Categories
Geeky/Programming

VS 11 Experience

Today I decided to give it a go and install VS 11 Developer Preview (off the USB key I got from BUILD) onto my production machine. Whoa, Steve, that could be risky!!

Yeah, it could, but sometimes you need to live life on the edge. As much as a geek can.

There aren’t a ton of options when installing. The installer looks.. “beautiful” compare to other Visual Studio installers. It installed a few things, then reboot, then some more, then it was done. Easy. But of course, it installed SQL Express (Denali CTP3) which I really didn’t want to install since I already have 2008 R2 developer on my machine. Maybe in the advanced install I could have disabled it, but I didn’t dig through it all. Anyways, I just turned the service off and set it to manual start.

VS 11 is nice. Seems faster. Cleaner. Crisper. I LOVE the code clone feature. Found some good info there. I like the new TFS design (the work items, etc look nicer – almost a fat client version of the new TFS server and TFS azure experience).

The big app we work on compiled and ran, which was good. I didn’t try .NET 4.5 yet, that might be for another day. One thing that does stink about the dev preview is that you lose all your add ons. The VS productivity tools are baked in (at least some? I didnt try them all). But things like Resharper, etc aren’t there so you might be “missing” some things you are used to.

The solution file of the project changed on me, since I opened up a VS 2010 sln file. It added some comments and rearranged some things, but after I closed VS 11 and saved everything, I opened in VS 2010 and it still worked. Checked into source control and other devs with just VS 2010 opened it and it worked, etc. So MSFT wasn’t lying.. backward compatible!

Excited to dig into it more and for the future versions.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Quick Thoughts from //build/

Was at the Microsoft //build/ conference. Like other conferences, you usually get your mind blown and information overload. No difference here. Excited about all the new announcements. Getting used to the new Samsung Win8 tablet they gave out. Once again Microsoft is going to change the game for developers, for good or bad. But most skills will translate. Windows 8 is very early. I can see potential. There will be metro style apps, and desktop (or “pro”) apps. Eventually users will clamor for Metro apps. The tablet is nice, a little big, fan runs all the time. Haven’t even scratched the surface. You can try to compare to iPad but they aren’t the same class of device. This tablet is a PC. iPad is a tablet. Looking forward to digging into .NET 4.5 (even though it wont be supported on XP). Looking forward to learning WinRT and Metro. Want to do more with OData and I think it can give some quick wins (Did you know that is the only way to query data from Metro?)

A lot more will come out in the coming months, and hopefully most if not all of the FUD will subside. I am excited again though as a “Microsoft” guy (even though I’m an “Apple” guy too! 🙂 ) .. I can see convergence with Phone and PC, Cloud/Azure. Exciting Times.

I probably will have a more detailed post on things later, maybe not though 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Windows 7: All My Fonts Are Italic!

Last week, I uninstalled some software on my Windows machine, a Dell “reader” app. I reboot. Right away I notice something is wrong, all my fonts that were usually just normal Times New Roman or Arial were italic. WTF?

I figured that removing the app somehow also removed or reset my default font’s on the machine. I had someone export out some reg settings and I added them back to mine and things returned back to normal. Attached is the reg file. YMMV. I’m not responsible for your machine getting hosed, or anything related to this fix. Backup your registry, yada yada. win7fontfix

Some apps are just downright destructive when uninstalling. I think back to DLL hell and some of the wacky things that could happen there. System DLL’s removed when uninstalling an app. Just horrible. It seems even with Microsoft’s latest OS, things can still get jacked by a bad app install/uninstall.

I could have also probably went back to a snapshot, but figured I would give it the 10 minute try to fix it approach first. Seems to have worked.

Categories
Product Reviews

Yammer: Transparency in Enterprise Project Communication

Recently I attended the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations conference in Orlando, and one of the main points they kept bringing up was “social” in the enterprise, how your IT Ops groups can use it to communicate, Yammer was at the forefront here (and SharePoint).

