Just a quick note to remind you that SP2 for SharePoint has hit the streets. The good people at Microsoft has collected a nice list of added features and fixes. It will definitely be worth your while.
I usually stick to writing from a technical perspective but this time, I need to get a few things aired. I’m sorry to break the focus with this first post in a long while. I assume that few have missed that there is an ongoing trail against the founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest torrent tracker. The trial is being intensely followed by people across the world with disperse interest in what’s going on. From discussions I have followed, I understand that there is a bit of a misunderstanding of what is really going on so I thought I’d clear things out. Illusion 1:
If the case is lost, The Pirate Bay will shut down and defendants will go to jail.
- Truth:
There is a huge voluntary organization following and supporting TPB’s cause. Even if there is a substantial fine (in Swedish measures) involved, the defendants most likely already have this part covered by external support. Jail would be an extremely unlikely outcome. The site itself is no longer hosted in Sweden but at a number of locations abroad. In fact, the defendants have made a point out of not knowing exactly where, by leaving that part to their supplier. This all will result in the defendants walking away free, with fines covered and The Pirate Bay still up and running. Illusion 2:
The Pirate Bay trial is bothersome and a threat to a popular file sharing site but whatever…
- Truth:
The case for The Pirate Bay is only in its smallest perspective related to the world’s most popular file sharing site. In fact, the implication that shutting down TPB would have have no other effect is absurd. In essence, this trial is not about a torrent site at all. To Swedes, this is a trial that will precedent whether American lobbyists have the power to force the Swedish legal system into obedience. Also, this will mean that there will be open season to go after any other foreign organization that refuses to abide by the whims of the American lobby organizations. Illusion 3:
C’mon! What the guys do is illegal. They only had it coming!
-Truth:
As long as there is an international agreement on the rights of intellectual property holders, there is no reason to applaud the act of providing copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission. However, it would nice to see IFPi and the other stake holder clean up their own back yard first. TPB is not providing copyrighted materials, nor do they provide torrents that do. The Pirate Bay is an indexing service (or search engine, if you like) that provide its users with information similar to what Google is doing. This goes for Live Search, Yahoo! and most of the other internet search engines. The guys on trial are Swedes, being tried in Sweden but even if we looked at this from a US perspective, it would much more be a matter of a case against freedom of speech that a breach of DMCA.
 ...Space Invader?! The city of Malmö have been nice enough to actually mark the way to walk from Malmö Central Station to the Malmö Convention Centre with our our friend, the Space Invader.
The 12 minutes walk was nice and I know that we will be looking forward to some absolutely fabulous sessions here in Malmö during the Øredev conference. Just follow the white Space Invader.
Right in the midst of the ongoing PDC, Microsoft has released a major update on the information package for the platform code named "Oslo". The purpose of "Oslo" is to increase productivity by mainstreaming model-driven application development based on domain-specific models. The current "Oslo" package comes with a set of best practices, idioms and patterns as well as an entire new language, the MGrammar, which is used as a textual means of writing a domain-specific language. Domain-driven development in general and model-driven development in particular aims to decrease the gap between the organization and the development team in order to enhance communication. By using common languages and models to describe issues and solutions, the risk of misunderstanding along the development process can be minimized. Unlike Microsoft's previous attempts at modeling tools, "Oslo" is not just a simple BDUF application that messes up the development process by building a scenario that will be impossible to implement in the long run. It remains relevant throughout the entire project lifecycle, acting as a communications instrument between the development team and its stakeholders.
Hey, I have been out of the loop so forgive you me if this is old news. :-$ The Microsoft Patterns an Practices team has had two really interesting releases lately. The purpose of them both is to help you avoid writing monolithic applications. In true agile spirit, the aim is to write only as much as necessary at the time. First out, the Composite Application Guidance for WPF. I attended a briefing on this by Dotway's George Bolsch, who is on the advisory board of this particular CAG. The idea is to provide software development teams with the tools needed to build their WPF apps in a highly modular way. The focus in this case is not the application itself but the construction process. By applying CAG for WPF, you can split the development across multiple teams and then seamlessly compose those pieces into an application. The second release on my mind is the Managed Extensibility Framework. Unlike CAG for WPF, which focuses on composition, MEF provides application extensibility. Team vs. application focus in other words. MEF can, in its simplest form, be considered a generic plug-in mechanism but from my perspective, it provides an enhanced support for agile development principles. If you make sure that you have implemented the proper extension points and that the application's core features are in place, you can then add functionality in the form of extensions without having to recompile the core. There is also an MSDN Code Gallery Area for MEF. I really didn't think of it before I started writing but the apparent direction of thoughts after mentioning these two releases would be to also consider implementing some kind of Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control framework. Obviously, the minds of the P&P team wandered that way as well and they have subsequently released their first attempt at a DI container, called Unity. Coincidently, CAG for WPF comes with out-of-the-box support for Unity. These are all techniques that you should consider using when you develop .NET and in particular WPF applications. The minimum engagement is to at least know as much about them that you can make an well grounded decision to leave them out of your solution rather than just missing them by accident.
