What if we had Trove for Team Foundation Server?

One of the hard limits that people have identified in Team Foundation Server is one on the number of Team Projects that can be created. This is really a fundamental architectural issue which I hope that Microsoft addresses in a future release. If I was looking at this challenge I would be wondering how I could remove this limitation whilst still adding great new functionality.

An idea that I had was around providing some of categorisation facility so that rather than the project list containing a complete list of projects, it just gave you a search form. I could see this kind of facility becoming a valuable asset within a development organisation because the categorisation (like everything in Team Foundation Server) could be made extensible.

I can imagine a time when your corporate TFS installation has something akin to a software map - ala SourceForge and Trove.

On of my favorite Vista platform features is the Restart Manager.

My last trip to Redmond (a kind of Mecca for Microsoft geeks) saw me at the MVP Summit. One of the benefits of the MVP Summits is that you get to sit and listen to folks like Jim Allchin. Jim was giving a demonstration of a recent build (at the time) of Windows Vista and showing off all the new platform features.

One of the cool features that I didn’t know about back then was the Restart Manager which Daniel Moth does a great job of explaining.

The Restart Manager is a feature that allows Windows to notify you application that a restart needs to occur and that if it can (by listening for a particular message), it should persist user data and close down. The idea is that once the machine is rebooted your application can start back up, re-hydrate its state and pick up from where it left off.

The Singularity

I’m currently reading two books by Charles Stross at the moment (that is about all my meat brain can handle). Charles Stross is an acclaimed Sci-Fi author who has written a number of books and short stories including Singularity Sky (which I borrowed from Chris Hewitt in dead trees format).

The other Charles Stross material that I am reading is Accelerando which was recommended by a commenter on my blog (thanks Ian). The books are really having an impact on me (good fiction and science fiction always does).

Science fiction writing is one of those interesting things where either what is written actually comes to pass or was so way off the mark that it is funny (remember Flash Gordon?).

One of the uniting concepts in both resources I am reading is that of a Singularity, a moment in time where our progress in technological terms essentially goes vertical. The stories essentially sit on either side of this event and document the characters who play a part in some way.

Every now and then I contemplate what total disconnection would look like for me - how would I feel if I went cold turkey on technology. I think I do that because its more socially acceptable at the moment run away from technology - but what if you actively tried to connect yourself to every single information resource at once and tried to come up with ways of processing that information through a network of software agents.

Would this be Human 2.0 Service Pack 3 (third time is a charm)?

More photos of my daughter . . .

I’ve been showing these photos to people in the office all week, I’ve got about fifty of them of Bella in various shots just doing what Bella does best (I love my little girl).

These photos were actually taken by Natasha Merry who is basically my favourite photographer in the whole world - although I’ve never met her. My wife Nicola has uploaded a few of them to her Flickr space.

Anyway - thanks once again Natasha.

Microsoft CRM 4.0: More evidence that hosted solutions are increasing in popularity.

I posted just tonight about how I think that more and more business systems are going to need to be made accessible over the Internet. Anyway, I was reading through my backlog of interesting blog posts and I came across this one from Stefano Demiliani about the future release of Microsoft CRM 4.0 (codenamed Titan).

There were two interesting things that I noticed about this release in particular, first, it will be using .NET 3.0 to support its Workflow Engine (go .NET!!!) and second it will support multi-tenancy. This has to be due to some of the hosted offerings in the same space but its a sign that even the big software companies are starting to adjust their attitude.

But what could be driving this? Well, I think that users are getting smarter. We are starting to get a generation of users in the enterprise today that aren’t afraid of technology, but not only that, they know exactly what they want and they are willing to pop out the AMEX and pay for it.

A hosted technology offering is actually a way to by-pass a lot of red tape and if you can get at it running over port eighty then even better.

Outlook slaves are the happiest slaves in the world.

I’ve been using Outlook for a long time, in fact, I was using Outlook back when it was Microsoft Mail and Schedule+. Before then I had a brief flirtation with Eudora, and spent some quality time with PINE (and before time began I could be found lurking on FidoNet).

Just prior to 2000 I used Netscape Mail for a little while when I decided to abandon the capitalist shackles of Microsoft Windows and run RedHat Linux (which turned out to be just another set of capitalist shackles).

When I read Jordana’s post on her changing over to using Office 2007 it made me ponder why more people don’t use Outlook at home. Obviously cost is a factor, Outlook isn’t free, but I wonder if there is more to it than that - does your e-mail address (e.g. @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) have a huge bearing on which mail client you use?

