Updated: 25/08/2004; 15:58:59

 30 June 2004

Amazing array of Windows Powered Devices

I was wondering a few weeks ago why the Tablet PC team were moved into the Mobile and Embedded Devices division in Microsoft.  Then I saw this web page and the array of Tablet format devices and I realised why!  Theres a very good write up of recent news from the Embedded developers conference here.  More links to Windows powered devices can be found below:

 

- Posted by Steve Richards - 5:28:53 PM - comment []

Office 12 and other key release dates

Some interesting roadmap data has been published at Tech-ED.  Well perhaps more stunning than interesting.  I posted previously that maybe Microsoft were loosing their nerve and pushing product to market rapidly through fear of loss of revenue, and that there strategic re-architecting of the main product lines was potentially being compromised.  However these dates tell a different story:

The core foundation elements, i.e. Longhorn Client and SQL Server come first.  Then Longhorn Server, then Exchange Kodiak, Office System 12 and SPSv3 in 2007-8.  Hopefully a new version of WSS sits somewhere around 2005-6.  This implies that Microsoft are planning something significant in Office System 12, and that the information management and collaboration story might actually start to come together with the next versions of Longhorn server, Exchange and SPS.  There’s a jpeg of the roadmap slide available here.

Microsoft are planning to give me some details under NDA of this stuff quite soon, so I maybe able to confirm some of this speculation at a high level.

- Posted by Steve Richards - 2:09:50 PM - comment []

Extreme Programming

The spoke has a short post on extreme programming.  Its been a long time since I have been a real programmer, and was probably never an extreme one by any definition, however I have managed my share of development projects and a few things appealed to me in this report.

Developer bids for work: developers in the team bid for tasks. Lowest bid wins and gets the job. 
>> This is a very cool motivational tool, if you have the right team and culture.

Work in pairs

>> This is a new one on me, although I have done some of my best work when working in pairs I have never seen it formally laid out like this as part of a methodology.  The overhead cost is considerable at first glance; it would be interesting to see the overall effect on lifecycle cost though.

Work in pairs: but the most experienced one does not drive the keyboard. He/she watches the other one and makes comments

Lies: two developers will be more candid about the prospects for the development. They are also better able to negotiate deadlines and features and less inclined to lie about the situation.

Blame: it is harder to blame two people for getting something wrong. And they will be better able to defend themselves.

Crucial: no one person can be crucial to the development. Rotate the pairs so that expertise is spread around the developers.

 

Building Systems

>> This is all about the daily build concept.  I came home with this one a couple of Tech-EDs ago and my dev team at the time were sceptical however they gave it a go and it worked out great.  In fact the approach they took was really pretty impressive.  They were working on a web application using IIS and Exchange accessed via WebDAV and ADO.  They setup an automated system that allowed each person to have their own work in progress system running live on the same system.  Each night they checked in any code they thought was ready for the rest of the team to test and this went live in a shared environment on a test server.  Each night any code that had been tested by the dev team was made available in a semi-production environment.  The old code from previous days was also available live and could be accessed just with a different URL, to test regressions.  The whole system was automated and very easy to use and resulted in very rapid development and lots of early feedback from the users of the semi-production system, who used it live, to run a major programme, but were mainly friendly IT guys themselves who did not mind the odd glitch.

Design in the test: write the test specs first. Test everything. All coded paths. Automate your tests. Make the testing easy, so you do it lots.

Daily Build: Build regularly. But not every day perhaps. If someone breaks the build process they must mend it. Make running versions with limited functionality. The deploy process is part of the build and should be similarly automated. Anything which takes more than 10 minutes to build is probably worth looking at.

- Posted by Steve Richards - 1:59:04 PM - comment []

More on PowerPoint

Powerpoint seems to be cropping up all over in my blogs at the moment.  I am a big user of PowerPoint.  I recently checked my local machine using X1 and I have 669 PP files at the moment.  Anyway I was pleased to come across this post by Michael Hyatt which point to all of his favourite Powerpoint Resources on the web, they are repeated here, but for more details Visit Michael's blog.  I have added to and annotated his list, you gan get the details here ...

- Posted by Steve Richards - 1:45:50 PM - comment []

WIndows 2003 Server, anywhere access

It's TechED Europe this week and Microsoft have announced more details of the next release of Windows 2003 Server.  The area of most interest to me is, "anywhere access", which Neowin reports on. Anywhere access enables users to use terminal services over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC), Outlook over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC) and also file shares from within corporate LANs over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC). 

These are very interesting developments, the WTS capabilities removing one more advantage that Citrix has over Microsoft.  The file share access is interesting, as file share access using WebDAV is already available I can only assume that this is CIFS access tunnelled over HTTPS, this would be a big improvement over WebDAV as it would support more applications, the properties dialog and other features not available today using DAV.  I thought Outlook over HTTPS was already part of Exchange 2003 server, so I am not sure why this is included in a feature list for Windows 2003 server unless its actually provided by the OS or probably IIS rather than Exchange.

These HTTP access mechanisms are useful not just in providing internet access to corporate resources but also for corporates wishing to provide controlled access on their WAN for third parties, aquisitions or businesses in the process of being disposed of.

- Posted by Steve Richards - 1:36:45 PM - comment []