I have been a proponent of Yammer for some time. At work, I actually created our Yammer instance back in September 2008. Although it hasn’t taken off as I’d hoped, it has made some people think. Coming from a tech company in MN to a bike manufacturer, you can’t expect leading edge technical things to take off too fast, have to set expectations, was just kind of waiting for the right time to see how we could really use it.

Recently, on a software project we have, I was thinking on how to “up” the level of communication between team members, but also keep things transparent so everyone who wanted to could “drink from the firehose” so to speak. Tons of communication happens on IM and Email, phone, face to face. All those have their place and are needed, but they are all mediums in which people are left out.

Face to Face, usually is more personal and unless it is a huge conference or meeting, not everyone can hear or be there, and things get lost or no notes are taken. Same with phone. Email, things get saved, but people are left off and not everyone is included. Many small questions or items to communicate aren’t even sent to avoid email overload. IM is good for one on one quick questions and information sharing, but once again, it gets lost and isn’t saved for anyone else to see.

In comes Yammer. Create a group, and then say “everything to do with the project, communicate it here”, and see what happens. Well, tons of info comes pouring out. Things that were maybe a conversation or IM/Email between two people are now open for the group to see and other people can add their voice to the conversation, or just be aware of the issue. Things you might previously emailed or IM’d, throw them on Yammer. Is there really any reason any project based communication that isn’t of a personal nature can’t be there for the group?

Start using #hashtags, and you start building a knowledge repository. Upload images, files for more info.

Now, you might say, “Well I am going to get Yammer overload!” yes, that may happen. Turn it into a daily digest instead of emails on every post. Hit the site now and then throughout the day. If you really want to get someone’s attention, @ them and make sure you/they have the setting to get alerting on a @ to them, either through IM/SMS or email.

Things to watch out for? Gotta make sure you dump messages to your group, not the main feed, or you end up clogging up people’s feeds. Also, install the desktop app for a better experience.

Can using Yammer lead to more transparency on your project? I believe it can. Try it out, and see what it does for you.

I find this.. exhilarating.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Lync Configuration Information

Cool tip. If you are running Lync 2010, and want to see the current Configuration Information. In the systray, the icon, hold CTRL and right click, and you will get a configuration information menu. Click that and you get your info

From here you can see your URL’s and if everything is set up the way you want it to be. One thing to note, the “refresh” button doesn’t seem to do anything. You need to close the window and reopen it to see changes.

(As a note, you can do the same with with Outlook, and get to the testing menu to test connectivity and configuration)

Categories
Product Reviews

Google TV

Basic review here. Setup was easy. Software ok. Browsing web is cool. If you don’t have cable you are somewhat out of luck. You need an hdmi source to do the more cool things like search and watch “TV” at the same time.

Interested in where it will go with honeycomb. As of now it’s a glorified Netflix, Amazon video, YouTube player. Comparable to Roku. I’d say apple tv beats it by a mile, especially if you’ve bought into the apple ecosystem with iOS and iTunes, etc

Blogged from my iPhone

Categories
Agile

Agile: Projects vs Support

One big questions that comes up ALWAYS when doing Agile is: “How do we deal with support requests (or issues, or helpdesk or operations)?”

Well, the answer, as you figured, is … It Depends.

First, it depends on what kind of project or team you have. Are you Development? Or Business Intelligence? or Creative/Design? or Infrastructure? Or XYZ?

One thing to think of as well is how is your organization structured? I went into a dev group and the developers couldn’t get anything done because customer service/support was constantly hitting them up with issues. What do you expect to happen? Magic? You need a buffer. 2nd Level support. Filter the issues so that there is just a trickle into “3rd Level” or Development.

You could even assign one dev to “3rd Level” for a sprint and reduce their velocity. But it always depends on how much is coming though. You want to reduce, reduce, reduce the noise coming into developers. Buffer.

