So your venturing into your own waters, got a brilliant idea about the product and now your picking up the bits to make it happen.

Two tools you will defiantly need are Source Control and Project Management.

Well, there are several options.

For source control, my best suggestion would be SVN. I would suggest it even for larger companies (I am sooo crying right now because we are too deep in Source Safe that we can’t switch over… from the other side, all my personal projects are in SVN).

One great free option is Google Code… http://www.googlecode.com

You can setup your projects there, manage them and everything… it works great.

Also, SVN generally isn’t hard to host… you can bring it online in a matter of minutes (probably it takes more to download it then to set it up :))

Ok, so the other part is Project Management… I am personally a proponent of Scrum, like the tools I try to use… it seems so frictionless, no hassle, no fuss… just easy and simple methodology to manage my projects. Again, I would be really happy that we don’t have our own internal methodology so I could utilize it… but at least this way, I just “rip” off from it bits and pieces I can use easily implement and that bring real benefit to my projects… e.g. daily standup’s.

Back… now, two tools I’ve found easy enough, free and quick. Both are free for small teams and small projects, both are hosted online and both are quick&easy:

- http://www.acunote.com/ - Scrum based online project management tool. Seems really good.

- http://www.basecamphq.com/ - Not Scrum based, but still quick&easy

Hope this gives you some ideas! I am taking for a ride Acunote and GoogleCode on my Akua framework (although it is my private, non profit project… still it could benefit from some PM, and SC is already there :)):

http://vladanstrigonet.googlecode.com/svn/akua/trunk

Cheers!

A great place to host my own code, presentations, ideas and stuff as it turns out is Google.

For starters I’ve decided to put there the started work on my own thin “glue” framework for ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, BDD… it’s a very early project version (started the idea a couple of days ago), but still… has some of my code (together with the new framework my recent BDD specification base class work is included).

Also, there I plan to publish my presentations and demos, so in the future, all my presentation materials will be found there and linked from this site.

Enough chit-chat… the URL is: http://vladanstrigonet.googlecode.com

if you have any comments, do share them!

Cheers!

Together with the guys from my company I’ve been able to establish a blog through which we as a company will be able to express our opinions, interests and details of the work we do as well as little secrets of the trade.

The success of the idea is guarantied as not more than a month has passed since it’s inception and already we have some 10-15 posts there.

Go check it out:

http://blog.netmedia.hr

If your asking yourself why did we make one?

Well I see the advantage of having a corporate blog from multiple view points, I won’t go into details (as I have work to do), but here are just a few:

a) Education - I hope to raise the awareness of our teams and show them that there is a world of good ideas and smart people out there that doesn’t sleep after 16:00 or 17:00 hours each day (after the work time is over)

b) Knowledge-base - I’ve found it myself and read it through other people’s blogs - My blog serves me as a reminder sometimes, not to mention a knowledge-base - why not express good ideas through it and have other guys and people not within the company benefit from it?

c) Marketing obviously

d) …

So follow our blog! There is already a ton of interesting content there

Cheers!

It just hurts too much.

When reading about code like this, and especially code that should be an “good architectural principles” and “basic and advanced coding concepts” example it just hurts me to see what people write… believe me people… IT HURTS!

I cannot imagine that at any point in time (one common argument is that this is an *old* code, and an outdated example) this was considered good - no matter how old the code is - bad things are bad, terrible practices are terrible. Someone should really stop and scratch their heads before calling something good.

Now, if you want to read the post that disturbed me this morning, go here:

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/11/28/Code-review-The-PetShop-Application.aspx

@Ayende: I feel your pain man. No one should be put to this - no one deserves it.

Ok, I need some more coffee…

As you can probably see by now… this is my new blog!

Note for the content:  I’ve put a 301 redirect on all urls with .aspx extension to this post, so that you don’t get those freaky “Not found” messages. If you need to find a tutorial, download or a post - just use the search on the right.

To continue… after having my own blog implementation (using the News Articles module in DNN) and being cirpled because it’s not a full blown blog engine (most things which I’ve missed were that it didn’t use any blogging standards… MetaBlog API, BlogML…) I’ve was fed up and wanted something for which I don’t have to develop every good thing that the blogging community comes up with (not that the engine I’ve used was bad… but simply it wasn’t a full blown blogging engine).

My effort to move to Wordpress lasted for a couple of days, and I can hapily say that I now have here every tutorial, and every post I made on my previous blog… I am very happy about that.

So far I am very happy with the new enviroment (no matter that it’s not my prefered ASP.NET)… simply it’a great blog engine!

Hope you enjoy my new blog - I am already!

