Introducing Readify’s MSH script site.

At Readify we love MSH (or as Scott Hanselman refers to it “mush”). Now – thats not strictly true, when I told the developer folk at Readify that I wanted to do a presentation at TechEd 2005 on the upcoming Microsoft Command Shell they suggested that I would be the only one in the room and they started referring to me as Monad Mitch.

Now that Readify has an infrastructure practice I don’t feel quite so alone because the infrastructure guys seem to get the whole scripting thing. Thats why we have decided to launch the scripts site:

http://scripts.readify.net

We are going to use this site to publish useful scripts that we write (and if we can, the ones we find). We really want it to become a community resource so feel free to check out the Scripts, Links and FAQ pages and make any suggestions (via the forms provided). You can also hook up to the RSS feed so you know when it has been updated (the feeds actually contain the content which is cool).

Site Implementation Details

Implemented using ASP.NET 2.0 (duh!). I actually used the soon to be released Web Application Project and rather than using the database to store the data we actually use SharePoint as a backend store. The advantage of doing this is that we don’t have to write an administration interface and we can leverage a tool that everyone in the organisation is already familiar with.

While the data access was possibly a little bit more involved, it really saved time on the administration front. Time actual for development would have been around three or four hours, but time elapsed was probably more like three weeks since it was done in spare time.

email2face: What a cool online service.

email2face is a cool online service by the guys at ASPSOFT. I can’t wait to see how people use/abuse this in mash-ups.

Using an i-mate JasJar as a USB modem.

So, you’ve just plugged your handy dandy WM 5.0 device (in my case an i-mate JasJar) into your laptop and started the Wireless Modem program on the device – wait a few seconds and start scratching your head! When you do this Windows will attempt to detect the hardware, and it will pick up a generic USB modem device for which it doesn’t have a driver.

What you need to do to get this working is install this USB modem driver when prompted. It will do a whole heap of buzzing and finally spit out that it has successfully configured the device. After the installation is complete you will have a “HTC USB Modem (WirelessModem)” connection defined in your Network Connections.

It will dial up the device using *99# and use your default access point name (configured on the device under the tools menu in the Wireless Modem program. For Vodafone Australia it is “vfinternet.au”.

I found Bluetooth easier to configure (just create a partnership between the devices – from the desktop) and it detects a standard bluetooth modem. In that case you need to create your own connection that dials *99#. The problem with running bluetooth is that it really runs down the battery in this mode so when you can, hook up using USB to keep the charge in your mobile device.

Warning: Make sure you have a good data plan before doing too much surfing or e-mail.

Scrum for Team System 1.0 Released

No – I haven’t created it, but I have been BETA testing it. The guys over at Conchango have been hard at work for quite some time pulling together a process template for Scrum. I got an e-mail today that they have released it and you can go and download it (registration required, but its free).

Congratuations to the guys at Conchango, I think that this will be one of the most widely used Process Templates outside of MSF Agile 4.0!

Process Template Released: Personal Workspace - v1.0

Last week, before he presented his session in Canberra, I was having a chat to Jeff Beehler about some of the things I would like to see in TFS down the track. One of the topics that came up was the lack of a scratch pad for developers who wanted to version control their stuff but not choose a process template which was in-appropriate for them.

Well – tonight I sat down and took the process template form MSF Agile 4.0 and stripped it down to the bare essentials. Like all good things, its not what you put in, but what you take away.

• No portal support.
• No reporting support.
• No iterations.

Basically its an empty shell with only one type of work item (Task). You get all this in a tiny 7KB package (download here). This is the first version of the Personal Workspace process template so if you see something that you would like added (or better yet, taken away) shoot me an e-mail.

Getting into Password Minder

I hope Rocky doesn’t see this. But I’ve had enough of forgetting passwords and password reset e-mails taking hours and sometimes days to be sent. So I have downloaded and installed Password Minder by Keith Brown over at Pluralsight.

The issue came to a head when I was having a _secure_ IM conversation with one of our infrastructure guys – Derrick Buckley. Derrick was giving me about my 1000th unique username/password combination to remember and he himself wondered whether I would be able to remember.

Being an honest kinda guy, I said no – and he suggested Password Minder. So far I have about twenty passwords safely tucked away behind my super password (30–40 characters) and backups of the password file are taking place every week.