Outer Quartile Range

MOSS 2007 need a NoteField to be upgraded to longer the 255 CHars?

2009-10-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

I have a client who was busying filling in content when they realized that some field lengths where not long enough. Specifically the NoteField length being used as a descriptions for certain articles (this case pages in a Publishing Web).

I thought the field length was default long enough since in the database it was listed as Text.
After doing some searches I saw some people creating custom field types in order to have a longer NoteField and they where actually using the type NoteField .

That is when I realized that it is in the control not the field type definition. The validation in the control is the only thing limiting the field length here.

So what I did was simply create a new render control that extends the NoteField type and I then override the "validate" function to stop all validating (in this case it removes limiting of the field to 255 chars).

And then voila all my old NoteFields are now nText length instead of 255 chars. You can create the control simply in a dll and throw it in the GAC or the bin. If you include it as a trusted dll in your web.config you can use it in your masterpages, or add it dynamically however you wish. The code is so simple it is not worth showing but what is interesting is that it is possible with out custom field definitions. Anyways the code is something like this:

class LongNoteField :NoteField
{

/*
my class actually includes overrides for all the functions but they are just call
base. so no need to place them in this example.
*/
public override void Validate()
{
//notics the comments here
//base.Validate();
}

public override void UpdateFieldValueInItem()
{
// base.UpdateFieldValueInItem();
// this may not be necessary but i am not really sure what this funcitons is doi
// the base.UpdateFIeldValueIntItem may trim the string or something so i just ignored it.
// simple setting the field item value manually workds as update() is called later.
this.ListItemFieldValue = this.Value.ToString();
}
}

I do this same things with the RichtHtmlFields in which case I then run this.value through an HTML cleaner (Tidy) to make it render valid XHTML. It is easier then paying for a 3rd controls and you can implement it on sites that already have data without having to migrate anything.

So there you go, more than 255 chars anywhere with MOSS 2007.

The Ideal World of Web Development

2009-09-28T10:25:00.001-07:00

When work turns into just work it is time to change. I see it too often, i enter a workplace there is 1 or 2 people in 30 who actually care about the product they are trying to deliver. The other 28 to 29 are just doing what they have to do to get the job done. I am not saying that work should be more important then health, family or religion, but if you are going to do something then at least try to be the best at. The more I enjoy what I do the less I call it work.

When I was making pizzas at Little Caesars in America, my goal was to be fast and to make the most perfect pizza. The most fun was when there was a group all with the same goal. When we were short staffed we really turned up steam and really saw the potential. But for some reason this team spirit is missing at many IT company's i have visited.

I have as well experienced team spirit within in a programing team and it was fantastic. Every member on the team was focus on the goal and really want to achieve it in a short period, and guess what we did. Of course that type of energy may not exist always or with every project but it should be there ready to happen when it is need.

At a company I do a lot of work for they had a 24 hour competition where teams got a mystery problem and had to create a web application. The people created their own teams (no managers), and every one pitched where they could to completed the work. Within 24 hours every team had results and a really good time making it, why are normal projects not like this?

I believe that the largest bottle neck in this creation of team spirit is the current project management "system". The project managers today spend much of there time assigning tasks to different disciplines. Okay 14 hours html, 20 hours C#, 10 hours flash. Okay Programmer X you do this and Programmer Y you do this.

Granted at better companies this appears more open and friendly but in essence this is what is happening. I ask project leaders often why is it that I feel like I am working on an island. The response tends to be because the clients want us to work this way. We can't go to the client with a complete FD, after the FD we can't start building without a completed Graphical Design, you can't start programming on the server until the HTML etc...

Funny thing is after years of being brainwashed I actually started believing them. I would say "ah, i am not going to start on this project until the HTML 100% completed and perfect in all browsers". I started becoming demanding, saying like "this page is not designed etc.." . I was no longer focused on the product what "we" where trying to make, I became my role. My role was programmer I don't care what the total result is, I still cared about the quality of my work, but the others well that is there own problem. If Ii am done working I go home, so what if the HTMLer is having a hard time with something.... this is mentality that happens after years of the waterfall.

My ideal world would be this, a client would come in I would have a team of multi-talented developers and designers (the all-rounder still exists you know) all of which would be qualified as advisers for strategy, interaction and web metrics. The client would say i would like something like..... and we as a team would start collaborating, take a look at some similar applications. the designer would directly start trying to get a bit of what the client wanted. Someone would throw a YML generate a database together, or demo some possible CMS's to client. Hopefully within like 8 hours we would already have a portion of the work done, and enough information for continued work for the next week or two. After a couple of weeks we would sit with the client and continue the same process until everything the client wanted was completed.

