General Interest

eXtreeeeeeeme Project Management

Chris Williams — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:41:44 GMT

In addition to learning WWF (that's Windows Workflow Foundation, Paul) I'm also reading a book given to me at the client, titled: eXtreme Project Management.

I haven't read any PM books before, and I've only just started this one. The intent is for me to read, discuss and learn, so I figure why not open it up to a broader audience and see what you think too...

1) Have any of you read this book? It's by Doug DeCarlo, published in 2004.

2) If you have, what did you think?

3) Whether you have or not, if you know a thing or two about eXtreme Project Management vs Traditional Project Management... feel free to speak up as well.

Thanks!

edit: AaronE has a relevant blogpost here that is worthwhile reading.

Kansas City Day of .NET

Chris Williams — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:35:53 GMT

If you're in the Kansas City area and you haven't heard about Kansas City Day of .NET (or KCDODN) then you're missing out.

KCDODN is Saturday, December 6th at the Centriq Training center. (Go here to register...)

Looks like 4 tracks of .NET Developer goodness, including a session by yours truly. GWB'ers Jeff and John will be there as well... so come say hi if you're there.

Kansas City Day of Dot Net
	Development	Architecture	SharePoint	Special Interest
8:00am - 9:00am	Registration & Breakfast
9:00am - 10:15am	Russell Ball Increasing developer productivity with ReSharper	Raymond Magness The Idea Exchange: Managing Features By Inspiring Customers	Michael Lotter Building and deploying custom SharePoint Application pages (_layouts) with Visual Studio 2008	Timothy WrightUsing JQuery
10:30am - 11:45am	Chris Williams XNA Development That Rocks	Troy Tuttle Continuous Integration: The "Original" Best Practice	Todd Kitta SharePoint and Silverlight	Jeff Julian Developing Multi-Touch Applications for Windows 7
12:00pm - 1:00pm	Lunch
1:00pm - 2:15pm	Rob Reynolds Inversion of Control with Windsor Container	Dru Sellers & Chris Patterson Message Based Application Development with MassTransit	Becky Isserman Cheap and Easy Wildcard Search	John Alexander Developing for Microsoft Surface Applications
2:30pm - 3:45pm	Rob Kraft SQL Injection: How it works and how to stop it	Yair Segal Entity Framework versus Linq to SQL	Steve Walker Team Development using SharePoint	Muljadi Budiman Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers
4:00pm - 5:15pm	Lee Brandt Your Code is Trying to Tell You Something: Reading Static Code Analysis Metrics using NDepend	Van Ice Adding Silverlight to your Enterprise Applications	Todd Bleeker Sharepoint custom membership provider	Shawn McCubbin Microsoft Dynamics
5:30pm - 6:30pm	After Party & Giveaways

new gig

Chris Williams — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:30:19 GMT

I've been pretty quiet the last week and a half (at least in my blog... I'm still twittering plenty.) The reason for this is that I've started a new gig with Magenic and I've been really, really busy.

This new gig has me traveling from Minneapolis to a smallish town named Mitchell, SD and back each week. Between work and travel (and spending most of my nights getting up to speed on new stuff and new concepts) I haven't had much time to blog regularly.

So, I'm going to try to make a conscious effort to reverse that trend. I still have a few more of my NINE Questions interviews in the can, so I'll be putting those out there, and I'll try to provide some updates on the fun experiences I'm having learning about Windows Workflow (among other things.)

(Besides... D'Arcy is starting to catch up with me and well, we can't have that...)

It's all over but the shoutin...

Chris Williams — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:53:34 GMT

Looks like we have ourselves a new president.

I've always considered myself apolitical, never really caring who was in the white house, mostly because I don't believe it made a difference. The disaster we casually refer to as "the last 8 years" cured me of that philosophy. Turns out, the incompetence of one man, can actually make a difference...

So, it was with gradually increasing interest that I began following the 2008 electoral race. This is a landmark year, in that no matter who won, things were going to be different. After all, not only would it be a vast improvement over the current administration, but it would also be a landmark election either because Barack Obama would become our first African American President, or because Sarah Palin would be our first woman Vice President.

Things are changing. I spent most of this evening wondering how it would turn out. At the time of writing this, CNN has pronounced a winner. It's not who I would have picked, not that the other guy was much better, mind you...

Time will tell.

