The DigiBarn and Facebook - A Killer Way to Meet Old School Geeks?

The Digibarn is a museum of old computers. They have a great virtual collection of every computer that I've ever owned and then some.

Here is just a small sample of weird computer systems I've owned or used extensively over the years:

• Coleco Adam
• TI 99/4a
• Model 100
• PC JR
• Commodore PET

Facebook currently has lots of curious personality matching tests such as "Which Disney Princess Are You?", Celebrity matching applications and personality comparison tests.

So here is a killer app idea for meeting old school geeks - why not combine the power of the Digibarn with the social network for Facebook to create a profile based on computers you owned over the past 20 years? Imagine having a date with someone who also owned a TI 99/4A, just like you? Imagine the nostalgic conversations about GOSUB, sprites and tape drives you could have over dinner?

At least it would be better than that Zombie Facebook application floating around these days...

Take that First Step Toward Becoming a Legend (in IT Governance)!

I received this spam from Oracle the other day and I nearly fell off my chair laughing about how marketing people can really get things wrong if they try to apply consumeristic jingoisms to IT related products:

Do people in "IT Governance" (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) really need such a confidence boost that they need to be pandered to by suggestions that the systems, memos and processes they put in place will make them "legends" and their companies "Admired by your industry, as a leader in IT governance"?

And as an executive, imagine if the first impression of your company's brand was a "leader in IT governance" or that the "company's legacy" was really good IT governance?

I hope I never work for that company... :)

Best Logging Strategy using Microsoft Enterprise Library?

The Microsoft Enterprise Library has a really good Logging Application Block that allows you to make your logging infrastructure configurable. By simply typing in the following code:

Logger.Write("log this!");

you can log to a destination configured in your config file.

The Microsoft Enterprise Library out of the box provides the following destinations for logging messages:

• Email
• File
• Database
• Message Queue
• Text File
• WMI Event
• Custom location

I took our web site and our main global error handler and did a dump routine of all exceptions to the log and it worked great. But the discussion in our team arose - where should we log? Here are some of our ideas as we debated the issue:

• The least error prone seems to be the flat file. The custom location seems the worst option simply we would hope that our proprietary code is less tested in less real world scenarios than Microsoft's Enterprise Library components.
• The idea of logging to the database is attractive from a reporting perspective, but everyone on the team felt like it was risky given that the most typical scenario for an error in the application itself was a database related error. I suppose if we had the logging database seperate from our application database then this would reduce the risk, but we don't have the resources for such a move, so if our application were to kill the database it would take down any logging sources there as well.
• Even with the flat file, it is possible that it will fail. A simple scenario for it failing would that the file is read-only or the ASPNET process doesn't have permission to access the file. So we need at least two logging mechanisms to provide redundancy. The Enterprise Library allows for this - you can configure more than one listener for every log message being written.
• Our second challenge with using flat files is that they no provide a notification mechanism like email. So if there is an exception, the file has to be constantly monitored or periodically checked. Therefore, combining an email message and a flat file backing store seemed like a decent combination. If the email fails, then we may not know for a day or two but at least the error will be logged. If the file fails, then at least we'll get the email.
• The event log is not a bad option either and its generally easier to monitor as most monitoring tools already handle event log monitoring. The one issue with using the event log that I have found is that if you use an event log source that doesn't exist the logging will fail without any notification to you. Your error will simply disappear and won't be logged. You can use any existing EventLog source or create a new one in the registry for your custom logging needs. In addition, you have to make sure that the ASPNET account has permission to write to the event log.

That's where we are at so far - its not quite bullet-proof yet but its getting there. If you have any further suggestions or thoughts, leave them as a comment!

Arcade Game Prices are Finally Catching Up With Inflation

I've been playing arcade coin-op games since I was a little kid. When I started playing these games, they were 25 cents a throw. If you were good at them of course your quarter could go a long way. For example, there was a game called WonderBoy that I could play for about 45 minutes on one quarter.



Somehow despite 20 years of inflation, the price of an arcade game was stuck at 25 cents. Eventually, the prices went up by multiple credits being required, especially for newer games. The current arcade games seem to cost on average $1-2 per contest.

But if you went to the back of the arcade, you could still typically find an old Galaga, Gyruss or Pacman sitting in the back still running for a quarter a throw.

Well not so fast anymore - I was in one of the last arcades left in the city and these older games have now been replaced by emulators which allows the arcade owner to change the price and also house multiple video games in a single console. This makes sense - given the size in memory of any of these old video games, you could house hundreds of them on a single memory chip.

So I had fun today playing the old favourites, but I'm a bit disappointed that it cost me 50 cents. I guess after 20 years of dwindling attendance and increasing costs, the prices have finally gone up.

Thankfully, I have MAME which allows me to play any old video game for free!