What happens when there are issues that NEED to be looked into (server down, etc, etc). Well. Your “do’ers” need to look into it. You may have to pull out stories if it takes too long. Reduce the velocity. That is just the way it goes. If support issues continually cause you to pull out stories and reduce velocity, you should assess your organization structure, and get a support structure in place.

Big thing with support is this: YOU NEED TO TRACK STUFF. I can’t stress this enough. Bottom line is I have rarely or if ever seen stuff tracked well. This is a killer for your process. Issues need to be tracked for multiple reasons. Why?

Well, let’s look at a scenario or two.

1. Customer Calls Support
2. They work on issue for hours but never track anything
3. They go to 2nd level with the issue but since they didn’t track anything, who knows what was done already and what was changed, etc
4. 2nd level fumbles around for 3-4 more hours doing the same thing, but again, not tracking anything.
5. The issue gets handed off to 3rd level and it is a complete mess since nothing was tracked.
6. In the end, the issue might route back to 2nd level or whatever
7. In the very end, nothing was tracked at all. Even a Category or Sub Category, who the issue was for, what system, how much time, who worked on it, etc.

Now look at that scenario and think if everything was tracked. What if you could pull in all your support issues and Pivot them, slice and dice, see trends. Well, then you can figure out what you need for resources. Pretty simple actually. But harder in reality. People start working on something and run around like crazy and not tracking anything. It is a big problem.

Back to our main problem. Projects vs Support. Another thing everything depends on is this: Who is prioritizing your work? It is a main driver on what you work on. Someone needs to make a decision and say “This is a support issue, do it NOW, or.. This is not an issue, do it LATER, or.. this is part of our project, do a STORY” or something like that.

If the person who should be your main prioritizer doesn’t buffer or learn how to say NO, then everything because #1 top priority and everything you try to accomplish from a project perspective is worthless. Your prioritizer (if it is the Product Owner, your Manager, the Project Manager, whatever) can learn to buffer, and only let through the extra critical support issues to work on now, then you can dedicate 90-95% of your teams time to project (agile) work.

I think the main question of Projets vs Support really throws people off when it comes to Agile. Some groups are doing nothing but support so they are in a death spiral. They need a 2nd level support structure, or hell, even a 1st level support structure.

Teams that are trying to do Agile but feeling the pain of too many support issues, well they need a 2nd level support buffer.

Teams that are doing Agile but have 1st/2nd level support that isn’t tracking a ton are in need of some process control. (more so for resource management than anything).

As you can see, there are always ways to do things no matter what situation your team might be in, but definitely something you need to asess and figure out before you jump into a process.

Categories
Blogging

7 Years

Been blogging for 7 years now. 975 posts. Hopefully I will get to 1000 this year. I am not doing a ton as far as posting goes, could probably do a lot more. Too many things have my attention now though. My 2.5 year old. My GF. My 75 social networks. My 10,000 things going on at work.

But yet, I still love this blog because it is MINE and I can do what I want, when I want, and control the content and the flow. It has been a good 7 years, It is funny I actually looked up a post back from 2004 today for something I was doing at work.

More to come.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Moving to Office 365 from Google Apps: Follow Up

Earlier I blogged about Moving to Office 365 from Google Apps, and some of my woes.

In the time since, things have been straightened out. First off, what happened to me sucked, but was resolved. I think Microsoft knows they have some initial bugs and they will work it out. What does stand out is that the customer service is top notch. Their forum moderators replied. Their twitter account @Office365 replied. They actually CALLED me and walked through fixing the issue. This was great. They made sure it was working before leaving me hanging.

After I got the issues resolved, I switched my GoDaddy DNS to MSFT DNS name servers and away we go. I reset up my iPhone, iPad syncing with my new Office365 stuff, worked great, found the server url, etc. Android I had to type it in (to find it, log into web mail and go to about off the help icon). I set it up with Outlook 2010 and it works great. Also Mail.app on Mac, works great there too.

