For me that's not many. Right now is a typical example. I started to read a blog post, followed a link or two, found something else that was interesting, stopped thinking, what was I doing again? Ahhh... reading blogs... Ok, back to that... Or maybe not, I'll rather blog about why I'm getting distracted...

No vonder it takes time. According to my Google Reader statistics I subscribe to 133 blogs and I've read 350 posts the last 30 days. But I've been lazy lately though... I have 668 unread items waiting for me now.  It's a fulltime job :) Anyway, back to reading blogs.

When I was at Øredev I wrote two ([1][2]) blog posts about the conference, and these got picket up by Øredev Project Manager Michael Tiberg. Yesterday I found this in my email box:

I really think this is a good way of letting the community know that they listen.

If you've ever been to one of Roy Osherove's talks you've probably heard him do one of his songs at the end. It's very funny and the crowd loves it. There are two videos at YouTube from TechEd Barcelona 2007 you can check out to see what I mean. Notice the guy behind the podium on the second video? That's Pavel Kapustin, co-worker of mine in CMA Contiki :) I think he got Roy's book for helping him out with the PP decks.

Every Build You Break

Reflection song

You probably know allready, but Visual Studio 2008 is now available on MSDN Subscriptions for download. If you don't have an MSDN Subsription I'm afraid you'll have to wait until February 2008...

Update: Added links.

Update2: Link to XAMLPad

Some notes about conference conditions

My last day at Øredev. I’ve had a setback. I’m unable to attend the testing tracks that I want because it’s just too freaking cold in that room. This is true for Test, Project Mgmt and Architecture tracks as well, which is at the same area. I had to go to a .Net track (which is normal room temp) and drink a bucket of tea to get my blood flowing again. And I live in Norway, f%&#ing close to the North Pole! They should defiantly do something about this! I saw Michael Tiberg (Øredev PM) today and was thinking of telling him, but he looked very busy, so I didn’t. I regret it now though.

Sessions

First one that morning (in a freaking cold room!) Testing on Agile Teams by Jonathan Kohl. He basically told his story as a tester and test lead on agile projects and his related experience. He had struggled with getting acceptance of doing testing on agile teams because of their unit testing approach, which they thought was enough. I totally agree with Jonathan that it’s not. Software is not used by computers (not exclusively at least), and can hardly be fully tested by computers. We need human testing in order to find logical errors that computers are unable to discover. Not only that; I don’t believe that you can cover all areas with automated testing. It would be nice if he had been more specific in certain eras, but he had a lot of ground to cover and I understand why he didn’t.

The second session was LINQ by Eric Meijer. I only attended the first 15 minutes, because it was totally not as expected and I had to make some phone calls as well, so can’t really say much about this one.

Back into the cold area (which got slightly warmer) for Holistic Outsourcing by Matt MacGregor. Lot of good reasons for not outsourcing IT competence. I almost felt sorry for Matt and his company for what they’ve been through during their outsourcing process. Interesting subject, but have to keep most of my notes and thoughts for myself for now, because we’re outsourcing as well ;) One of my conclusions though was: Avoid fixed price/time contracts so that the company you use don’t get hung up in your specs and use it as an argument for not delivering the functionality you really want. Change in requirements will be costly if you do.

It was now time for another talk by Jeff Sutherland (PM with Scrum). Very similar to his previous talk, only slightly changed to target PM’s. Personally I’ve read and watched a lot of Dr. Sutherland’s work before, so nothing new for me. Key points:

• Why do software companies as the only industry in the world tolerate such a high failure rate on projects before taking action? Solution: Scrum.
• How do you bid for fixed price projects when you are Agile? You need to do the same upfront work as in waterfall projects (estimate, spec, document etc), but force the client to be a part of your process (e.g. review meetings, priorities etc).
• Government projects are often regulated by government rules forcing waterfall processes.
  

Last session of the conference for me was Advanced development with WPF and Silverlight by Stefan Wick from MS. I was expecting advanced development, but got 20 demo’s of Silverlight implementations. I was cool though! He showed some apps with XAML only, in XamlPad. Personally I took notes about ScaleTransform and Xml Data Binder which I have to look more into.

Panel Debate

This was cool. Andy Hunt, Matt Gibbs, Kevlin Henney and Dan North where discussing accidental complexity. You could ask them questions by writing it on a note and pass it to one of the “conference helpers”. I got my question debated :)

First impression

I didn’t go to TechEd this year and thought I’d try out this conference in Sweden called Øredev (www.oredev.com). The agenda that I found on their website was pretty good. I really liked the tracks:

• Java
• .Net
• Methods & Tools
• Embedded Systems
• Architecture
• Test
• Project Management
• User Experience
• Case Studies
• Future & Trends
  

Should be enough to choose from for conference lasting two days :) It was difficult to choose which sessions to go to though, but for me it was really nice to have something else than MS related sessions to go to.

The Conference

The welcome speech and introduction by Øredev Project Manager, Michael Tiberg (and someone else that I don’t know who was), was not very impressive and kind of gave it all a bad start. It might be me being used to very fancy welcome speeches in other conferences, but these two guys was mediocre to say the least (or maybe it was just bad English). Anyway, Andy Hunt (the keynote speaker) is experienced and I soon forgot all about the shaky start. His presentation was good. He’s a funny guy (at least he was today) and gave us a walkthrough of the history of computing and development. Always nice to know where your roots are.

