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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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

Congratulations James!

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.