Heartland Developers Conference - Omaha

Chris Williams — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:43:48 GMT

Just got back from HDC - Omaha last night and it was a blast. (The drive home was a little crazy... apparently my GPS has developed a crack habit, but that's a whole other story.)

Wednesday -
Jason Bock and I arrived in Omaha around 11:30am and after a quick lunch at the hotel with Amanda Laucher, the three of us piled into the jeep and were off to meet Joe Olsen and the GeeksWithBlogs crew at the PhenomBlue office for a Microsoft Surface demo. We hung out there for a bit and chatted up some of the team and got a tour of the place. Joe's offices are amazingly cool and home to a great bunch of obviously creative folks. The Surface demo was neat and it was my first chance to get a look at a finished product. (I had seen early prototypes.) I was especially interested in the WPF / XNA possibilities along with the multi-touch capabilities.
After the demo, we wandered around Omaha for a bit, eventually getting back to the hotel at which point Jason decided he needed a nap (having been up since 4am) so Amanda and I decided to wander downtown, eventually finding an interesting bar to check out. After that we wandered back to the Convention Center and roamed around there, checking out some of the other events. "The Big O Show" was wrapping up, so we walked into the Exhibit Hall and checked that out for a bit, snagging some free samples and talking to some of the exhibitors... There was a pretty cool super stretch limo that was totally pimped out, so we HAD to check that out, of course.
Finished with The Big O Show, we still had time to kill before the pre-party so we wandered around upstairs and did some urban exploring... making our way into the back of the arena and watching them set up for the Mary J Blige concert later that evening, before someone spotted us and we had to leave. We figured that we'd have better luck checking things out later and maybe even getting backstage once the lights were out and the concert started.
After leaving the arena, we scouted the Hilton looking for a way to get on the roof (never found one) and ended up wandering through one of the kitchens, mostly by accident. The Hilton is pretty cool, because there's lots of interesting stuff to see... like sculptures and stuff. We roamed around there for a while and eventually hung out at the GWB suite for a bit before deciding to head back to the convention center to see what was going on over there.
Once we got back to the convention center, we discovered that Godfather's Pizza was having their big 30th anniversary company meeting, so we wandered around and mingled with those folks for a bit. They had a live band that was setting up, and of course they were right next door to our party so if things got boring, we had options. We also saw "the godfather" guy, that people were going to be getting their pictures taken with, so we figured... why not, and went over to talk to the camera guy and got a couple of test-shots taken.
Our party STILL hadn't started, although Rock Band was set up, so we hung out for a little longer and played some rock band and started raiding the bar for olives and whatever else we could find before wandering out again (curse this ADD) and seeing what else was in the convention center.
We ended up wandering back over to the arena to see if Mary J Blige was onstage yet, but she wasn't. We did catch a little of the opening act (Robin Thicke, I think) and noticed that there weren't very many folks in their yet. We were pretty much over it by then so we decided to head back to the HDC pre-party. On the way back to the party, we noticed the Godfather's party was jamming pretty good so we snagged a couple of the "godfather hats" that everyone was wearing and cruised in for a bit. Turns out they had a pretty decent free bar, so we grabbed a couple drinks before heading over to the HDC event.
By now, things were picking up a bit at the pre-party and there were people around we actually knew so we decided to hang out, play some more rock band and talk to people we hadn't seen in a while. Jason showed up a little while later, poker chips in hand... so a few of us sat down and played poker, but it was pretty crazy in there and this one drunk guy (sitting right next to me) was being a real pain in the ass, so I went all in on a hand I knew I couldn't win just so I would have an excuse to walk away from the table.
Eventually the party started thinning out, and by that point I was completely beat, having gotten up at 4am (and having a few drinks at the party) so it was time to head back to the hotel and get some sleep before the conference officially started on Thursday morning.