Feedback

The way they handled feedback at Øredev was quite nice. On your way out from the session you picked a card (green, yellow or red) that you drop in a bucket. Red is of course not good and green is, and I leave up to you to decide what yellow is.

Lunch

What can I say… Handouts of food, nowhere (at least not dedicated) to sit down and relax while eating, cold conference hall (had to put on my jacked to not freeze my but off). Not impressed.

The talks

The first session I had decided to attend was Model View Controller Framework by Matt Gibs, but this got changed with something else (at least they renamed it) and I decided in the last minute to go to Dynamic lang. for statically typed minds by Niclas Nilsson. This was quite good. I’ve not looked much at the dynamic languages out there yet (except from what I’ve read), and this was a nice introduction that gave me a bit of insight into the different ones. Niclas compared static typed languages to dynamic languages and showed the differences by examples. He also talked about the influence dynamic languages have had on C# and Java with extension methods, LINQ etc.

Next session up was Testable Architecture by Ron Jacobs. It turns out that Ron couldn’t make it for some reason (probably liked TechEd and Barcelona too much and decided to stay), so Michael Feathers and Dan North jumped to the rescue. Those two guys pulled that one off nice! They only got asked to do the presentation the night before, but that didn’t seem to bother them. They did the session like an interactive discussion panel (like they did here), and it gave me good value. One of my takeaways from this session was that I have to read Michael’s book about legacy code.

Next up was Implementing and extending VSTS. Not very impressed, though the two presenters (Mattias Olausson & Peter Blomqvist) have created a project on Codeplex which is the result of their implementation of VSTS. It wasn’t that it was bad, but they’ve could have done much better.

ParallelFX: Concurrency Library Ext. by Joe Duffy. I decided to go to this to see what MS has done and are thinking around parallel processing. I got an idea of what they’re doing and which problems they address. I would like to see this being implemented it the CRL somehow and automatically kick in when needed, but I guess that is the same as having threading work the same way, which is not very realistic. My point is that I just don’t want to be bothered by this. I just want my code to execute it the fastest way possible, making use of as all processors power available. Joe also briefly mentioned PLINQ and showed how it’s related to what they’re doing. To sum up: Parallel.For and Parallel.Do

What to Test and When by Udi Dahan. I believe that any good tester should be able to break an application within 10 minutes. Udi is no different and managed to crash Power Point not once, not twice, but tree times! The poor conference guy had to restart his machine every time. This interrupted the session a bit and was not planned (as you might be tempted to think). Anyway, Udi managed quite well and I got a few ideas and suggestions along the way. I’m looking forward to implement some real testing where I work (in addition to unit testing that is).

Last session of the day was The Agile Enterprise by Jeff Sutherland. Don't think I was the main target for his talk (more CTO, CEO, COO stuff), but I just had to see Jeff in real life and say hello. He is after all the founder of Scrum together with Ken Schwaber. During his talk I still managed to come up with a few new ideas for our team, even though it wasn’t really related to anything he said. This is just a typical example of how your mind get motivated and constantly come up with new ideas at conferences like these.

The wait is almost over. At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced the release date of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. Check out the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

Today I got tired of using my mouse when navigating in Google search results, so I started to search for Google keyboard shortcuts. I found some tools that added this to Firefox, but I just couldn't believe there weren’t existing in Google already. And then I found something at Google Experimental Labs. By clicking you convert your Google search to be keyboard sensitive. Nice! Here's how it looks after I've "Joined the experiment":

Here are the available shortcuts:

Key	Action
J	Selects the next result.
K	Selects the previous result.
O	Opens the selected result.
<Enter>	Opens the selected result.
/	Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>	Removes the cursor from the search box.

I’ve blogged a bit about planning poker lately (Planning Poker and Planning Poker – Why does it work?). This time it’s the anchoring effect. You might have heard about the anchoring effect before and you can read more about it at Wikipedia, but here is an example of why anchoring in planning poker is not wanted:

David is Product Manager. Jonny is team lead. He’s been in this company since the startup 5 years ago. David, Jonny and the rest of the team sit down for a round of planning poker. Before they vote, David reads the user story to be estimated and asks if there are any questions. Some questions come up and get quickly answered by David and Jonny. Before they start to vote, Jonny says:

    “This should be very simple, shouldn’t take us more than a couple of days”.

Jonny has now put out the anchor. When all votes are in, not surprisingly they’re all unanimous on 2 days. Jonny could have left out his guess on 2 days, and there would still be an anchoring effect. This is because he states “this should be very simple”.

When playing planning poker you should try to talk about the story without mentioning anything about your impression of the complexity or timeframe of the story. This will allow your team to estimate more honestly. If Jonny didn’t say what he said in my previous example, someone might have voted much higher and forced a discussion that would have highlighted something previously unknown to the story. As soon as the anchor is out there, this seldom happens.

On Wednesday NNUG Bergen was lucky enough to get Einar Ingebrigtsen to speak for us. He held a great session about XNA and some game dev history. Einar did game development for about 8 years and then jumped to business development. His background was perfect to highlight some of the similarities between the two. Especially interesting was the similarities around layering.

Einar is involved in many things and one of his latest projects is Game Camp. On November 23rd Game Camp will kick off with a great agenda in Oslo. Go here to check out the agenda and registration.

Another thing Einar has been doing lately is creating a 3D engine for Silverlight called Balder. As you may know Silverlight is a subset of WPF and one of the things they removed was the 3D stuff. But that didn’t stop him. Check out his 3D project over at CodePlex. To see the engine in action, check out this demo.