Demo done - and training in the pipe

The demo last Friday went like a charm. Of course the occasional demo-ghost showed itself but it was nothing some quick talking couldn’t handle.

I am still in wonder on how much you can get done by working with SCRUM. It all boils down to focus and sharing, in my opinion. The team gets to focus on the task at hand and the frequent sharing and communication makes every team member aware of her/his role and importance. From that some great result are achieved!

Tomorrow and the day after that I will take a SCRUM-master certification. Great to be on a course and it will also be great to have that certificate in the CV. Below is a picture of the place where the course takes place… Nice huh.

Training

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Demo-time - sprint 5

Phew - the last week has real been something else…

We are closing in on a demo (tomorrow) for my project and as always that means wrapping things up. Which in turns means that you’ll have to tend to all the stuff that has been unattended for way to long.

Well, well - everything seems quite alright as it is now so I am not that worried. Fingers crossed.

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Intensive pair-programming - comparing entity data

For about four days straight now we have been battling a classical, but hard programming problem; given two entity objects return a list of all the differences between the objects data. We solved the problem with reflection and some hard thinking. I am thinking about posting an article on how later.

It has been quite fun but the real lesson for me was pair programming! Try it if you haven’t. It is intense, I can say - but also very productive. Not as many errors and the code gets an immediate review that is priceless. While the “driver” writes the co-pilot have a chance to reflect on was is going on.

Also - it is lots of fun!

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Bullet Hell Tactics - .NET Awards

A friend and colleague (and current project member, actually) has created a game on the XNA platform. The game has been competing in various contests but is now nominated to .NET Awards, which is the arguable most prestigious award in the Microsoft community in Sweden.

The game is called Bullet Hell Tactics and is great fun. Please download a try out version and then vote, vote, vote for Jens (Team Shmup) and his game on the .NET Award site

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Black Dyke overture

The season has started for the brass band in UK and Black Dyke kicked it off with a tour of the Netherlands.

Here is a clip from a concert. This is the overture! Listen to the playing and especially the soprano - just imagine to play like that and have two hours of the same before you. And listen to the reception afterwards - that could make you go on I presume.

Also observe that the euphoniums turn pages after about 40 seconds - its that many notes! Cool!

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Sandcastle - revisted

As i wrote earlier i have tried out the CTP version of Sandcastle. And it is a CTP by which i mean that it’s not a finished product. But I looks very promising i must say.

One of the things I miss in Sandcastle (CTP) is an easy integration with MSBuild so that you can rebuild your documentation as part of your continuous integration. Sandcastle in itself is a bunch of tools to be used a the command prompt and they can (but not easy) integrated.

Luckily this has been done for us already, through some well-initiated sources I found an application that builds on top of Sandcastle (CTP), that fills the gap surrounding MSBuild integration. I haven’t have time to try it out yet but will sure get around to it

Also - from the same source, I got an performance tip that cut the document...

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