Is Google Analytics Having Trouble Keeping Up?

Since I started this blog, I have been using Google Analytics to measure traffic to the site. In general, its a fabulous service and works really well, until recently.

I've noticed that in the past month or so, Google Analytics seems to have trouble keeping up with the traffic. I've noticed that the numbers reported are lower than expected and stay that way for 1-2 days and then as presumably the engine crawls through the right logs in queue, it catches up.

One way to tell for sure whether you're having a similar problem is compare your Google Analytics numbers to your Ad Sense numbers. Ad Sense seems to be more accurate and is updated in real time. Google Analytics is queue based and so tends to need some time to catch up. I've found in recent days that Ad Sense gives me a better indication of short term stats than Analytics.

For my blog, this is not a huge problem. But this is yet again a mark against the "software as a service" model - would you want to trust your corporate infrastructure to a queue in the cloud that can get bogged down because of an influx of unexpected growth?

Ad Words and Negative Content

The great site Worse Than Failure had a few images today of examples where legitimate ads were being shown side by side with negative content:

Having ad sense on my blog, I have noticed the same thing. I wrote a couple posts on the failure of Canada's tax software, and if you go to this post the ads displayed are for tax software!

Isn't this a pretty basic requirement for online advertising, e.g. don't put my ad for Levi's Jeans on a web page where the content is "I hate Levi's Jeans!"? Why after 10+ years of online advertising has the experts at Google and others figured out how to targets ads to the right content. In my example, the right ads would be those marketing to people reading about the failures of the tax system, e.g. tax lawyers, H&R block, etc. and not tax software providers.

Project Planning in an Agile Project

Tate Stuntz has an interesting post on his blog arguing that Project Plans are obsolete and hard to maintain when doing Agile projects. In my experience on agile projects, project planning and Gantt chart making definitely has to change, but there are still ways I think you can make MS Project and Gantt charts work for you in an agile context. Here are my recommendations based on my experience:

• Learn to use MS Project efficiently (see my previous post for recommendations). I've seen PM's take 2 weeks to build a project plan - if this is you then trying to work this way in a 2 week iteration cycle means you're not moving fast enough. You have to be at the point where you could re-boot your project plan in a matter of hours so that you can adjust quickly.
• Use MS Project for planning and not for tracking. If you're working with short iteration cycles, you'll see improved tracking by simply management by walking around. In addition, measuring project velocity is more valuable than percentage complete since in an Agile project the finish line is not always defined.
• Use a project plan for iteration planning at a macro-level and not for iteration tracking within an iteration cycle. What I like doing is maintaining a project plan with a simple list of user stories in each 2 week iteration. That allows me to track dependencies between user stories pretty easily. At review time at the end of an iteration, we discuss the next iteration with our stakeholders and reset expectations by re-forecasting the plan (which takes no more than an hour of work). That gives stakeholders a good understanding of what we currently see as in and out of scope and when features may be coming up. This is highly valuable and I find is critical for buy in for stakeholders - if the response from the team is simply, "we can only see to the end of the next iteration cycle" this tends to make business users very nervous.
• If you need pretty Gantt charts, one of my favourite methods is to use Visio - it provides pretty Gantt charts for presentations without the fuss of Project.
• I tend to use the whole team as a big pool for planning iterations. This gets you out of the micro-detail of having to assign one user story to one person, another user story to another person and so on. If I have 4-5 developers on a team, that gives me 70 hours x 4-5 developers for a total iteration budget of 280-350 hours. I can then do a good estimate of each user story that includes planning, development and QA with the team. We simply add up a bunch of these stories into the budget and that becomes the iteration. The way to do this in MS Project is to take your steps and instead of assigning individuals assigned to each task and running them in parallel try simply taking a generic role of "developer" and assigning them at 500% to every task in sequence. You can then tell how much time you're going to spend across the entire team without having to fuss with all the micro-dependencies.
• For preliminary planning, use low-tech Gantt chart tools such as whiteboards, post-it notes, etc. I can create a Gantt chart without MS Project using a white board, some markers and post-it notes. This works great without the overhead of the tooling getting in the way. If you want to preserve it, simply take a digital photo of it and store the picture.

I think if you follow some of these techniques as a Project Manager, you can still sleep at night without feeling completely out of control and yet move faster and leaner. In addition, you can use project planning to help sell the concept of Agile to stakeholders who aren't as comfortable with the XP style of development and give them the comfort of a traditional project plan without locking yourself into the traditional bureaucratic approach to Project Management.

Good CIO Level article on Silverlight

CIO Magazine posted a good summary on Silverlight. We used the technology in a Proof of Concept to build a kiosk for our donor hall and from a user experience perspective it's a great toolset. CIO is right to point that Version 1.1 is the version you want if you want to target the platform as it supports the .NET framework and includes support for LINQ and web services.

