52 Books Goal

Beginning of this year I set myself a goal to read 52 books or a new book every week.

This was to hone my skills in the areas of

• Economics
• Finance
• Communication
• Marketing

Today I achieved this goal with the completion of  my 52nd book for this year:

‘Buy-In Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down By John P. Kotter’

This book has some great tips on concept selling and persuasion. I highly recommend it.

Multiple Monitors – Remote Desktop

We tried to start a multi-monitor remote desktop session today on Windows 7 (RDP 6.1.7600) and couldn’t get it to work.

Easiest solution to this was invoking RDP from the run command (Windows key + R)

mstsc.exe /W:3200 /H:900

where:

W = Monitor 1 Width + Monitor 2 Width in pixels

H = Smallest monitor’s height in pixels

Finally

I finally did what I always wanted to do, but never had the courage to take action.

If things change, then this is me marking today as the day when it all began.

Google docs integration

If you are like me and use Google Docs for storing and managing your personal documents, then you will find OffiSync very useful.

It basically allows you to open, edit, and save Google docs from within your MS Office desktop application.

The best news is that its free!

Generate Schema (.xsd) from MS SQL Server Table

I just had to extract the schema from a MS SQL server database table today and it was as easy as running this query:

DECLARE @schema xml
SET @schema = (SELECT * FROM TableName FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS, XMLSCHEMA(‘SchemaOutputName‘))
select @schema

Just save the output to a file with .xsd extension and there you have it.

Foundations of Programming

Recently stumbled upon Foundations of Programming which is a free short E-book by Karl Seguin. I think we should hand this book to all new software developers before they write any production code. It is a great introduction to real world software development concepts. Being a very short 79 pages book I think it can be part of induction literature for new starters at any software development organisations.

 

Some of the topics covered are:

• ALT.NET
• Domain Driven Design
• Persistence
• Dependency Injection
• Unit Testing
• ORM
• Memory
• Exceptions
• Proxy

Tech.ed 2010 Experience

This year I was fortunate enough to attend teched for the very first time. It was at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre with approximately 3100 attendees. I attended 24 thought provoking sessions during the three tech-days and was blown away by the quality of the speakers and their knowledge on the subject. These sessions not only made me aware of the things that I did not know, but also highlighted things that I did not know, that I did not know.

My favourite sessions were:

• DAT306 Scalability Standouts – the biggest in the world, and how they did it by Nicholas Dritsas
• WEB202 Then things you need to succeed with Natural User Interface by August de los Reyes
• ARC204 The role of an architect in an agile team by Tom Hollander
• ARC302 The Future of Data by Graham Elliott
• ARC206 The Business of Cloud Computing by Chris Auld
• DAT311 Spatial BI by Alan Eldridge
• SEC406 Hacking: Top 5 Attacks and Defenses by Rocky Heckman
• KEY002 Locknote – How IT is changing us and our future by Miha Kralj

The consistent marketing message coming across from many presentations including the Keynote and the Locknote was the push for Cloud computing (Azure) and Phone 7. It is not easy to predict the future of these two technologies, but both of them certainly look promising. At a higher level Cloud computing makes economic sense especially for start-ups, but there are obvious risks and issues like Sovereignty, integration, and bandwidth. Phone 7 seems like Microsoft’s attempt of catching up with Apple’s Jesus Phone. Result of this competition is dependent on support from the big .NET software development community, which will either make it a good competitive product or make it another Zune.

It is too early to predict, but I believe that the catch-up game has high chances of failure. So my prediction for Phone 7 is that it is going to be another Zune. This prediction might come back and bite me, but I am going to stick with it. This is because I have seen nothing so far that gives Phone 7 a major competitive advantage over JP which already dominates the market.

I predict Microsoft competing well in the Cloud computing market and expect Azure platform to do well. Even if Azure does not succeed, the concept of cloud computing which allows businesses to change their mindset on infrastructure from CapEx to OpEx has lots of value.

For me teched was an awesome experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the company of 3099 intellectual individuals, and hope to attend this conference again in the future.

Technorati Tags: TechEd2010,Microsoft,iPhone,Apple,Phone7,WindowsMobile

LR/Enfuse

I have always used multiple specialised programs to do exposure blending for HDRs, image stacking for star-trails, and focus point stacking for DOF.

Today I discovered LR/Enfuse, this is one plug-in that will do it all. So if you use Adobe’s Lightroom for processing your pictures, then check it out.

They also have other useful add-ins.

Definition of Done

Normally all software development tasks would go through the four phases listed below. The definition of “done” for each of these phases should be well understood by all stakeholders so that when a development assignment is marked as being “done”, the criteria mentioned below are met.

Analysis Phase

• Functional and non functional requirements were clearly defined
• User stories were provided for  supporting the requirements
• Where applicable logical data model was designed
• Where applicable use cases and sequence diagrams were provided
• Stakeholders have signed off on the findings

Design Phase

• All functional and non functional requirements have been considered
• Pros and cons of the selected design are well understood and documented
• At least one senior developer has reviewed the design

Development Phase

• Code is deployment ready
• Code meets all functional requirements
• Code meets all non-functional requirements.  Typical ones include performance (capacity, scalability), usability, security, maintainability
• Code has been cleaned up. This typically means:
  • Code meets defined coding standards
  • No Code Analysis warnings
  • No Source Analysis warnings
  • There is no commented-out code lingering around
  • There are no TODOs
• UI components meet the defined standards
• UX principles have been considered and applied appropriately
• Automated unit tests have been written with high code coverage
• Automated integration tests are written
• At least one other software developer has reviewed the code
• All code parts have been checked in to source control
• Associated tasks have been marked as completed and times have been updated

Testing and documentation Phases

• Test cases are prepared
• Testing has been executed
• Testing task has been closed
• Help file has been updated
• Release notes have been updated

Design Language Called Metro

Recently read about the Windows 7 mobile and the user experience initiative. They were talking about a design language called Metro, some really useful principles got mentioned. Here they are:

• Clean, Light, Open, and Fast
  • Feels fast and responsive
  • Focus on Primary Tasks
  • Do a lot with very little
  • Fierce reduction of unnecessary elements
  • Delightful use of whitespace
  • Full Bleed canvas
• Celebrate Typography
  • Type of beautiful not just legible
  • Clear straightforward information design
  • Uncompromising sensitivity to weight, Balance and Scale
• Alive in Motion
  • Feels responsive and alive
  • Creates a system
  • Gives Context to improve usability
  • Transition between UI is an important as the design of the UI
  • Adds Dimension and Depth
• Content Not Chrome
  • Delight through content instead of decoration
  • Reduce visuals that are not content
  • Contents is the UI
  • Direct interaction with the content
• Authentically Digital
  • Design for the form factor
  • Don’t try to be what it’s NOT
  • Be direct

Technorati Tags: UX Windows7 Mobile