Category Archives: Blog

This statement isn’t new, but my esteemed colleague, Jimmy Bogard, recently wrote an appropriate post extolling business analysts and managers to focus on knowledge gained through software, not just the code gained.

Code is easily tossed aside and written afresh.  Business knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is much harder to come by.  Head over to Jimmy’s blog and have a read.

We at Headspring have just posted our Quality Assurance article over at http://blogs.headspring.com.

I’ll give a summary here of our view of QA.  Here are the main points:

1. Move QA before coding
   That’s right.  We are assuring quality of the whole result, not just the code.  If we code the whole thing, but the quality of the design or analysis wasn’t spot-on, we have a problem.  QA starts with analysis and goes through deployment and operations.
2. Unit testing vs. Full system testing
   Everyone is so caught up with unit testing and TDD, but full-system testing is the only type of testing that gives close to the coverage the system will experience in a production environment.  If you aren’t doing any type of automated testing, start with full-system testing, not unit tests.
3. Get to production quick, before the software is finished (ok, this is a point I wish were in the article)
   I’m actually expanding on it right here, but you will never have as clear a picture of whether something works until it it goes to production.  Until then, there is a risk that it will fail.  Get to production quick.  Sometimes, it seems that the type of problem or system just won’t work with an incremental rollout.  The hard problem to solve is how to not solve the whole problem right away.  How do we solve a piece of it quickly, but fully solve it.  In some cases, an incremental production rollout might be incremental by feature.  In others, it may be incremental by user group.  Still in other cases, live pilots may be appropriate.  In any case, old and new systems will need to be integrated.

Go check out the article here.

With many folks adopting ASP.NET MVC as well as Visual Studio 2010, there is a fairly confusing change if you are one of those people who doesn’t engage in the alpha and beta phases of new product releases from Microsoft or any other vendor, for that matter.

The issue of <%: vs. <%= has had a great deal of discussion around it in the years leading up to the Visual Studio 2010 release.  This new expression syntax, or code nugget, is a new feature of ASP.NET 4.  It applies equally to ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications that are using the Web Forms view engine (ASPX).

In short, <%: ViewData["Message"] %> does the same thing as <%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"]) %>.

When creating a new ASP.NET MVC web application in Visual Studio 2010, you will see that the default Home/Index.aspx view is as follows.

However, if you create an ASP.NET MVC 2 web application in Visual Studio 2008, you see that ViewData[“Message”] is printed using the syntax that heralds back to the IDC/HTX technology of IIS 2.

I hope this tidbit helps in sorting through code samples online.  If you see <%: %>, you know that the code sample was produced for ASP.NET 4 or later.

Thanks to INETA, which has become the latest sponsor of Party with Palermo.

I recently had the popular problem of Windows 7 battery manager malfunctioning and not charging my battery when plugged in.  The battery was fine, the power supply was fine, and the motherboard was fine (I have enough laptops with the same specs in the Clear Measure office, and I was able to swap out parts to isolate the problem).

I also searched for this problem online, and many folks are having this problem with all makes of laptop computers.  I found the steps that solved my problem here on the TechNet forums.

There are multiple solutions proposed, and here are the steps that fixed it for me:

1. Disconnect AC
2. Shutdown
3. Remove battery
4. Connect AC
5. Startup
6. Under the Batteries category, right-click all of the Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery listings, and select Uninstall (it’s ok if you only have 1).
7. Shutdown
8. Disconnect AC
9. Insert battery
10. Connect AC
11. Startup

Please comment if this fixes your problem so that others can solve their problem sooner.  I was surprised at how many people were having this problem with Windows 7.

Jimmy Bogard is again teaching the MVC Boot Camp from Headspring. 

http://www.headspringsystems.com/services/agile-training/mvc-training/

The class runs 3 days from May 26-28.  Give us a call at 512-459-2260 to inquire about an available discount.

