Free Scrum and XP book

I have just downloaded a free book about Scrum and XP from the trenches and added it to my TODO list.

Get the download from InfoQ.

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

ReSharper 4.1 Released

Jet Brains have a minor point release to one of my favourite productivity tools ReSharper.

Since installing it I have noticed that my memory footprint for devenv.exe is much much smaller and the whole IDE and coding experience feels noticeably snappier with Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1.

Hopefully I will notice the same benefits when I next switch back to coding with Visual Studio.NET 2005.

For further details on the release you can visit the release notes page on the Jet Brains site.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/releaseNotes41.html

Google Chrome

A new web browser has arrived. Google Chrome has just been released in beta.

Here are my initial thoughts:-

• The installer worked and it imported all of my Firefox settings without a problem.
  
• The design is simple and clean and feels less cluttered than IE or Firefox.
  
• The tabs work really well and each tab sits within its own process so that hopefully any pages or sites that would normally crash the entire browser will only require the tab closing and thus not losing any work or pages that you have left open.
  
• It is really fast! It launches faster than IE and renders faster than Firefox. The rendering engine appears to be WebKit rather than the Mozilla engine.
  
• It's small! By that I mean that it's memory footprint in task manager is at least 3 times smaller than my Firefox footprint and that is with just the one tab open.
  
• I already miss my Firefox extensions!

So far so good.

I shall be testing all the sites I've worked on and actually use it as my main browser for a little while.

Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control - CTP Release

Microsoft have a .NET control wrapper around the their virtual earth API. There is a good video here that demo's the control.

This is CTP so you cannot use it on production websites unfortunately.

runat != "server"

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/designer.aspx?clear=true&number=286179670#

Inline Edit Box.Net

CodePlex is hosting a .NET control called InlineEditBox.NET that provides in-line text editing functionality.

Ajax examples and demos

Found a new site today called Ajax Rain with some good jquery (and others) examples.

One of the more impressive samples I found was a jquery virtual tour

CSS Grid Layouts

Today I started to build a new website and have been given the design from the graphic designer along with all the images that are needed to build the site.

The next step is to turn the design into XHTML and CSS and create a .NET Master Page for this new design.

Some earlier reading and research has pointed me to some nice CSS frameworks that can help me out with this.

YUI Grids CSS
Blueprint

Both of these frameworks allow you to split up your page into a grid system allowing you to create containers, navigation bars, headers, footers and such like and cover all the browser inconsistencies including IE6.

Hopefully using one of these frameworks will give the site a nice consistent look and feel and one that is standards compliant also.

Not sure which one I will use if any but I will post my findings in a future post.

Users Stories, BDD and Rediscovering Business Benefits

On a project I worked on recently the team used the SCRUM methodology for building the software.

Scrum is just one of the many flavours of agile software development and for the most part it worked really well.

The easy side of any agile project for me are all the good things such as getting the development tree setup in source control, getting a continuous integration server working and practicing techniques such as TDD with tools such as NUnit, TestDriven.NET, RhinoMocks, Selenium and NAnt.

What wasn't quite as easy for the team was the writing of user stories, these are better than BDUP specification documents but are still not a walk in the park to get right.

This is still something that I try and continue to improve my knowledge on and a couple of articles I've read today that have a slightly different take on user story writing than I've previously read.

• User Story And Acceptance Criteria Formatting
• My BDD experiment
• Rediscovering Business Benefits

While writing this, I was listening to "Web 2.0 - Part 2 of 3" by ThoughtWorks

ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate and Spring

I've just finished reading a couple of fantastic articles written by Billy McCafferty that cover ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate and Spring.

• NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET
• S#arp Architecture: ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate and Spring

When I get some downtime I'm going to have a proper look at Billy's S#arp Architecture.

While writing this, I was listening to "Sorting out Internationalization with Michael Kaplan" by Scott Hanselman

ReSharper 4.0 Keyboard Shortcut Cheatsheet

The company credit card has been dusted off again and this time to upgrade my ReSharper license from the older 2.x version to the new 4.x version.

The new version has full support for C# 3.0 and LINQ and has ASP.NET performance improvements.

All of the shortcuts and productivity gains I used in 2.x work in exactly the same way although most of my current projects are built in Visual Studio 2005 so I'm not getting the full benefit of the new version yet.

This will be changing soon as some upcoming greenfield projects will allow me to use Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET MVC and many other cool new things!

I am going to print out the keyboard shortcut cheatsheet pdf and stick it above my desk.

While writing this, I was listening to "Sorting out Internationalization with Michael Kaplan" by Scott Hanselman

Windows Sysinternals tools

The Windows Sysinternals team create a superb suite of system administration utilities which you would normally download and install onto your local machine.

This suite of tools includes a replacement for the windows task manager called Process Explorer which also helps debug file and registry operations.

While this suite of tools is incredibly useful as it is they have now released online versions of them at http://live.sysinternals.com/ meaning that you can simply point your browser to that link and run any of the tools without installing it locally.

The main advantage here is that you don't have to keep updated as they release new versions.

I guess this is another example of computing in the cloud!

Microsoft should get rid of the runat="server" tag from ASP.NET!

I write ASP.NET code most of the time and do so with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003/2005/2008 and it has become really tiresome to add the runat="server" tag all the time!

I wouldn't mind if there were runat="client" or runat="pub"  options but there isn't.

So please Microsoft stop us from having to use it!