Hills House of GAIN

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Lol! No sooner than I promise to post more frequently I swan off on a weeks holiday to the sunny southwest of England for a last minute kite-surf session.

Well, in between the temperatures reaching sub zero, and freak hail storms I managed to get on the beach once, and then my trusty old O’Neil Hammer wetsuit wasn’t up to the extreme cold, so I managed all of 1/2 hour. In all the years I’ve been to St Ives this was by far the worst and coldest weather I’ve encountered. People were literally running for cover when the hailstones fell in Newquay, and within minutes the floor was white over.

On the home front it looks like my time at "EDS an HP Company" may be coming to an end! They’re big, but they’re just not big enough to contain my passion and enthusiasm! I’ll know more tomorrow after a discussion with my superiors, but I think my future lies elsewhere.

Hint : I’ve updated my Contracting CV.

Wow, its been so long since my last post that I’ve almost forgotten what a blog is. Well, almost.

Many things have happened both personally and professionally, hence the post hiatus.

But once again, I’m back and hopefully this time, I wont be straining myself trying to crank out humongous posts that take days to complete. Maybe if the posts are short and sweet i’ll end up with a more regular flow of useful snippets, rather than a 3 month delay then a 20 page monster article. These will still happen, but they won’t be the focus of my attention.

Anyway here’s a few things that have been keeping me away from the blog (if anyone’s interested!)

• I’ve won another award for the project I’m working on – this time it was cash. Cold hard cash 🙂
• I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I’m working masses of overtime for the wrong people, so it’s time to redress the balance. I won’t be working less, I’ll just be shifting what I’m doing, and who I’m doing it for. Working less is for sissies.
• I’m setting up a Micro-ISV. After being infected with the Micro-ISV bug from my good friend Tim Haughton. After many conversations, I’ve been convinced that my talents lie elsewhere. Well other than permanent employment that is. More about this later.
• I’ve been put through the assistive technologies wringer, and befriended a blind user who’s convinced me of the value of proper screen reading access. I can’t imagine using a PC without seeing the screen but he manages just fine. Truly amazing. One thing it has made me aware of is the vast market for well written useable products that aid users, even if they’re just partially sighted. Our WPF application at work has scalable fonts throughout, and i don’t think there’s a single user that doesn’t change the font sizes to make them larger.

Anyway, that’s enough posting for this entry, or I’ll be back on a 10 pager. I *will* be back tomorrow with a post about a good way to allow assitive tech to read the stuff on a WPF application under Windows XP. Damn that was tricky.

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A little bird’s told me that the .Net3.5sp1 will be RTM on 11th August! Wonder if the Pixel shader API has been rationalised… Multi-texture here we come 😉

Ok, my bad. I’ve been real busy at work WPF is really soaking up all my time right now. That’s actually a good thing, anything that forces more WPF into my head can’t be a bad thing.

On an alternate note I’ve solved the iPod software problem. I’ve settled on winamp! Although it has native support for the iPod, it’s pretty poor, but there’s a much better plugin available called ml_ipod. Support and features are excellent, and because i’ve been using winamp since it first came out, getting used to the feature set was a doddle.

Anyway, anything to get rid of iTunes! Winamp+ml_ipod all the way!

Thought I’d brain dump a little problem I came across earlier today. Data Error 19.

Here’s the full error.

System.Windows.Data Error: 19 : Cannot convert ’40’ from type ‘Int32’ to type ‘System.Int64’ for ‘en-US’ culture with default conversions; consider using Converter property of Binding. NotSupportedException: ‘System.NotSupportedException: Int64Converter cannot convert from System.Int32.
   at System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter.GetConvertFromException(Object value)
   at System.ComponentModel.BaseNumberConverter.ConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext context, CultureInfo culture, Object value)
   at MS.Internal.Data.DefaultValueConverter.ConvertHelper(Object o, Type destinationType, DependencyObject targetElement, CultureInfo culture, Boolean isForward)’

How did I get here? Well, I have a bunch of generated values that come from a data dictionary , they’re generated into classes that contain Key/Value pairs, where the Key is an Int32.

This list is shown in a combo box, and the current value of the combo box is then bound to a CLR value type in a class. The only problem is that the classes CLR Type isn’t an Int32. It’s an Int64.

Now I know the the real fix is to generate a list of values for the combo box who’s type matches the destination bound value of Int64. The trouble is that I don’t always have that type information available. Thing is, I can’t remember any other control having the problem of changing types.