Headspring is putting on another free workshop at the Austin Microsoft office.  This one will be led by Senior Consultant, Eric Anderson.  Here are the details:

Headspring Presents:

Version Control and Build Systems for Growing Teams a workshop by Eric Anderson on:

Does your team run into frequent conflicts with source control? Has your build system become a broken window with little hope of repair? Do you struggle to deploy minor changes and bug fixes while keeping the system stable? If so, perhaps this session is for you. Come learn how Headspring tackles these problems with source control strategies and continuous integration systems. This session will start at an introductory level and move on to more advanced tips and tricks for generally making your development life easier with version control and continuous integration.

Topics to be covered include:

• Branching strategies in Subversion
• Branching strategies in DVCS with Mercurial
• Continuous Integration with Hudson
• Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.Net

Tuesday, May 18, 2010
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Microsoft hosts Headspring at:
Microsoft Technology Center
9606 N Mo Pac Expy
Austin, TX 78759
(map)

Since January of 2008, Headspring has offered small, very advanced boot camp trainings.  These have been 3 days long and very fast-paced.  Everyone who has come through these training classes has proclaimed that they are the best organized courses they have ever taken.  Our approach to any of the boot camps is to team the practices that we employ while creating software for our clients.

We have an ASP.NET MVC Boot Camp coming up on 5/26 as well as an Agile Boot Camp on 5/19.

First and foremost, Headspring does deliverable-based project work.  We don’t do staff-augmentation, and we don’t sell our curriculum to training companies (mostly because we are always improving it).  These classes teach what we have learned regarding technologies and development practices via software projects with client.  Regarding ASP.NET MVC, four of our employees are authors on a book by Manning Publications on the topic.

If you would like to know more about our worldview of software and consulting, you can read our whitepapers, which are available via our website at http://headspring.com

• Custom Application Development
• The Agile Difference

Lastly, I ask, what would you like to see from Headspring to help you be better at your job?  I’m mostly asking programmers and people who manage programmers here.  We try to be an open book regarding our methods, so sharing is important.  There are many technologies and methods in which we are experts.  What offerings would you take part in?  Specifically, what offerings would you or your company be willing to invest in (with dollars)?  Let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to make them available.

Party with Palermo is back at Tech Ed, New Orleans in 2010.  The date is:

June 6, 2010 at around 7PM

Location:  Margaritaville

The party will once again have Diamond Sponsor of The Code Project, so thanks to them!  Keep an eye here for announcements of more details and a registration page. 

First, you should place your advance order for ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action at http://manning.com/palermo2.  That way, you will receive the printed book even before you see it at your local bookstore. 

The entire book is finished, and we are just moving through production right now.  But that doesn’t mean you have to wait to read it and learn about ASP.NET MVC 2.  Since the beginning of the book project, you have been able to see the progression of the book on GitHub, our project site and version control system.  That’s right, version control is for more than just code!

Head over to http://github.com/jeffreypalermo/mvc2inaction and go to the “manuscript” folder to read the entire book in Word document form.  All the content is there.  In fact, the Word documents for the 1st edition is there as well.  You can see just how much we have expanded the 2nd edition to not only cover version 2 but also to incorporate lessons learned using the framework over the last 2 years.

You will notice that the raw files in GitHub are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  That means you can use the content in blog posts, whitepapers, and you can use the code samples in any way you like.  The only restriction, really, is that you have to give us credit if you republish portions of it (and you can NOT republish the full work, of course), and you can’t resell our work.  Other than that, use it the best way you can.  We hope it is a great learning tool for you, and we hope that releasing the raw files early help you get a jump-start learning about ASP.NET MVC 2.

Credits:

Authors:  Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, Jimmy Bogard, Eric Hexter, Matt Hinze 

Technical Editor:  Jeremy Skinner 

Foreword:  Phil Haack

P.S.  I wish I could say that we are pioneers in this, but I have personally benefited from two others I know about who have worked on their books “out in the open”:

• Iron Ruby in Action (available during writing)
• The Art of Agile Development (need to sign in to Yahoo)