General Development In DotNet

"Assuming a WorkItem has many WorkItemNotes..."

"Many experienced database professionals have acquired a somewhat jaded view of parallel query execution. Sometimes, this is a consequence of bad experiences with older versions of SQL Server. Just as frequently, however, this view is the result of misconceptions, or an otherwise incomplete mastery of the techniques required to effectively design and tune queries for parallel execution."

" I don't see how having the entire team working on the same story is generally the best approach. "

" My concerns are (1) as soon as we start tracking non-story tasks we'll lose focus on delivering customer value, And (2) if we don't make these sorts of tasks visible, we won't make progress on them at the rate we need to. What are good patterns you've seen for dealing with technical tasks that aren't directly attached to a story (or that cut across multiple stories)? "

"I guess this could be considered a continuation of my last post about SQL Server Memory, Understanding the VAS Reservation (aka MemToLeave) in SQL Server, but for a long time I have noticed that when people don't understand how SQL Server uses memory on their server, they immediately begin to think that SQL Server has a memory leak. So in this post I'll dive into how SQL Server allocates and uses the physical memory available on a server."

" THE 1st JS CONFERENCE IN SA ... EVER!"

Stephanie Forrest believes in applying evolutionary biology principles to the software process creating evolvable software through automated bug repair, improving code and creating new combinations of existing functionality.

"I was astonished to be invited to what became the meeting that originated the Agile Manifesto because my work had always been based around building models. The Structured Development for Real-Time Systems trilogy with Paul Ward and the pair of Object-Oriented Analysis books with Sally Shlaer all focused on analysis and design, placing much less emphasis on the coding and testing favored by agile practitioners."

"The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: the requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price (based on their interpretation of the requirements and estimates of cost) and everyone signs a legally binding agreement."

"Takeaway: SQL Server 2005 has several system tables and views that can provide a ton of insight into blocking problems that you may be facing in your database environment. Through these procedures, you can find blocking chains. Learn more about blocking processes."

"At first glance you're going to hate the "advanced layout" that is currently a W3C working draft. Maybe it's the similarity to table-based layouts, of which we all still have nightmares. Mainly, you'll likely cringe just because it's such a foreign way to write CSS. I think you'll eventually come around."

"Hopefully if you're reading this you've noticed that I've started a series of Tips recently. The tips will mostly apply to Entity Framework or Data Services. Seeing as I expect to have a lots of tips, it probably makes sense to have some sort of index. That is what this is post is, as I add a new tip I will add it to this page too. If you have any suggested topics for tips please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me directly at Microsoft (Alexj is my alias at Microsoft, and emails at Microsoft are in the form alias@microsoft.com) Without further ado here are what I have so far:"

Cross device mobile SDK based on standards and web technologies

"Column-Based Query Accelerator will help dramatically increase query performance ~10x and reduce performance tuning through interactive experiences with data for near instant response times and streamlined setup which removes the need to build summary aggregates."

"Lurking on any machine that has Windows Scripting Host installed (virtually all machines these days, although scripting can be disabled), is a powerful Regular Expressions facility, the VBScript.RegExp scripting object. You can get to it from any COM client that supports the IDispatch interface. IDispatch, you'll recall, is COM's popular late-binding interface - it allows applications to use COM components without knowing anything about them at compile-time. In T-SQL, we get to IDispatch via the sp_OA stored procedures. Via a simple UDF, we can access the RegExp object as though it were part of T-SQL:"

"The authors of the agile manifesto asked us ten years ago to rethink the way we (programmers) collaborated with our customers. I, along with my PhD advisors, Robert Biddle and James Noble, were intrigued, hopeful, and also simply keen to understand how it all worked in practice. Not how people think it should have worked, as is so often reported, but how it really worked. We spent the next six years understanding this, and over that time, visited eleven agile teams[1] in five different countries. We visited teams across a variety of industries, with the teams ranging in size from 5 to 60 people."

"In an earlier blog post, Creating or modifying Entity Framework EDMX files from code: an introduction to HuagatiEDMXTools.dll, I wrote about the EDMX file wrapper that is used by the Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools add-in for parsing, updating, creating, and writing EDMX files. HuagatiEDMXTools adds an easy to use object model on top of EDMX files (see documentation at http://huagati.com/edmxtools/help ), making it a lot easier to create/read/update EDMX files, and to write LINQ queries against Entity Framework 4 metadata. It also has a number of built-in queries and lookup functions that make it a breeze to work with Entity Framework 4 EDMX files from code."

"DPack is a FREE collection of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 tools. DPack is designed to greatly increase developer's productivity, automate repetitive processes and expand upon some of Microsoft Visual Studio features. DPack includes various browser tools that allow the developer to quickly find solution files, types, particular type members, methods or properties for instance, or quickly find and reference standard .NET framework types. DPack includes greatly enhanced numbered bookmarks feature, various code navigation tools as well as streamlined surround with feature, and much more. See screenshots and learn more about individual features using Features menu. Major features included: Code Browser File Browser Solution Browser Framework Browser Numbered Bookmarks Surround With Code Navigation Solution Statistics Solution Backup All features support C#, VB, C++ and Ruby In Steel based projects."