Ideally everyone would be experts, but I think it would work if only 50% where expert. It would fun to try.

Of course this would work even easier and better if the develop environment was 100% agile and more automated. That the consultants could create an instance of most any CMS with the push of a button. Generate a rails applications, php frame works etc. Automated building, continuous testing everything.

So this is my new goal create that environment and then go looking for customers. I talking about dumping the whole middle management layer. Actually account managers are actually just waste managers, me and friend figured out. They spend most of there time managing the waste in the system and running between clients and developers. In general they keep plannings that are mostly unrealistic and if the plan is achievable then they happen to estimate with a huge margin because they themselves have realized there is a lot of waste in the system.

Of course the clients are as well to blame when it comes to over the top bureaucracy. Today a client wanted a change in an FD. This change was so small but because everyone is afraid every change need to fully documented and signed. a process that take in total 3 or more people and at least 3 man hours. When if the client would have talk to the developer while the project was being developed it would have taking about 30 seconds.

So I am always looking for expert all-rounders to help achieve this goal as a real team, leave your ego at home.

Agile web Development, the challenges of small projects.

2009-09-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

It is often talked about but I have never seen it truly implemented in small scale media bureaus. "Agile Web Development": How can you truly implement and benefit from the tools that are clearly intended to improve quality and ROI in the Internet world for small projects? I am talking about projects that may have a lifetime of 2 weeks, a long project in this world is 6 months. If it is longer the 6 months you are probably doing something wrong. I believe we are running at less then 40% of capable productivity in this world (probably even less than 20%), currently I am trying to collect data to prove this, though most of these companies don't have any reliable data. I am not sure if any one of the many types of Agile development practices are currently suited for this situation, and that is when I had my eureka moment. The reality of complex processes is that there is no perfect answer only best practices.

The basics of Agile anything is simply team work and communication. It is something so basic that we forget about it. How do you create a team? Coaches get paid tons of money to create good teams that win, and if they don't create a good team they get fired. Most project leaders today don't create teams, they create task lists. Often they don't even create task lists, they have a functional designer do that and they assign the task. The only thing that could help to make their life better they destroy. The worst part is that most project leaders do not even know they are doing this. They seem to have this idea that a person is a role and a task fits a role. But we need to see a role as an expertise and not a limit. The project leader must realize he is not a manager, and if he is assigning tasks he will eventually become a beggar or a tyrant (depending on his personality).

Well I am currently not going answer any questions here as I am now still asking questions. I think I have come up with a solution to many of the problems and hope to get the chance to implement this solution in the near future. Some of these problems are specific to the "Internet world of small projects" and the other are simple the difficulties of implement agile development when the Product Owner is constantly changing. Of course the answers are documented in the many books on agile development but the implementation will always have a unique quality depending on the situation and the company. Further more it will always be changing just like technology.

Here are some problems that come to the top of my head now:

The projects are often so small that coming into "hyper productivity" by using iteration is not really possible you need be hyper productivity straight off the line.
Sometimes waterfall actually works!!!, this is scary but i have seen waterfall work, because when something is so small it can actually get planned somewhat, when the technique is known. Example: I once made a website for a music for Warner Benelux, they wanted another website for another music group that was almost exactly the same with a few modifications, it was completely executed with waterfall and worked! (this is a problem when you try to convince a company to implemented agile development), but of course this is more like a feature then something new, but still it was waterfall, first discussion, then functional design, then graphical design, then building. It works when you have build enough similar things and the client has seen what it is getting actually before hand.
Preproject planning, the amount of preproject planning is difficult and can actually take equally long as the development in this world. Getting clients to commit to a basic ideas and design can be difficult. Commitment to design changes is as well complicated. This will often set a team still if they are only working on one project.
The chaos of many projects. This is an extreme challenge, prioritizing and maintaining focus is a huge problem here. Can you reach hyper productivity when you are changing from project to project every 3 days? What is the minimal time of focus on something, is it a week? why even differentiate between projects, if you have a clear goal does it matter which project it belongs to?

These are just a few questions, there are still many more to be asked. Once I implement a potential solution the metrics to measure it become complicated. If I am using complexity points or other relative methods of estimated difficulty of implementation, how does that scale across many projects. Can you really estimate a true velocity then?

I hope to get the opportunity to answers these questions in the coming months. As well I plan to really look into some PHP frameworks to see how the rivals of Ruby are doing. Of course I am always looking for tools to improve my rapid development. Maybe I will give Scala a try as well.

This concludes my first "quick blog" and we will see all to soon if i am able to keep this up with all the other tasks those project leaders keep giving me ;)