Heck,if you look at the conversion that it’s trying to do, it should be able to cope, converting an Int32 to an Int64 isn’t a narrowing cast, so there should be no problems with overflow. Eitherway, i just want to bind up this stuff and not worry about the types.

So, I wrote a small test app to verify what was going on.

Both the slider and the combo box are bound to an internal value, called surprisingly , "BoundValue" that’s declared as an Int64, and there’s a textbox that is then bound the "BoundValue" to show its current value.

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Free Vouchers this time. Apparently I’ve won £100 of vouchers for implementing the Scrum methodology! I have no idea which shops the vouchers are for, only that they’re high street vouchers, so I suppose that’s cool, they could have been for kitchen tiles or something equally as mundane. But, heh, I’m not really doing anything to achieve these awards (like my iPod winning idea), just kind of, well, plugging away at changing things. I guess someone’s starting to listen!

Anyway, we’re kind of a heavily entrenched Waterfall development shop so, I thought I’d liven things up and ignore the people that said we couldn’t do Agile here :). So I merrily headed off down the Scrum path – having done it before I’m pretty sure by now the shoe will fit.

Friction, damn I thought I was on fire. Straight from 15 years of waterfall into scrum caused friction on a galactic scale – most of it not from the project itself, but the organisation. So, while the project works pretty well, and customer satisfaction skyrockets, the rest of the organisation is playing catch up. Still I guess nothing worth doing is easy. If it wasn’t for the customers complete buy in I don’t think I’d be winning awards, I think I’d be winning P45’s. (for you international readers that’s the short walk to the long unemployment queue…)

So, the best bit is actually that the customer loves the method so much that they’re bending over backwards to keep us using it, so much so that I hear they’re making requests of other projects to be run the same way! So from the customer side I’m starting to shine so much you need sunglasses when you approach my desk, whilst from our side I have dozens, if not hundred of disgruntled waterfallers baying for my blood. Some people simply don’t want to change. Heh, you can’t please all the people all the time.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed using Scrum with non-technical customers that are worth pointing out.

1. It doesn’t matter how much work you’ve done, if its not on screen its not done.
   You can have web services coming out of your ying yang, and if the customer can’t push a button and see it work you haven’t done it.
2. It doesn’t matter how your project schedule is organised, if it doesn’t list when visual elements appear, they’re not interested.
3. Make sure that you’re fully resourced before you start.
   Ok, a bit obvious you may think, but the customer may not be your best friend when it comes to telling them you cant deliver feature X,Y or Z because Johnny Programmer hasn’t joined the project yet.
4. When organising the project by allowing the customer to prioritise the feature set for the product before generating each sprint, make sure that they’re prioritising Visual Features. They won’t understand anything else.
5. If the customer is involved in providing data to you, make sure they’re in easy to edit formats like word or excel. Deal with translation or the data conversion yourself, hiding it from the customer. Hint : customers don’t like angle brackets.
6. Customers like deadlines, make sure that the door swings both ways and provide dates you’d like them to have things ready by. It’s a good idea that keeps them working towards the same goals as you and makes them feel committed to making the product a success.
7. If you’re having real users testing the application, make sure that its as close to zero defect as possible. Users take great delight in pointing out the obvious like the focus rectangles are missing, they’re not bothered that you haven’t finished that bit yet.
8. Make sure you have customer identical kit  before you start. Requesting kit wasn’t the problem, the waterfall police ended up delaying requests because we weren’t in the testing period yet.
9. Prepare to spend a lot of time repeating yourself – especially to the crews on your side. If they’re still in waterfall mode, it will be a while before they ‘get’ it.
10. Play nicely with others. Although the agile methods typically mean you do everything, it could make whole gaggles of people feel redundant and won’t win you any friends. Even if you can automate all your testing, make sure that your testing dept buys in, and maybe you could even get them involved in learning new testing methods. Who knows they may even want to help provide some code for you. Make sure that everyone feels needed. 

Not an exhaustive list, but things worth keeping in mind if your customer isn’t technical, or they don’t have anyone au-fait with the technology and methodology you’re using.

For the current project I’m using WPF  and scrum – so we’re already 7 years ahead of most of the crowd who are barely breaking free of VB and winforms 1.1 😉

And,for those of you wondering, yes, you can do LOB applications with WPF. 🙂

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