I’ve got lots of e-mail addresses, but the two that I use the most are my @notgartner.com and my @readify.net one, and I read both of them using Outlook (2007 actually). I’ve become so proficient at processing e-mail with Outlook that moving to something else would be a real struggle - I’m a slave to the relative productivity of an Outlook-enabled e-mail environment.

Actually - as an interesting statistic, since last completely flushing my mail store, I’ve sent 17,485 e-mails

I want to be a Producer . . .

Thats a big P, not a little P. Last night over dinner a few of us were talking about how cool it would be to produce little vignettes about life at Readify. I’ve got a few whacky ideas that if I can pull them together I’d like to upload them to YouTube. I think that Darren has latched on to a unique experience.

What we really need is a “corporate sound” - thats right, we’ve moved beyond the letter head. We are in Intel territory.

Anyway - here is my Producer TODO list:

• Make “the sound”.
• Find an IV trolley (anyone got one).
• Three Readify staff members.
• One with a lab coat.
• Two willing to subject themselves to cruel and unusual punishment (we’re hiring).
• An outlet.

Can your business run over the Internet?

I reckon that if you asked most businesses that question, the only honest answer would be no. Most enterprise class (and even SOHO for that matter) class systems today are designed to lock corporate information assets away behind firewalls and never _ever_ expose that information to people who are out in the field except for in specific circumstances.

Driven almost by a desire to break free of the shackles of corporate life (which is actually a fairly recent invention) people are starting to demand applications which run over the Internet. In some cases people are even deciding that its best to create data islands in hosted facilities that they don’t control simply because its easier.

The FolderShare software that I used to syncrhonise the three machines that I have regular access to is a classic example. It shouldn’t be news, but I believe that solutions like Coghead (source: Guy Kawasaki) which empower users to work smarter are the way of the future.

This decade, if you can’t work:

• on a beach,
• on a train,
• on a plane . . .

. . . thats a problem - and you need to fix it, before the next decade.

Moving forward, this new reality is going to challenge some of the assumptions that we as developers have made around our software architectures and its actually a point I’m going to touch on in one of my talks at the Ready Summit 06. See you there - if you think you are Ready

"all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

It’s 9:00PM, the work day is well and truly over, my Inbox is empty, I’ve got my headphones on and I’ve got the volume turned way up on ABBA (its my dirty little secret).

Over the last couple of months I have been almost completely focused on one individual client and a number of their projects that Readify is currently delivering on. When I haven’t been actively working on the project I’ve been thinking (or rather stressing) about the project and as a result I’ve had precious little time to do what I love doing which is geeking out, learning lots of new stuff and blogging my brains out. I think the post frequency and quality of my blog posts over the past three months has probably shown this.

Thanks to my team, we’ve managed to get all the projects into a healthy position where we are either in the process of handover or on the glide path to delivery (although one has several iterations left until final delivery). So what does this mean to me?

Well - it means that I can look up and smell the roses, I can contemplate working remotely a little more often which means spending more time in Canberra with Nicola and Bella, although I am still going to be active in this project well into next year. One of the things that has made this

Some things that I am looking forward to doing over the coming months:

• Completing some side projects which I have neglected badly.
• Blogging about the stuff I read and what is on my mind a whole heck of a lot more (I think the fact that not using this blog as a venting mechanism has made me unhealthily argumentative).
• Refocusing on technology a little bit, its like going back to my roots without the pressure of having a project to use it on.

Anyway - let the fun commence!

Aside: The phrase “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” will be familiar to those who watched the movie “The Shining”, although I’ve never watched it. Through “The Phrase Finder” I’ve discovered that:

The sentiment expressed by this proverb was first recorded thousands of years ago by the Egyptian sage Ptahhoptep, who wrote in c. 2400 B.C., ‘One that reckoneth accounts all the day passeth not a happy moment. One that gladdeneth his heart all the day provideth not for his house. The bowman hitteth the mark, as the steersman reacheth land, by diversity of aim.’ The more familiar modern saying appeared first in James Howell’s ‘Proverbs in English, Italian, French and Spanish’ (1659), and was included in later collections of proverbs. Some writers have added a second part to the proverb, as in ‘Harry and Lucy Concluded’ (1825) by the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy/ All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy’.” From “Wise Words and Wives’ Tales: The Origins, Meanings and Time-Honored Wisdom of Proverbs and Folk Sayings Olde and New” by Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner (Avon Books, New York, 1993).

Source: ESC on The Phrase Finder