Winterdom

I spent some time this weekend playing with the MSDN virtual labs, and it worked remarkably well, it was a far better and more enjoyable experience than I had expected. The whole process went very smoothly, and my only problem was some delayed rendering of the remote machine, thanks to...

A few days ago Sam Vanhoutte posted on the BizTalk newsgroups about an issue he was having while trying to process Unicode encoded messages using the BizTalk Framework Disassembler. Here's the tale of what we discovered in the process. Problem descriptionThe error happened while trying to process an UTF-16LE encoded XML message...

I've just now updated my Pipeline Testing Library. In this version, I've created my own mock IPipelineContext[Ex] implementation, to support configuring some functionality not previously available: You can now configure at the pipeline level the thumbprint for the Group Signing Certificate so that it is returned from IPipelineContext.GroupSigningCertificate to pipeline...

Brian Harry has posted a very interesting inside look at what progress they've done while trying to rollout Team Foundation Server across Developer Division, including the problems and limitations they've run into and some of the options they are considering to work around them and increase the scalability of TFS....

Martin Fowler has a couple of good posts on Code Ownership here and here. I prefer the collective code ownership way mostly because I believe it encourages everyone to take responsability for the whole project instead of each one just worrying about his little corner of the code base (which can...

I've been spending some time with ASP.NET 2.0 lately. There are many interesting and very useful new features (Master Pages for example being one of my favourites). Some features however require some more effort to make them work as you'd like (as everything, I guess). Two of those are the Menu and...

James Shore has been posting a very cool retrospective diary relating his experiences trying to effect organizational change as a developer to push agile practices and improve quality and efficiency. I've enjoyed reading each entry as it's been posted, not only because of the original content, but also because of the retrospective...

Jesús Rodriguez has posted the core pieces of a new sample about interoperating the recently released Two Connect WSE 3.0 Adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. It appears the adapter can be downloaded now for free if you register at the new AdapterWORX site. Seems pretty cool, and definitely look forward...

Just found this post by Pamela Slim called "Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world". Had quite a few laughs over it, but I would've laughed harder if I hadn't already witnessed these kind of things in our side of the world happening. Check out also...

Jeremy Miller talks a little bit here about the effects on productivity that can be achieved when there's continuity on a project team. I find this interesting because it's a point I've been pondering for a couple of years now. I used to talk about this and argued for ways...