Thursday -
This was Day 1 of HDC and since my session wasn't until after lunch, I had an opportunity to wander around and check out the various vendor booths and also hit some other sessions. My buddies Jeff, John and Jerod were at the GWB booth, doing some podcasting and they had Joe's (Phenom Blue) Surface machine there for the IAMDIGITAL project (and for other demos, including an XNA one.)
After breakfast and the keynote (Joe Stagner, who I had seen in Minneapolis) there were a lot of interesting talks to choose from, so I caught part of Jason Bock's talk on Reflection and part of Mike Benkovich's demo talk, eventually catching up with my buddy Rod Paddock who had come in from Austin to speak at HDC. Amanda, Jason, PhatBoyG (I wish I could remember his real name) and I went out for some local food (mmm bar burgers) at lunch and then got back in time for me to prep for my talk before going on that afternoon.
My talk went really well, it was probably the highest attendance I've had yet (a little daunting at first, though I warmed up pretty quickly) and I got some really good questions although most of them were near the end or after the talk. (I guess they didn't want to interrupt?) Kent Tegels and Amanda hung out for my session, which was cool... it's always nice to have a friendly face in there. I even managed to gain a few more Twitter followers from people in my talk.
Once I was done with my talk, I wandered around the conference some more and then Rod & I caught Jeff Brand's Silverlight talk and then it was time to head back to the hotel for a semi-private get together with Microsoft and some of the community influencers. While there I ran into a few familiar faces that I hadn't seen in a while, mostly folks from previous conferences and got to meet with some more Microsoft folks in the DE program. Of course, I also got to hang out with the GWB gang again.
After that party, it was time for the HDC Attendee party so a bunch of us walked over there and had a great time. The turnout wasn't quite as high as expected, since this was the biggest HDC yet, we were expecting a larger crowd at the party but that just meant more food (and drinks) for those of us who did. The party was a lot of fun and I got to meet some new people I wouldn't have met otherwise, just by sitting down at a random table and chatting folks up.
Eventually the party started to die down and some of us ended up in the bar downstairs for a while, there was some live music (one guy with a guitar) and we hung out there for a bit before eventually calling it a night and making our way back to the hotel to get some sleep for day 2.

Friday -
I woke up absurdly early on Friday, around 4am... no idea why, but it gave me plenty of time to get ready for the day. I went ahead and packed everything up and checked out of the hotel, packed up the car and still had time to get over to the conference center for some breakfast and to catch the Infragistics (Jason Beres) keynote. Amanda was already there, since the conference center had free wifi (unlike the Hilton... booo) so all of us were sitting around the table with out laptops open doing some work and catching up on emails before the 2nd keynote. I got a chance to talk a little F# with her, while chatting with Rod and a few others.
I hadn't seen Jason Bere's keynote before since he wasn't at Minneapolis, and it was really good. After that wrapped up it was time for Amanda's F# talk and then the plan was to hit the road. (That was the plan anyway)
Amanda's talk kicked ass. It was the first time I had seen her present, since every time we're at the same conference we end up speaking in the same time slot. I'm definitely glad I caught it. She does a great job of making a potentially very dry topic actually entertaining. Having already started learning F# on my own I learned quite a bit during the talk and got some pretty cool ideas on things I want to research further like Domain Specific Languages.
BTW: One of the cool things about Amanda is her ability to really hone in on someone who is asking her a question and give them a thorough answer. So many people in our industry seem to be constantly scanning the horizon to see what else is going on while talking to someone (I do it too, and I blame my ADD) but I've never seen Amanda do that. When she's talking to you, it's like you're only person in the room. It's something I definitely need to work on.
After Amanda's talk was over, we hung out for a bit and discussed upcoming events (SoCalCodeCamp, PDC, Iowa Code Camp, Chippewah Valley Code Camp) and our pending co-presentation at Codemash (still waiting to hear if we got selected.) By that time it was lunch, so we grabbed some lunch at the conference and hung out with the Microsoft gang for a bit.
I had been promising the GWB guys I would do a podcast (see how that plan to hit the road right after Amanda's talk was quickly going down the drain??) so I did about 15 minutes with them and the called Jason to see where he was, and of course he was sitting in someone's talk so I waited until that was done... said goodbye again to all the people I had already said goodbye too earlier (hey.. what? you're still here?) and played with the surface some more.
Eventually Javier Lozano's talk let out and we got out of there and got back to the Jeep so we could hit the road. The battery in the Garmin was pretty much dead so I used the GPS in my phone to get us out of there and back on track. Apparently my phone had secretly developed a crack habit when I wasn't looking since the GPS decided to take us off the interstate and onto a series of backroads, dirt roads and closed roads... 6 hours, and lots of detours later, we finally made it back to Minneapolis.
It was a great conference and always awesome to see everyone. I can hardly wait for PDC next week.

Go Vikings

Chris Williams — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:48:06 GMT

This weekend sure was busy.

