Two talks of Joel Spolsky in Dublin

Both of them took place on November 7th. The first one was in the morning and Joel Spolsky was presenting FogBugz. Explaining the product on feature by feature basis Joel managed to tell the audience a little bit about how he thinks the software development process should look like. And you know that people like him are right in 99% of cases and you can follow them blindly ;).
FogBugz is a great piece of software that provides many desired by every software house functionalities like bug tracking, project tracking, Wiki, discussion groups, evidence-based scheduling and even a small help desk system. All these features are seamlessly integrated together in a way that the user is not aware when he/she moves from one part of the system to the other. Every activity that requires user attention is as simple as possible and what is very important as natural as possible. It's enough to say that whenever you need to specify an end date you can simply type word "week" and the system will calculate the date based on the current date. Adding new tasks to your to-do list is simpler then firing notepad (actually I do this every morning to keep my 5 most important task always in front of me). When you start working on a task you just hit start button and when you are finished you hit stop. The system calculates everything for you taking into account lunch break, scheduled meetings, your working hours, etc.  Those are small things but they show how the whole application has been build. Basically, FogBugz tries to be as transparent as possible to let you focus on your real tasks.
The next thing that impressed me a lot was the evidence-based scheduling. If you work with FogBugz you will never get just the end date of your project. Instead, you will get a set of dates and probability assigned to every of them. Taking into account how many IT projects are completed on time and on budget then this must be a better approach than what we have now. Needles to say that it does make sense especially when you take into account Quantum Physics.
The second presentation was part of the IJTC launch and Joe was talking about a topic that is as incomprehensible to software developers as the fact that they should not spend half of their life in front of a computer :). He explained how Companies take advantage of misattribution to sell us more of their products. His example was based on comparison of iPhone and a phone X of company Y. It's X and Y because I don't remember their names which is the best evidence that misattribution works :). Basically iPhone has fewer features, it's not extensible for the time being, it doesn't have a replaceable battery, it's 4 times more expensive and the features that are present in both phones are better implemented in the phone X. Why Apple has sold millions of iPhones and the company Y can only dream of something like that? iPhone looks way better and it's much more user friendly. People then attach the UI experience to the rest of it and that's how iPhone as the whole seems to be perfect in their minds. That's what Joel calls misattribution. Although I suppose that the marketing success of iPhone is a little bit more complicated beast I still think that his point is valid and it was certainly refreshing to me.

What's new in Orcas release of WCF

Christian from Thinktecture prepared a list of new features and improvements that are part of the Orcas release of WCF. My favorite one is Custom username over transport security. The reason is that I've been trying to integrate WCF and PHP in a secure, standards based way and I've learnt that it's not easy because Custom username in WCF 1.0 forces you to use a mix of transport and message security (TransportWithMessageCredential). As we all know support of WS-* specifications in PHP world is far less than perfect and going directly to the transport security might make my life easier. I will write about my PHP/WCF/Java story later on.

O2 broadband - pros and cons

Quite a few people asked my to describe my O2 broadband user experience. Sure. I've been using O2 broadband for a month and I'm happy enough and I can not really complain about it though it's not perfect. Let me provide some data that I gathered using a small app I wrote. The test app was sending every 10 seconds a unique (to avoid caching) query to google and measured the response time.
The first test was running for 24 hours in my house which is located in Dublin 14. As you can see in most cases the response time was below 1 second though there ware a few periods when the response time exceeded 10, 15 or even 20 seconds. Fortunately, as I said there ware only a few of them and they lasted for around a minute.
Click on the picture to see the details.

 
Next I checked how the response time is dependent on the location in Dublin. I got on the Aircoach in Sandyford and went with my laptop to the Dublin Airport. The exact route can be found here. During the trip I applied the same procedure as the one described before. The results are again decent but they could be better.
Click on the picture to see the details.

In general I would recommend O2 broadband to people who:

1. need to be able to connect to the Internet in nearly any spot in Ireland. If 3G is not available it falls back to GPRS.
2. don't need great responsiveness at all times
3. don't download/upload huge amount of data
4. don't need to share their broadband and if they do they can dedicate a PC or laptop for that purpose
5. as myself on the one hand don't appreciate how Eircom acts and try to avoid it but on the other hand need to have access to the Internet that works most of the time.

Hope this helps.

Bunch of Scotts talking about the new Microsoft MVC framework

Scott Hanselman recorded two sessions about the new Microsoft MVC framework.  Both of them look interesting though you need to take into account that they are showing really rough bits. If you just like me don't want to watch them in a browser you can download them directly to your local disk:

1. Scott Gu - MVC
2. Scott Hanselman - MVC + DLR

Microsoft .NET framework goes open source - kind of :)

Scott Guthrie doesn't stop surprising me. Nearly every month he publishes something that makes me think that Microsoft is not that bad at all :). Today topic is the .NET source code. One could say that Reflector provides that functionality since it came out. That's true but Microsoft goes beyond that and they actually integrate debugging symbols + source code with VS.NET 2008. This feature will let you seamlessly step into the .NET framework code while you debug your own application. What is more they provide code with all the comments which from time to time can make huge difference. Of course they don't go mad completely and the licence the code will be released under prevents you from copying it. No hope for a quick catch up for Mono :).

A great .NET architect - Udi Dahan - is waiting for our invitation

I hope Philip or Clare or one of the other guys who run MTUG will be able to invite for free (via INETA) Udi Dahan. I've been reading his blog for over a year and I have to admit that this guy is just brilliant. All he is interested in is architecture that is technology agnostic. It's really something unique these days when so many people rush to use the latest technology because they think it will automagically solve their problems which we all know is not true :).

Short explanation why VS 2008 is going to be of much better quality then VS 2005

Emma Williams is talking about how and why Microsoft has changed the way they develop Visual Studio. My favorite change is feature teams. The feature team is a small team of a few people that are responsible for delivery of a feature. The team comprises of developers, testers and project/product managers. They all work very closely together until they deliver which makes them emotionally bound to their task and that's good. There is nothing worse then a bunch of people who don't care what they work on. If testers wait for developers to be finished and then developers wait for testers to be finished and so on then every person works on its own without any notion of being part of a team. If you hear a few times a day "who cares", "I don't care" or "I don't give a s..." then unfortunately most likely you work in such an environment. BTW she was born in Ireland :).