everything I wanted to be.

First, I shut off email/exchange sync to my iPhone/iPad, easy enough in the settings. Turned off the calendars too so I didn’t get any new meeting alerts. Good to go.

How else did I use my devices?

Well beyond the basics (on the iPhone – Phone, SMS, Email (personal), Taking pictures and videos, weather, calculator, maps, maps, maps, maps..)

1. Gowalla/Foursquare – I recently just killed both my accounts and started fresh. I tried to see the usefulness and benefit of these. I like Gowalla better – just prettier. Foursquare tells me what is trending better. I use them both to find things around where I am, and check in to keep track of where I went 🙂

2. Twitter/Facebook – just killed my Facebook account again as well, I think I have 15 close friends on there now, so it is pretty quiet, but nice. Twitter I use to just keep up on the real time stuff going on, track favorites, as usual.

3. Soundhound/Shazam – used these to lookup songs I heard at bars or wherever, it is a given pretty much anywhere.

4. Flixster – used this to find movie theater near by and showtimes. Couldn’t buy tickets at the theater I went to, but I could have with fandango, just not worth the hassle I guess.

5. Yelp/OpenTable/Urban Spoon – more targeted in finding foodie places. OpenTable to reserve.

6. SportTacular – to keep up on the Twins and Vikes 🙂

7. WF (mobile site) – to view my accts and transfer and what not

8. Nice Ride and Train Brain – these are where it gets good. Downtown Minneapolis has these cool bike stations you can rent out a bike (for free for under 30 minutes!) or for a small fee (http://www.niceridemn.org/_ (FYI Trek has a similar offering, called B-cycle). Ride it all over and drop off at another station. We rented two and drove them from Uptown to Downtown. Was pretty awesome. The app shows you the stations and has a timer, it could do much more though 🙂 Train Brain shows you the light rail schedule in town, we took the train from Govt Plaza to Mall of America, and back. Was pretty cool.


9. Scanner – QR codes are all over in Uptown on shops, etc. I used this to scan their codes and open links.

10. Reeder – on the iPhone and iPad – used this to keep up on my Google Reader 🙂

11. iPad – in general used it for mostly news apps, and surfing the web, used it as a “computer” – did you know on maps.google.com on an iDevice, if you click on the icon of a “place” it does much more than the native Maps app on the device? I thought that was cool.

I also used CityPages app on the iPad to look up some things going on.

Saw a Twins game vs the Royals (they won!) and Wicked as well. Got a little sick Wednesday morning through Friday so that was a bummer but overall it was a good vacation


Categories
Product Reviews

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

Ran across this today. Setting up a laptop, and one team we use Windows Live Messenger, the other Google Talk. I know there is Trillian, Digsby, etc, but I just wanted to use Windows Live Messenger, but still IM Google Talk contacts

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

BuddyFuse to the rescue! Seems to be working well. Why just Windows Live Messenger? I like the presence it brings with Outlook 2010 and TFS, etc. More tightly coupled with the OS. Like using iChat on a Mac.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

PC vs Mac

Microsoft has published a site, PC vs Mac

There is only one thing you have to know, everything else is fluff.

You will never get a blue screen of death on a Mac. Oh, I got one last night on a Windows machine. With an xlsx half way open and not done yet. Lovely.

done. game over. Mac wins.

And I love Windows, for Development and Business Intelligence. It is the hardware and software that have problems working together. Should Microsoft try to build a PC? Hardware? (ala Xbox?) Would it perform better? Maybe. Would they have more control? Of course, the hardware and software could integrate nicely. I would buy a mythical Microsoft computer before buying a regular PC. Just like I would buy a Mac rather than a Hackintosh 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

Flipboard for iPad, Personal Techmeme

Last week Flipboard informed me that their iPad app was ready for me to use (I have had it since day one, but their servers were overwhelmed).

The premise is that it takes your Twitter and Facebook feeds and creates personal “magazines”. It has other aggregated/curated content from around the web as well. I don’t know what the exact algorithm for figuring out what to show me is, but it seems to do ok. Right now I see it as another quick way to scan through things.

What I think would be an awesome edition, if it could handle it, is syncing my Google Reader. I want a personal “cloud” or personal “techmeme” – filter and find and combine like items. I thought maybe “The Early Edition” for iPad would do that, but it croaked on my 300 some feeds.

Some day there will be an app that does it 🙂


Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Tool of the Day: Sysinternals ProcMon

Funny how you might not EVER use a given tool, and some days you might end up using it twice. Sysinternals Procmon was that tool today.

It is the successor from old utils from Sysinternals – Filemon and Regmon.

What does it do? It monitors all processes and services and watches what they are doing on your system. File, Registry, etc, etc. Open/Close, Read/Write, what user, status, etc. You can filter and pause and find out pretty much anything going on in windows.

So early in the day, running into a website issue, not loading in IIS. No idea what is going on. Fire up Procmon and filter to the website directory on disk. Lo and behold, the site is trying to impersonate a user, and that user doesn’t have permissions. The site still didn’t work, and if I would have dug a bit more with Procmon, would have found that the user impersonating on the site also needed rights to the ASP.NET Temporary files, but after seeing the impersonation and the site still not working, I guessed it didn’t have rights to the temp folder.

Things like the scenario above I have seen people waste a support call with Microsoft with.

Second thing today. Trying to install a extension to SSRS. The installer isn’t even seeing that SSRS is installed, yet it clearly is and functioning correctly on the box. Some how the installer must be reading something or looking somewhere and not finding something. Procmon to the rescue. Fire it up, watch msiexec.exe. Seeing registry reads, it finds the SSRS instance names, then looks to a registry area with that instance name and tries to find more details. Was failing on finding the details because there was no reg keys in the second location (for whatever reason). But there was info in the first location, the same info it was looking for. I exported it out, changed the reg path of the keys, and imported. Re-ran setup and it found the instance this time and I could install the extension.

Without Procmon would have been flying blind or just guessing randomly on what to do. Could have been hours on tech support with a company, or again, a support call with Microsoft.

Procmon saved the day. Check it out and try to use where applicable in your day to day troubleshooting.