Obviously, I will be there. Daniel Akenine, the IASA Sweden chairman, will visit Gothenburg to bootstrap a local chapter of the International Association of Software Architects. If you happen to be in the Gothenburg area, I think you should join us this evening. November 4th at 18:00. Sign up at the IASA Sweden web page now.
Any SharePointers still around here? In that case, you might want to know that Microsoft has a nice list of Best Practices over at their SharePoint Server TechCenter. They actually do have a bunch of suggested practices for developers as well, so it's not all IT Pro stuff.
Yet again Google delivers. This time they provide us with Google /*Code Search*/ which searches through  millions and millions of lines of open source code. By default it searches through all code available, but if you hit the Advanced Code Search link, you can preset a specific language as well as adjust some other preferences. As for regular Google search, these options are also available from the search box so if you for instance are a bit curious on how to write an if statement in C#, you'd just time something along the line of if lang:C#.
I passed a car this morning (interestingly enough, not a JEEP) with this bumper sticker, It's a JEEP thing - you wouldn't understand it and realized that that's exactly what makes the difference. I've spent plenty time with developer friends fretting over the differences between good developers and ground  level coders. I actually do have some JEEP friends as well and have heard enough to actually understand it. I remember one time when they told me of a meet where a girl got stuck in a mud pool with her JEEP. The crowd started chanting 'dive, dive, dive...' ...and of course she did! She climbed the hood of the car, grabbed the winch wire and dove and actually swam through the mud. It's a JEEP thing. When speaking with non-developer acquaintances and they ask me what I do for a living, I rarely venture beyond answering that I work with computers. I couldn't tell them that I feel lost without my computer, about all the late nights trying to solve that last piece of a code puzzle and so on. They just wouldn't understand it. To some extent, I think that the same thing goes for the coder/developer issue. In the long run, there is only one thing that makes the difference. It's all about the passion.
I was made aware of this post by Jeff Sutherland, based upon email conversations between himself, Scott Downey and Björn Granvik, CTO of Jayway.
It compares team efficiency when following a waterfall process versus following a Scrum process. Jeff invites us to take part of some of the conversation between MySpace's Scott Downey and Björn and the overall conclusion is that new Scrum teams do need shock therapy to get started. By bootstrapping teams, Scott managed to boost the team's performance to 240% of MySpace corresponding waterfall teams in only 2.9 days per team member, in average. I learned directly from Björn that a Jayway team working at a customer location had an increase in performance of ~400% in three months. The key issue in most cases seem to be people in the Scrum team's surroundings with too much influence and too little understanding of how the Scrum Process works. This springs to mind a post I wrote a couple of years ago in frustration of trying to be agile in a non-agile environment. The meaning was to make that a series and I wonder if it isn't about time that I get some of my thoughts on helping organizations transition to agile down in writing.
I just realized that today is the 1 month anniversary since I started my new job. It's been a hectic month but only in the best of aspects. Building a local representation of an organization that only has top notch developers or better really isn't that hard work. With the recent Dotway Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 Open Space in mind, I feel invigorated and enthusiastic about being back in the software development arena. Magnus has a nice write-up of the outcomes. Even if we actually didn't focus too much the suggested theme, discussions ran high and low. A noteworthy comment from one of the delegates was that he passed on the second beer and had a coke instead, in order to stay sharp and be part of the intense and creative discussions. 
I just signed up to attend this year's incarnation of Øredev. It will be absolutely amazing! I'm looking forward to key notes by Ted Neward and Robert C. Martin and sessions by James Coplien, Patrik Löwendahl, Harry Pierson, Jimmy Nilsson, Eric Evans and many many more! I will also take the opportunity to take a SCRUM certification course for Jeff Sutherland. If Øredev 2008 isn't pure coolness, I don't know what is.
It is almost a year ago since I decided to quit. During this time, I've been having fun as IT Manager for Specsavers Sweden but it had to come to an end. I'm just not ready to leave the consulting business yet. After a few weeks of rewarding conversation, I have decided to join forces with Dotway. Dotway focuses on specialist .NET consulting and provide services to Microsoft Sweden among other companies. Members of the company also frequently speak at MSDN events and provide coaching in many of the .NET disciplines. Dotway is a member of Way Group Europe - a group of companies that has agility and highly trained specialist consultants in common. Other companies in the group are Jayway, well reknown for their Java skills and Øredev, the developer conference that bring the big names in systems engineering to Sweden. Even if Dotway already are represented in Gothenburg, I am looking forward to taking on the role as Managing Director for Dotway Gothenburg and get up to full speed during the autumn. We will recruit heavily among Gothenburg's top .NET consultants. I'll be looking forward to seeing some of you as my future coworkers. 
