“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

But anyone that has done any work in an agile shop knows that to achieve many of the goals of agile you need to have certain types of tools in place to facilitate the process.  This past week I have been preparing for the start of our first sprint this Monday.

What I’ve been doing is picking and choosing tools to help implement many of the details in agile, here are a list of the tools that I’ve chosen and what aspect the process they fulfill.

• Google Spreadsheets – for user stories and task breakouts
• Google Sites – for tracking stand-up notes and logging issues
• Beanstalk – hosted subversion for well, subversion.
• Team City – continuous integration and deployment

In subsequent posts I’ll go into more detail about how I’m using each of these tools, and if i’m actually still using them.  One of the amazing things that I have found when working in an agile environment is that the process makes people far more open to change, so if we find a better tool to fit the need then we will switch to it.

Today was our first team (3 of us for now) lunch and learn.  We reviewed the first chapter of the Foundations of programming pdf.  The other 2 members of my team are junior and intermediate developers and I’m actually relishing the opportunity to share some of the things that I learned in my time at Q4 Web Systems (where i worked in an agile environment for 3 years).

I actually started infection the company with agile quite some time ago, from the top down.  I was brought in to take the company from a strict marketing company to one that focuses more on product development.  This is a big step for me and I’m committed to making it work.

Next up I’ll review our first sprint mid week and let you know how it goes!

This is the first post in what will become a long running series on how this process has gone, it’s part content generation for this blog, part help and advice for you the reader and part excersize for myself in tracking the progress I make.

Hope you find this helpful!

It doesn’t.

After figuring out that there was no simple easy solution for this, the next logical step was to start googling for answers right? Obviously. Off I went, finding little bits and pieces here and there, never the complete solution though, I thought I had a solution and my app worked for a couple of weeks until all of a sudden one day I could no longer connect to more than a single database! FML as they say!

I happened to stumble on this stackoverflow post that sort of addressed my issue, it gave some of the pieces of the solution, but I had to piece the rest of it together myself.  After finally fixing my problem I give to you, dear reader, my solution.

Note: this post assumes that you have used subsonic, are fairly well versed in using it and have had the exact same problem as me.

1. Generate you DAL as normal using whatever method you like (i write a batch file to generate mine)

2. Create a file called whatever and place it in your subsonic project with this code in it (links to snipt.org, i’m straight copying and pasting my file, so change your namespaces and all that business).

3. Create a base class that all of your data access classes will inherit from (I call my RepositoryBase.cs)

4. Have the repository classes accept a connection string as part of the constructor, and pass it on to the base class.

5. In the base class, call the static method in the file you created in step 2 like so:

SSPProvider.SetProvider(”ConnectionStringName”, “ConnectionString”);

6. All of your subsonic related code will now use whatever connection string you passed to the SetProvider method.

7. ???

8. Profit?

Not so sure about the profit thing, but the code to switch databases works like a charm.

If there is interest I can post a more complete example but this should get you going for now.

When it came time to start saving my entities to the database, everything was working ok, except…. except after I had created a record in the database I could never change the IsActive column, like wtf?  I could never toggle between true and false on an existing record, but an insert would save the record perfectly every time.

To make a long incredibly frustrating story short, it turns out that if you have a bit field, that is set to allow nulls and has a default value of false it will never update (this is only using SubSonic).

So to ensure your bit fields work correctly in SubSonic, make sure those bit columns allow null and don’t have any default values!

I have an exclude file that I use to tell xcopy to ignore files like the obj directory and .cs codebehind files.  I noticed that none of my .ascx and .css files were being copied?!  Turns out the .cs entry in my excludes list was causing those other files that had .cs in the extension not to get copied.

The solution?  Add a backslash to the end of the .cs entry so it looks like this:

.cs\

All your other files with .cs in the extension will now get copied.

Hope this helped someone!

You are going to fuck it up

Now I use the phrase “fuck it up” in place of fail for effect, for impact, ya know if this was a power point there would be one whole slide dedicated to the phrase “you are going to fuck it up” yes, that lesson is that important.

Now you might think what a great way to instantly ruin any project! So what your telling me Chris is no matter what, I’m going to fuck this project I’m about to start working on up?

Yes, that is what I’m telling you… But, its not the only thing that I’m going to tell you.

There’s an expression that’s become increasingly popular in the development world as the popularity of agile and lean development rises.

“Fail early, fail often”

It sounds so insanely wrong so anti everything you’ve ever learned doesn’t it?  Once you get over the stigma of failure you’ll quickly realize that failure isn’t as bad as you’ve been conditioned to perceive it.  Early failures cost less both in financial terms as well as in more personal ways that we won’t touch on here.

The concept of fail early, fail often is wonderfully summed up (quote stolen from codinghorror.com)

Learning doesn’t happen from failure itself but rather from analyzing the failure, making a change, and then trying again. Over time this gives you a deep understanding of the problem domain. (Michael Hunter on fail early and often)

I sum it up a bit differently: “The only real failures are ones that you don’t learn from”

So go out there dev’s and fail away, not only are you going to understand more about the stuff your working on, but you’ll likely discover more about yourself and the people around you as well.

I’m going to keep all my work and development related stuff here.  It makes sense because blogging about that stuff takes a bit more time, so I don’t mind sitting down in front of the computer to write a long post regarding that stuff.

If you are going to spend time working on new features, don’t spend time on planning what you think might work. Build something quickly and let your users decide on how it should work.

You might think you know how it should work, but chances are you don’t.

Make it so it’s good enough, release it, get feedback and repeat.

I did a search for this exact phrase about a month ago to solve a quirky problem that I encountered while using the built in asp:menu control that was introduced with version 2.0 of the framework.

I could go into a long explanation of how difficult it was to find the solution to my problem but instead of doing that I am simply going to give you the solution, that’s all I wanted when I went searching and it took a long time to get it so here dear reader is the solution for you.

To the asp:Menu control render correctly in chrome (or safari) paste the following bit of code in your Page_Load event on every page that you use the control

        if (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("AppleWebKit") > 0)
            Request.Browser.Adapters.Clear();

or grab it on snipt.org

One of the really cool things about the service is that you can sign up to test features before they are released to the entire user base.  Right now I’m testing the new smart add feature, it’s awesome and i just noticed a really cool touch that I thought deserved sharing.

See the small window with the ? in the top left, it lists the shortcuts that you can use in the smart add box.  Seems pretty simple right?  The little window actually stays open after you click the question mark until you explicitly close it using the x.  Why do I think this is interesting?  Because it allows me to see those shortcuts as I’m using the tool, it doesn’t force me to go to another window or stop and hover over a link to get the info, it makes learning the app a lot easier, it removes the friction between becoming and advanced user.