The Sherpa Project

Big Visible Cruise has moved up to 0.5.

Here are the highlights…

• Support for the Java-flavor of Cruise
• Support for the Ruby-flavor of Cruise
• The ability to selectively display projects (all projects are shown by default)
• The ability to change the display name of the projects that are shown

All of the new items are mostly documented in the BigVisibleCruise.exe.config file in the 0.5 zip file.

If you are going to use BVC, you need to make sure that your cruise implementation exposes project XML over http (take a look at the config file for some examples).

Now that these items are implemented, the fun stuff should start soon. I want to get some new visualizations in before the 1.0 release.

It’s still somewhat rough around the edges, but it seems to work pretty good so far.

If you run into any issues (or have any enhancement requests), you can put them in as issues on the project site.

I’ve been spending roughly 4 - 8 hours a day doing remote pair-programming lately. Although there are always connectivity issues (usually once or twice per day), it’s still only a minor nuisance. Overall, I’m really enjoying the experience and it’s starting to feel pretty close to side-by-side pairing.

The tools that I use on a daily basis include Microsoft SharedView for screen sharing and Skype for voice and video. The combination of these two tools seems to work very well (even over wireless).

SharedView is still in beta, but it is a very nice, minimal, and responsive tool. With the exception of the ads (integrated into the tool), I’m impressed. I’ve used many other tools in the past but this one just seems to fit the way I work better. The features like the ability to see other mouse pointers, clicking, and highlighting is a very nice feature.

Right now, the only thing that consistently bugs me is the quality of my headset (junk). I’m hoping to pick up a new one in the next couple of days.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the past couple of years trying to find a way to use index cards during the typical Release, Iteration, and Daily Planning cycles of various projects. The problem is that I’ve been working on distributed teams.
I find it hard to function without a Wall Gantt. Without a doubt, I think it’s the best way to plan for a sprint or iteration.

I’m glad to say that a couple of weeks ago we found an alternative that works for distributed Wall Gantt functionality. If you are in the same situation, check out CardMeeting. CardMeeting is my new favorite tool. I’m not sure how I functioned for so long without it.

I still prefer real cards, but the capabilities of CardMeeting are very good and the feel of the application is as close as you can get to the real thing.

Jim has posted a list of tools that are available in the Windows Developer Power Tools book. That’s a lot of tools.

Windows Developer Power Tools is up on Amazon and ready for pre-orders. The book hasn’t been released yet (it’s currently slated for November 1st), but it can be pre-ordered. You can find some sample chapters on Jim’s page for the book. The book was written by James Avery and Jim Holmes with a variety of contributing authors (including myself). I’m obviously biased, but I love what I’ve seen of the book up to this point.

There are a lot of great freeware and open-source tools out there and the book helps you navigate, evaluate, and see them in action based on the current task(s) that you are trying to solve. I wish this book would have been written a couple of years ago because it could have saved me countless hours in discovering tools and libraries that would have been a tremendous help.

It has been interesting going through the process of submitting articles for the book and reviewing others. In the process of helping do some light-weight reviewing I’ve learned about a lot of interesting tools, libraries, and concepts that I hadn’t previously been exposed to (and I spend a lot of time playing with development tools).

Simply put, this book is long overdue. Although there is a lot of content, it does a great job of giving you enough information to determine if the tool or library is a good fit to help in your project (or future projects). When you look at the number of tools covered and realize that they are all free, you realize how valuable the concept is.

The book has also has a rough cuts version posted at Safari.

If you want an idea of what the book will cover, check out the table of contents.

If you haven’t seen this yet, the VSTSPlugins project allows using Team Foundation Server with CCNet. You can find the documentation on the CCNet Confluence site and the VSTSPlugins project on SourceForge.

You can find it here.

The March 21st edition of .Net Rocks was my favorite show so far. The topic was Test Driven Development with Jean Paul Boodhoo and the show was very good. Jean Paul Boodhoo provided some great insights into TDD, Mock objects, and agile approaches to software development. 

Whether you're a devoted TDD advocate or not, the show is worth checking out. I can also recommend checkingout Jean-Paul Boodhoo's blog.

James has finally announced the release of his book Visual Studio Hacks.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.  This is going to be a long couple of months
Congratulations James!

I just downloaded GhostDoc and I am extremely impressed. GhostDoc is a great step towards providing consistency in comments. I was amazed to see how wonderful a little bit of intelligence and automation can help with readability of the code and the resulting documentation.

When you right click in the following code block and choose “Document This“ from the context menu…

1:     public bool CanRestart()
2:     {
3:         return false;
4:     }

You get this…

1:     ///
2:     /// Determines whether this instance can restart.
3:     ///
4:     ///
5:     ///     true if this instance can restart; otherwise, false.
6:     ///
7:     public bool CanRestart()
8:     {
9:         return false;
10:    }

Ghostdoc also provides configurable rules that you can use to customize the behavior and the resulting comments.

I’m a big fan of automating documentation and I’ve seen a lot of momentum in this space lately. In a perfect world we would either write code or write documentation, not maintain the two side-by-side. The generation could obviously go either way, but until I see a solid MDA product I think I’ll continue to have the code generate the documentation. NAnt and NDoc do a wonderful job of generating documentation during a build and the setup is quick and easy. I have also used NAnt and the BizTalk Server Documenter to generate documentation for BizTalk projects lately.

It puts a big smile on my face when I can provide everyone with technical documentation that I know is up-to-date.