But it works on my PC!

After my comments on the QDD session at a past BCS meeting I have been asked to return and speak at the West Yorkshire BCS meeting on the 30th of June to give an overview about Agile methods.

This will be very much a management overview for people who are unaware of Agile methods, hence I will touch on XP, Scrum, Crystal Clear and Kanban and try to compare and contrast.

But, If you can’t wait to find out about Agile, why not come to the next Agile Yorkshire meeting on the 8th?

I won’t bother to repeat what Gojko has said on David J, Anderson’s book on Kanban, other than to say I agree wholeheartedly.

I too have been looking for a good introduction book on Kanban as applied to software development (so Kanban as opposed to kanban, not the capital K). This is exactly what with book does. OK I know that this information is out there on the web (http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/); but there times, especially for introducing potentially non technical people to development methodologies, where you want to point people at an easily accessible introduction they can dip into. This is that book, have a look it is worth it

June’s Agile Yorkshire meeting is on the experiences of the BI development team at Skipton Building Society on bringing automated testing to data warehousing using Fitnesse and dbFit.

For more details check out the Agile Yorkshire site

When you drop a combo box on a Access 2010 web form and databind to a query or table with a value column and display column (e.g. the query select id, description from table1) you don’t get what you would expect. It shows just the value e.g. a set of integers in the combo.

This is not the case if you are using a standard Access client form. the wizard that gets run sort it all out for you, and if it does not, you just set the ‘Bound Column’ property to sort it out.

On web forms the fix is simple, but not obvious.

1. Databind the combo as you normal do to the query/table.
2. Go to the combo’s properties format tab
3. Set the column count to 2
4. Set the column widths to 0cm;2cm (basically hide the first column and show the second)

Once this is done it work fine

The next chapter of the ongoing saga. I had the 403 errors again today when using my phone as a modem to test out firewall. As I was in the office I had time to call Vodafone support. As expect I had to speak to a succession of people:

• Person 1 – call centre advisor, passed me straight onto ‘support’
• Person 2 – support advisor but seem lost when I spoke about web protocols, I think it was more ‘making a phone ring’ support
• Person 3 – 2nd line support, success, as soon as I explained my problem they said ‘yes that happens’.

The problem is down, as I had suspected, to congestion in their WAN network (not the 3G network, though the density of cells is a factor). When you try to use HTTP Vodafone route a request to their authentication server to see if your account is allow to connect to the site. By default they block a list of adult/premium web sites (this is service you have switched on or off with your account). The problem is at busy times this validation service is overloaded and so their systems get no response as to whether the site is allowed, so assume the site you asked for is restricted and gives the 403 error. Once this happens you seem to have to make new 3G data connection (reset the phone, move cell or let the connection time out) to get it to try again.

I have now had the restricted service removed from my account, we will see if this help. I fear it will not as any connection still has to ask the authentication server if the site is restricted even if my account is set to restrict no sites.

So it seems that volume of smartphones is really hurting Vodafone's internal network. They seem to have the 3G/Edge capacity, shame they have not got enough server wan/capacity to back it up yet.

What I don’t understand is why this has taken me so long to get a sensible answer. Can’t they publish a statement on this problem on their support forums or web site?

Don’t be a muppet like me and turn up for an Agile Yorkshire meeting on the 2nd Wednesday of the month out of habit. Due to the move to the great new location of the Old Broadcasting House the regular date has had to moved to the 2nd Tuesday.

Bit of a pain for me as I struggle to make Tuesdays.

I got this commonly seen version error when I tried to upgrade my RC version of Office 2010 to RTM

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of Microsoft Office 2010. You must first install any prerelease versions of Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

I had already removed by RC Office and Visio. Turns out the problem was I had the Outlook Hotmail Connector (Beta) installed too. Once this was removed the install worked fine.

Visual Studio 2010 provides many new features to aid Application Lifecycle Management. Learning its capabilities can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to Team Foundation Server.

So enter the new book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ by Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy and Martin Woodward. This provides a great overview of all the the key features of Visual Studio and TFS 2010, presented with a view as to how TFS gives an end to end delivery of an ALM process.

Don’t go expecting this book will tell you everything about TFS, even at 600 pages it cannot be that detailed, it is a huge product, you think SharePoint is big, well it is just a subset of TFS! To address this potential problem the book contains many links of to relevant sources both on MSDN and blogs to fill in the extra detail you are bound to need concerning TFS and general development processes. Think of it as a “get you started” book, or a “what’s new in this release”, not a day to day administrators guide.

My one complaint, and it is very minor, is that it does read a bit like a collection articles as opposed to a single book. However, given it has four authors and the scope of the subject it covers this is forgivable.

So if you are are considering TFS 2010, whether as a developer, a sys-admin or manager this book will give you a good introduction into that you can achieve in your ALM process. Well worth a read.

Got time today to start our proper internal TFS 2010 rollout. This involves linking up the new TFS to our SharePoint 2010 farm and merging in the contents from 2008 TFS and 2010 RC servers.

All went fairly well, our SharePoint farm caused a few problems with its rather nice redirection feature. This  allows you to gradually move SharePoint content from an older server to a new one. A page is requested from the new server, if it is there it is used, if it is not the content on the old server is used. This caused a couple of problems during the install of TFS that content was not on the new SharePoint server so it redirected to the old one. However, the correct response was that the content was not there and TFS need to install or configure it. Once we realised this was going on there were no major issues with the TFS 2010 installation.

So we had a nice new TFS 2010 install. The next task was to move over content from the 2008 server. Our 2008 server was virtualised so I snaphot’d it, made sure we had a good SQL backup and did an in-place upgrade, and this is where I hit a problem. Our new TFS 2010 install and the 2008 were using the same central SQL server. Our new TFS 2010 install had created a TFS_Configuration DB, I had had the option to put in prefix such as TFS_2010_Configuration but decided I did not need it. This choice came back to bite me. When you do an in-place upgrade of 2008 to 2010 it rolls up all the old TFS DBs into the new structure, creating a new DB, with you guess it, the name TFS_Configuration. If you are doing a new install you can alter this DB name, but this is not the case for a upgrade, you have to use the standard name. So I was a bit stuck. The solution was to:

1. take my new TFS 2010 server temporarily off line
2. rename the TFS_Configuration DB
3. do the in-place upgrade on the new 2008 server to 2010, so it creates as new TFS_Configuration DB
4. detach the newly upgraded Team Project Collection on the TFS admin console
5. take my upgraded TFS 2008 server off line
6. rename its TFS_Configuration DB (if really confident you could delete it)
7. rename the original TFS_Configuration DB back
8. restart the main TFS 2010 server
9. attached the upgraded TPC in the TFS admin console

Simple really !

A while ago I blogged about the problems I was having with 403 error when trying to use my HTC phone as a 3G modem or using Opera or IE on the phone itself. When I initially complained Vodafone refunded my data fee for the month and said engineers were onto this known intermittent issue. No grief, Ok I did not want to see 403 errors but I was happy with the customer service, fast and no quibble.

But the 403 errors have not gone way, in fact I am seeing them more often and not just when in the square mile in London. When I complained again I got a different level of service, I got the ‘it is your handset’ response. This was even though I had clearly said FTP and HTTPS (to an Exchange server) were fine it was only HTTP again via the phones two browsers and from a PC using the phone as a 3G modem i.e. traffic that they proxy.

They outdid themselves today with this suggestion

1. Switch off your phone
2. Remove battery and SIM
3. Clean it with clean cotton cloth
4. Insert battery and SIM after 15 to 20 minutes

How this is meant to help a server side error how?