I haven’t done much more than just use it. Some things I miss or want? First, in Gmail, you can archive mail right from iOS. Exchange doesn’t have this, but in Outlook you can set up quick steps to do it, so I did that. The OWA interface doesn’t have quick steps, which would be nice. I haven’t used Lync yet as I don’t have anyone to talk to on it, I will dork around with that later. Haven’t used the SharePoint or Office Web Apps yet, it has been more Mail, Contacts, Calendar to start.

I would like to point my mail.domain.com to the Office365 portal for easy access, haven’t looked into it yet.

One other thing I noticed, is that some mail still comes to my old Google Apps account. Facebook mail alerts for sure. They might have a slow DNS change time as most all other mail comes to Office365. More to come as I get into things though.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Reviews

Moving from Google Apps to Office 365

I have been using Google Apps premier since 2007. Almost 4 years. Before that I used hotmail and tried to use the Microsoft ecosystem as I had a Windows Mobile phone, many of them actually. Before Windows Mobile was “cool”. The thing with Google Apps is that it only offered the “core” apps for a loooong time. (Mail, Calendar, Docs, Chat). Recently they allowed you to “transition” to more Google services (apps), such as Reader, Voice, etc, etc.

Now, this sounds great right? Yeah, except in the last 4 years I had to create a regular gmail account to use most of the Google services (YouTube, voice, Reader), and now I have 4 years of content and what not built up with that account. Google wants me to “start fresh” with my Google Apps account? Doesn’t sound like much fun. Also Google+ just came out, and it doesn’t work with Google Apps accounts, another great way for Google to alienate paying customers, and rewarding free ones. You can’t be signed into both a Google Apps and Google Account at the same time (at least without problems) So I end up having to run one browser with Google account and one with Google Apps? No thanks again.

What I decided to do is try something new. There aren’t many options.

1. Hotmail
2. Yahoo
3. Hosted Exchange (Rackspace, etc)
4. Office 365
5. Other

With Hotmail.. It works, I actually changed it over in a hour or so.. but, there is no 1st class citizen mail client on Mac. Mail, other 3rd party, even Outlook, only connect with POP, not with IMAP. iOS at least uses Activesync. This is somewhat of a deal breaker for me, as I like to use a client on the desktop, or at least try them out.

Yahoo is just out, well, because it is Yahoo. Hosted Exchange looks promising, but too much $$ for not the same features I currently get. Office 365 seems like the logical choice.

I was in the beta for Office 365 and dorked around with it a little bit. I decided to take the plunge.

It is a little more expensive than Google Apps a year, but really no other choices. My first concern was with my Google Talk with my Google Apps. Probably not going to work. Why? Well, with Office 365, if you are on the small business plan, you have to delegate your DNS to Office 365. You can create CNAME and A records, but not TXT or SRV records, etc. Google Apps GTalk needs SRV records in your DNS.

Also, when you sign up for Office 365, you get a weird account, not a Windows Live ID, but Online Services ID, like blah@domain.onmicrosoft.com .. and then you have to set up your custom domain inside the Office 365 web app.

Currently, this is where I am at, and I hope to have a follow up to this..

I made all the DNS changes for Office 365. I created another account in my system, and assigned it a license. I made the account admin, so I had 2 admin accounts. Everything was working.

I decided to cleanup the onmicrosoft.com account, by removing the mailbox and account. It had the same “Full Name” as my regular account, Steve Novoselac. I went to delete and it said “Do you want to remove Steve Novoselac”, I was weary but figured it was keyed on email address of the account record, not name.

Boom, it deleted both the records on my account. Currently I can’t even login to my account. Even better with the small business account you don’t get 24/7 support. Just “service tickets” and the community forum. I did put in a service request and a forum post, and I am working through the issue, but it seems ridiculous. Why?

First off, you shouldn’t be able to remove the “last admin” from an account. Second, it should delete by email address and not full name. We will see how and when I get this resolved, but currently I just switched my DNS back to Google Apps so I can continue to receive email.

Another unknown is the Lync online. It is federated with WLM, but I am curious to see how that is all going to work. Giving support a few days and hopefully will have it all sorted out. More to come..