Friday night, we had the Twin Cities Code Camp V pre-party, and then a trip to a bar downtown... I think I got home around 3am.

Saturday, My XNA talk at Twin Cities Code Camp V went really well and then we had the after party at Joe Sensor's, followed by a trip to the Casino later that evening, and then a late night poker tournament at Jason Bock's house after that.

Sunday morning (today) a bunch of us met up at IHOP for breakfast and then went to the Vikings game. (This is my second TCCC & Vikings game... a fun tradition.) Best of all, the Vikings won this time.

I've got a couple days of work and then I'm headed to Heartland Developers Conference - Omaha for three days. I'll get back just in time for the Zombie Pub Crawl in downtown Minneapolis saturday night.

I'll get some sleep one of these days.

Happy 5th Birthday GWB

Chris Williams — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:48:09 GMT

Today is the 5th Birthday of GeeksWithBlogs! Congrats guys for kicking everyone's ass and making this THE premiere technical blogging community and home to so many badass cool people. Jeff and John deserve a HUGE pat on the back.

http://geekswithblogs.net/jjulian/archive/2008/10/08/125708.aspx

HDC starts tonight!!

Chris Williams — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:36:30 GMT

The Heartland Developers Conference has come to Minneapolis and things start kicking off tonight with the pre-conference party, down at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis.

I attended the HDC last year in Omaha as a representative of Magenic and enjoyed it so much I decided to speak at the event this year (both in Minneapolis and Omaha.)

I'm speaking on Monday and my time slot has some pretty tough competition with Andrew Troelson discussing LINQ Query Internals and Amanda Laucher discussing Real World F#. If I wasn't speaking at the same time, I would definitely be sitting in Amanda's session. She's a good friend of mine and an excellent presenter (and F# is pretty neat stuff too.)

In addition to these sessions, Monday also features a keynote on the present and future of development (Rocky Lhotka, Magenic) and talks throughout the day on Silverlight 2.0, Reflection (Jason Bock, Magenic), the Managed Extensibility Framework & lots more... really compelling stuff.

Monday evening is the Developer Jam Party which I don't know much about but it sounds pretty interesting.

Tuesday looks equally promising, with a couple of really interesting topics from Ted Neward (customizing your .net app with scripts & pragmatic xml services) and a really useful session on open source .net tools from Javier Lozano. There's also a talk on ASP.NET MVC (Javier Lozano, again) which I'm looking forward to checking out.

It's going to be a great time. See you there!

Saturday Night Fun

Chris Williams — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:15:56 GMT

Mission: Abandoned Mill

Debrief:
We've been here before, but haven't come close to exploring all of it.

We met up after dark and drove out to the site. Getting there was fairly quick and uneventful, and aside from passing a couple of bicyclists, it looked like we weren't going to run into anyone on the way in.

Just before we got to the entrance though, a car full of guys (looked like teenagers or early twenties) pulled up and tried going down a road that was (clearly) marked "do not enter." Confused, they turned around, and drove a few feet then stopped. From the pieces of their conversation I could overhear (their windows were down) it was apparent they were interested in the same place we were. Judging by their obvious confusion on how to access it though, I'd say it was their first time there.

On one hand, it was kind of cool that we were running into other explorers (if in fact, that's who they were) but it also concerned me since we had no idea of how these guys would handle themselves. Would they be reckless and stupid? Were they drunk? Were they just looking to vandalize stuff? It may sound hypocritical, but there's a certain code we go by on these missions. We're there to observe cool and interesting stuff, whether it's graffiti, urban decay or old & interesting architecture and equipment. We aren't there to get drunk and act stupid, or to vandalize property, or to get high or hurt ourselves or others. (I'll get off my soapbox now.)

So, we were faced with a dilemma. Do we engage these guys early on, or take a wait and see attitude? Since we didn't really want to be hanging around the entrance to this place for very long and didn't know how they would respond to us, we decided to break line of sight on these guys and slip in through the entrance while nobody else was coming up the road.

Once past the main entrance, we walked fairly quickly along the fence line towards the back of the property, looking back occasionally to see if we had any company heading our way. So far so good.

We went around the side of the building and found our usual point of entrance. The door was locked up from the inside, but the hole was still there so getting in wasn't a problem. At first glance, not much had changed since the last time we were there. Then I noticed there was a door open that I'd never seen open before. It led outside to a scaffold and I'm surprised we missed it since we walked right past it on the way in.