Yes, Ola got it right to such extent I even had to copy the title of his post. In short, the frustration of dealing with businesses unfamiliar with delivering 'project style' can be overwhelming. Anyone recognize the person rushing in and demanding a feature to be added to the top of the priority list? This feature claiming 2 weeks of development time where there are only 3 left. Usually, when you initiate a project, you already have a sufficient list of requirements. These will usually do and you really don't need more to fill out the time. Instead, you will kick off by prioritizing which requirements get booted from the top of the list, rather than what previously unknown (good-to-have) features that should be added. As a PM you will meet each additional request with a smile and and gracefully state that you will be happy to add the request to the feature list for the next release. You should currently be in the process of removing requirements that should not be on the top of your list. By arguing for removal, you get a good understanding for the business case of the feature. If a stakeholder manages to defend the requirement in a way that you keep it on the top of the list, you will also understand the benefits of implementing and and you will not have to go back and challenge it again throughout the project cycle.
The rumors of my death has been greatly exagerated. In fact, I don't even have writer's block. During the recent time, I have come to realize that what I had in mind to write about was not an option. In my efforts to adopt a different business practise for my company, it would mean that I revealed too much of our internal processes for it to be kosher. Last week, I finally got started going to the gym again. I think it's been a year and a half since last and my good I needed that. My new gym membership came with an offer of recurring BIAs (Bioelectrical impedance analysis). In effect, a BIA tells you how your body mass is divided between water, fat and lean muscle mass. E.g. how fit you are. While at Microsoft's V.I.P. launch (courtesy of Johan Lindfors with sessions by Jenny Nyberg) and in particular during the SQL Server 2008 session, I came to think of that there should be recurring measurements of an organisation's BIA as well. BIA in this case would be Business Intelligence Agility. I was a bit surprised that it was only the guys at Sybase that had caught up on this concept before me, apart from them viewing it as a base for enterprise modeling. to me, BIA would measure how easy it is to make an organization's data available for data mining and BI applications. Let's say that a company use a business system like Navision, and stora all data in native Navisaion storage, there will be plenty of data, but only available for transformations according to the Navision mining model. I am still not able to syndicate with other data and I can only use transformations available to Navision. A system of high BIA will have acessible, well structured data that can be ported to a BI platform of choice. In other words, BIA would tell how fit your data is from a BI perspective. More specific parameters to follow... Oh, and SQL Server 2008 compression is cool. Look into it - it will save storage, memory and increase speed.
Det här är ett tillfälligt inlägg som inte har tagits bort. Ta bort det manuellt. (d15ec91a-ede6-4424-b044-2b857e87411c - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
I recently spent some time catching up on my friend Richard's blog (Swedish), and not surprisingly, we share a rigid opinion on the matter of Business Intelligence. I came up with this idea from joining together a few of Richard's posts and in this case, I don't mean Business Intelligence in the same, traditional way as Richard does, but rather in the sence of the intelligence of a business. Thinking back on my time as Vice President of Content- & Knowledge Programs for the International Association of Software Architects, when our President and CEO, Paul Preiss, was visiting Sweden provides some fond but also eye-opening memories. Paul is genuinly proud of his openmindedness, particularly based on, as he says, him being American - suggesting that maybe not so many Americans are too aware of what is going on outside of the US' borders. In spite of this openmindedness, he was almost chocked when we described a typical Swedish business model, mainly focusing on business hierarchies, interpersonal respect, how managers and staff communicate with each other and so on. Apparently, the Swedish model (as us swedes already know, of course) is distinctively different from both the American (heh, international, as americans often refer to it) and Japanese management- / business styles. With this, and especially with large, international corporations in mind, wouldn't it be super interesting to be able to measure a company's Business Intelligence by factors such as: - Management style(s)
- Interpersonal skills
- Business agility
- Methodology Adoption level
- Process Adoption level
...And so on. I believe that this list could go on and on. The important aspect is that for a multinational organization, it is vital to adopt its core to each local market. Be intelligent about how you run your business!