Compared to Flash, the biggest advantage I see is that XAML is true 3D. I remember building things like car configurators for BMW and to try and get Flash to do fake 3D was a huge challenge. Silverlight is real 3D which means that doing animations that include zooming, tiling, sliding, and using 3D models could lead to some very interesting interfaces.

I'm interested to see how this platform evolves - I can see this tool becoming a real hit in the business applications space. Think of all the VB.NET intermediate developers out there who struggle with creating a really nice interface to an otherwise functional application. With a little bit of creative design and some nice tooling, Silverlight could turn a boring non-user friendly database application into something much more intuitive.

Low Tech Approaches to Requirements - Part 3

For those who missed Parts 1 and 2, see the following previous posts:

• Part 1: Different Techniques on using non-tech tools for requirements gathering
• Part 2: Using existing tech tools in simpler ways to speed up requirements gathering.

One of my staff sent me this image today and I thought it was a great example of how to use low-tech approaches to conversations. He simply took a screen shot of a screen, threw it into MS Paint and then started making changes with the developer beside him.

Between them in 5-10 minutes they had a "language" for what the marks on the screen mean:

• Red lines through something mean to get rid of it
• A box with text means to insert a new column
• A line on a checkbox means that on checking it something will happen
• etc.

So instead of using UML, fancy wireframes, or some bureacractic documentation process, try simply taking a screen capture and throwing it into Paint!

Managing Configuration Files and .NET

I've been using the .NET config files lately, and its been rather frustrating lately because of the confusion that arises when running a bunch of different ways to access the same code.

In my scenario, I have a class library called DBAccess.dll and I call it in the following ways:

1. From a web site using the ASP.NET built in web server launched from VS 2005.
2. From a web site running in IIS.
3. From a forms application
4. By running TestDriven.NET using a seperate test assembly.
5. From a windows service.

In all these cases, I'm expecting to get configuration values through the main configuration file for connection string so that it can be used by Microsoft Enterprise Library.

With so many options, .NET doesn't make it easy for you because of the differences in naming conventions on the default configuration file, e.g. in the case of a web app it expects a web.config, a forms app expects an app.config and if you run the NUnit application it wants the assembly config file, e.g. DBAccess.dll.config. Maintaining all these configuration files is a nightmare!

So in sorting through this, I came up with a few basic strategies to combat this configuration file overload:

• If you add an App.Config file to your class library project, it will automatically translate this into Assembly.Dll.Config for you.
• For NUnit, it expects a config file that is rooted to your test assembly. It does not read any dependent assemblies config files, app.config, web.config, etc. even if its the same directory of your assembly. Alternatively, you can add configuration information directly into the app.config file of the NUnit executable (either the GUI or the Console) but this isn't a very portable approach.
• If you have an App.Config file and an assembly config file, .NET will always read the App.Config file. It does not by design read your assembly specific config files. There is some code floating around that can do this for you if you want to have more distributed configuration mechanisms that are attached to assemblies instead of executables. This is one way to mitigate the problem of re-using an assembly across multiple projects where some are web projects and some are forms projects.
• Another great alternative is to use proper build files instead of the default studio builds. Either MSBuild or NANT will allow you the flexibility to store a single configuration file and rename it and then deploy it to the appropriate destination. The tricky part would be that you may need a configuration file named Assembly.Dll.config for your unit tests if you've incorporated them into your build process and a final App.config or Web.config for running the executable.
• Another great idea that I have used before is to use the Microsoft Enterprise Library to specifiy an external configuration file. This removes the naming problem with your configuration files in that you can have a seperate external file that represents the master configuration file and simply have Web.Config, App.Config, Assembly.Dll.Config point to your external file. This works quite nicely in my experience as long as you remember to add the external file to your project and to configure studio to always copy it into your build directory.
• You can build your own configuration loader. I have done this with custom defined configuration sections by having code in the custom section that contains a path to an external configuration file. You can arbitrarily load up any configuration file in code and grab whatever sections out of it. This is really useful for custom configuration sections where you want to provide code that saves and loads the configuration file with an arbitrary name. One important note with this strategy - there are cases where the Enterprise Library does the configuration loading for you, e.g. the DatabaseFactory will load connection strings for you automatically. In these cases, you cannot provide a configuration section or source as an object so you're stuck with the App.Config, Web.Config, etc. as a starting point.
• The ConfigurationManager in .NET allows you to open the Machine.config file. You might want to peer into this file directory to look at global values instead of your local App.config values.
• You can use a complete different configuration framework - no is forcing you to use App.config just because it's there (although most people do so). For example, look at Nini as an option (although I haven't tried it yet!)

I hope that provides some ideas on how to manage configuration files in a way that will allow you to have more re-usable configuration schemes than a basic App.config or Web.config file so that it can be used across multiple projects and different application contexts.