I know it sounds preachy (again) but we try not to leave any obvious entrances that weren't already there. If it's obvious someone has been there, then the police are more likely to check out the rest of the building, and we would probably lose our entrance as well as the one that attracted their attention in the first place.

Anyway, after a quick glance at the scaffold and a look around to see if anyone was out there, we decided to close the door, lock it down and continue upward. Since we'd been here before, our main goals were to check out the bridge and get to the roof.

A couple floors up, we were looking around and I heard "lights out." That's never good, since it means there's potentially trouble nearby. Waiting for a few minutes and looking out the windows, I never saw anyone, but one of the others saw someone walking around with a flashlight outside. The fact that it was just one guy meant it was most likely a security guy or possibly even a cop, and not the group of guys we saw earlier. (Considering the abandoned state of the building, my money wasn't on security guy either... there was a third option, he might be a scrapper. Those guys are generally bad news.)

Eventually, we started working our way back up again, being extra careful not to let our flashlights hit any windows on the way up. The open staircase is always a bit creepy, since its all metal and a little rickety. If you trip or slip, its a long fall, and when you're trying to prevent light pollution, it can make for a tricky climb. It's already showing quite a bit of rust and I'm not sure how much longer it has, but I'd guess a few more years... as long as we don't over tax it.

Next stop was the 6th floor, which had an exit to an adjacent rooftop and a ladder leading to the roof. After a quick look around, and some more time looking outside to see if anyone was out there, we continued up.

Access to the "bridge" is actually between two floors, and that was our next stop. We didn't have all the equipment we needed to go across the bridge, but we did want to investigate it further, so we went in a few feet and checked the floor, which appears to be fairly stable. Even though its made of wood, it's pretty thick and is probably (hopefully?) reinforced by beams underneath. (From the outside, looking up you can see one support structure, about midpoint, that goes from the ground to the bridge.) I really want to get across that bridge, to get to the stacks on the other side. We need to do it fairly soon, since it gets REALLY windy in the winter here and I don't want to be standing on top of a silo 200 feet up in the air with 30-40 mph winds at my back.

So after checking out the bridge a little better, we continued up a couple more floors to the top floor. Last time we were here, I didn't see the top floor so this was something new. It was pretty interesting, with some elevated structures and ladders leading to platforms. We didn't see any kind of roof access though, so I'm pretty sure the only way to get up there is going to be via the ladder outside the 6th floor.

The view from the top floor is pretty incredible, and it gave us a good opportunity to see just how big (and damned high) this place really is. It also provided a good view of the adjacent facility which is also believed to be abandoned (and that place is even bigger than this one!!)

The descent back down the stairs was pretty quick (as usual) and fortunately uneventful. We were still running relatively low light just in case there was someone outside interested in our activities, so the stairs were a little tricky. Once we got down the bottom, and back outside, we closed up our door and started the walk back to the car.

We never saw the guy or the group, and figuring it was enough fun for one night, we decided to call it a successful mission and head out.

CSLA Light

Chris Williams — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:29:36 GMT

Rocky Lhotka has just released Beta 1 of CSLA .NET for Silverlight framework (and a corresponding version for Windows).

If you are unfamiliar with CSLA .NET, it is one of the most widely used business application development frameworks for the .NET platform. I expect it will be extremely widely used in Silverlight as well, since it provides even more direct benefits to Silverlight developers! CSLA .NET for Silverlight abstracts many of the complex issues faced when building business applications in Silverlight, and helps provide the same level of productivity and power developers are accustomed to on the .NET platform.

You can read an overview here:
http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/OverviewOfCSLANET36ForWindowsAndSilverlight.aspx

And you can find download links here: http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/CSLANET36ForWindowsAndForSilverlightBeta1Released.aspx

To my knowledge, CSLA .NET for Silverlight is the first major framework targeting Silverlight 2.0 to enter the beta phase, and Rocky expects to release the final version of CSLA .NET for Silverlight as Silverlight 2.0 itself is released.

And best of all, all the sample apps are in VB (as well as C#). And he's been primarily using VB in the demos when speaking about the framework, and the various issues he’s had to address in building such an ambitious project on Silverlight 2.0. (so all you folks wondering about the future of VB w/ CSLA can rest easy.)