Evolution is an imperfect and often violent process. A battle between what exists, and what is yet to be born. [Heroes S1E6 "Better Halves"] How true this is. A couple of months has passed since I took on my new role as Manager of Business IT and Process Management. My current organization rests on the deep end of the complexity pool so I will not go too much into detail on how it all fits together. For now, let's just say that I work at the Swedish HQ of an international retail organization where most of the stores in Sweden are franchises while the rest of the world mainly is corporate owned. Coming from a consulting background with large companies as main customer base, I still tend to get surprised by how this company not only survives but actually prospers in spite of its gaudy past. There has been various acquisitions with one business model being applied after another, one way of identifying and documenting processes after another and one way of managing the company after another. And here we are today. If you look at the numbers alone, most people would say that this business is doing pretty well. The scary part is - it is! Bullheaded as I be, I enter the board room, claim my seat and proclaim that the time to change pretty much everything as far as organization and structure concerns has come. Eagerly, I lay up my master plan and explain why we obviously want to change and how much less everyone will have to work and how our profit will soar. No applause. Imagine that... Most of my remarks on the current state of the organization are met with an undisputable 'it works for us'. It does. So how am I supposed to argue with margins that show a decent profit, a solid increase in the ammount of stores and an organization full of coworkers that feel that everything is great just the way it is. All I need to do is leave things alone. Where I see missing structure and lack of processes, my coworkers see an organization that is making profit and a model that has worked for years and years. After a week or five, I cave in and resign my ideas of a leap in effectivity and consider the golden middle ground my best option. When I ask for process definitions, people reach into their shelves to grab a notepad, browsing to a specific page and slam it into the desk in front of me with a content 'Hah!'. Some processes are documented. In notepads. In peoples book shelves. Hah! What if I could offer a full set of process defintions, electronically available to all employees, where anyone that is dependent on this particular process can follow its progress. Where anyone that is supposed to provide input to the process is made aware of this well ahead of time to keep the process running swiftly. The response comes with the speed of a bullet. 'We have all we need. This works for us'. I have learned that evolution is an imperfect process. Does this mean that I will have to resort to violence? Structure and well documented processes will prevail! I will have to get back to you on this one.
Yes. Really. After finally realizing that I am but a mere human and in fact, quite a flawed such, I have taken the decision to change my path of carreer. I have been a systems development consultant all my professional life and the time has come to try something new. Considering that I repeatedly keep widening my professional focus area(s), I also see no other choice than to step down from all my other assignments as well. That means no more INETA and I have also, only a few minutes ago, turned in my notice to Paul Preiss, meaning that I am also leaving my years as Vice President for the International Association of Software Architects behind me. This is really something that I do with great sadness and regret but it must be done. For the recent subscribers to my blog - I assume that most of you have a SharePoint-centric interest. I will not give any further MOSS courses. In fact I will also stop teaching alltogether. I will try to keep my 'References...' post up to date and I will obviously post regarding new findings even if I suppose that they will be scarse, considering that MOSS will no longer be part of my professional toolset. Cornerstone's MOSS course will keep running without me. Software will be built, and projects will be run successfully - without me. It is really good to know that tomorrow will be pretty much the same as today, whether I am trying to change things or not. For a whily onwards, I will focus on only doing my job. I was about to start writing a 'thank you' section but in fact, I actually owe most of you a huge thanks! ...Argh, ok... I just need to pinpoint a few here, otherwise I will just freak out. Jossan, Patrik, Jimmy, Robert, Daniel and Paul. Who knows; maybe one day I'll be back. Today, I'd say not likely. But really, who am I to tell...
When time permits, I usually end my MOSS classes with references to a few places to visit that I highly recommend. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is such a potent platform for building collaborative, managed enterprise solutions that it will take some time to really understand all of its benefits. The following places will be of good service during your quest for MOSS excellence: - The blog of Johan Dewe. It seems that he's finally back from his paternity leave and writing awesome posts on MOSS - in Swedish.
- Todd Bleeker's blog contains a number of invaluable HowTo style posts.
- Ted Pattison's buddy Daniel Larson usually provides invaluable SharePoint insight.
- The man behind SmartPart, Jan Tielens, obviously has a place to share his MOSS wisdom.
- Exile Dane, Lars Fastrup, does not only provide an awesome SharePoint Search replacement. He has also released SharePoint Solution Installer, a most excellent tool that will set you back 0.00 ($|£|€)
- There is actually a downloadable VHD (Virtual Hard Drive - for Virtual PC) for MOSS 2007 available from Microsoft Downloads. It will expires 30 days after initiation.
- Scot Hillier knows a lot about SharePoint Server 2007.
- If you intend to go enterprise on your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you will, without a doubt, create Business Data Catalog (BDC) applications. And you would not want to use the tool (Notepad) provided by Microsoft to configure the metadata but rather the beautiful BDC Meta Man, provided by SharePointNick Swan and friends.
- When the time comes to designing your MOSS implementation, you really should stop by over at Heather Solomon's first.
- As a final note in this list, I just need to point out that Telerik just released a lite edition of their astounding RadEditor for free.
To add to this, there are a set of books which I would like to recommend: - Todd Bleeker's "Developer's Guide to the Windows SharePoint Services v3 Platform"
- "Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0" by Ted Pattison and Daniel Larson
- Scot Hillier has done so extremely well with his "Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005"
- Wrox has released "Professional SharePoint 2007 Development" written by a bunch of authors featuring Microsoft's Tom Rizzo among others.
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