Last weekend I went to MVP Summit in Cavtat. It was great… I’ve met some new people had some intreseting chats and drank allot of beer

If you are interested how it went, take a look at some photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vladanstrigo/sets/72157602166475775/


Met some great people as well (as always on these events), spent most time with:

Martin Kulov - http://www.codeattest.com/blogs/martin/

Ivan Pavlovic - http://www.hive-studios.com/About+Us/Team/default.aspx

Shouts to them and to all my Croatian and Slovenian MVP collegues which I’ve seen there!

My 2 cents…

Just saw the announcement of Telligent Graffiti CMS.

I don’t know why, but it feels so “marketing”… I don’t know if you’ve heared, but an employee of Telligent decided to record Scott W.’s internal presentation on a new product called Graffiti. When I saw it I only had 2 thoughs:

a) This is some scam, because noone in their right mind would loose a job over this (e.g. film it and show it on the company’s blog site)
b) Just another DotNetNuke / Joomla wannabe

Don’t get me wrong, Telligent guys are great and their Community Server is a GREAT product… but this is just too early in the product cycle to decide if it will be any good or a YAC (Yet Another CMS), and also if they chose to brake the news out like this… come one guys, you could have done it better


Cheers!

Just got an email from a prudct manager from Microsoft.

Some introduction:

We just released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months. This guide shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It’s a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

• Part I, “Fundamentals,” gives you a quick overview of team development with Team Foundation Server. You’ll see the big picture in terms of your software development environment, including the development and test environment. You’ll also learn the basic architecture of Team Foundation Server.

• Part II, “Source Control,” shows you how to structure your source code and manage dependencies. It also shows you how to determine a branching and merging strategy if you need isolation for your development efforts.

• Part III, “Builds,” shows you how to set up team builds, how to produce continuous integration builds for your development team, and how to drop scheduled builds to your test team. It also discusses common problems and how to work around them.

• Part IV, “Large Project Considerations,” show you additional considerations you need to deal with when working with large projects.

• Part V, “Project Management,” shows you how to use Team Foundation Server work items, areas and iterations to streamline your development process regardless of what project management approach you use.

• Part VI, “Process Templates,” shows you how to get the most out of the process templates and process guidance that is supplied with Team Foundation Server out of the box. It also shows how you can customize the process templates, and make modifications to work items and workflow to map to the software engineering process your team is already using.

• Part VII, “Reporting,” shows you how all of the other Team Foundation Server components integrate their data store into a common reporting mechanism. You’ll learn how to use the default reports as well as how to build your own custom reports.

• Part VIII, “Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment,” removes the mystery from Team Foundation Server deployment. You’ll learn how to choose between a single server and multiple server deployment. You’ll also learn how to support remote development teams and how to maximize Team Foundation Server performance.

• Part IX, “Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server”, shows the changes that are coming in the next version of Team Foundation Server. You’ll learn what new features are planned as well as what features are going to be significantly improved. Some of the changes impact the guidance we give elsewhere in this guide, so use this section to improve your Team Foundation Server upgrade planning.

This guide is available at: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide. We will be making this available at MSDN as well.

So go ahead and get it now to learn even more about TFS!

Some great news to start off the month…. I’ve received notice that I am MVP again

This is my second year in a row, and am VERY glad to receive the award.

Here is a paste of a part of introduction mail from the MVP Program leads:

“…Dear Vladan Strigo,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft. Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success everyday. To learn more about the MVP Program, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/mvp.

Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated. The benefits you will enjoy as a recipient of the MVP Award are outlined below. …”


Cheers!

Just received an email from my MVP Lead - Anka with a message “Did you see this?” and a link to GotDotNet site.

What I’ve seen there is interesting to me… GotDotNet is shutting down, and it’s projects are being reallocated to other Microsoft community sites.

On the site there, there is a more detailed plan how this will be done. Enough to say that if you are watching over some of the projects there and not visiting the home page of the site (like me :().


If you are asking yourself why am I mentioning this… simply said, it would be nice not to loose track of some of the nice projects which are there once they are moved, and if you are like me (didn’t see it), it will be of some significance to you.


Cheers!

So last week I went to Seattle to join a group of 1700 people on the Global MVP Summit.

For first impressions all I can say is… GREAT… the town is great, I’ve seen bits of Microsoft, talked to some products teams on their development cycles, heared allot of great new info (unfortuantly most of it is under NDA).

A side from technical sessions, Microsoft also organized some great dinners, one of the most interesting ones being at the Seattle Airplane museum (I have about 100 pictures from museum alone :)), and we’ve also been creative ourselves, visiting various breweries, pubs and other places trying all kinds of home made and imported bears


One part of the conference I’ve really liked… I’ve been able to meet up with the DotNetNuke team, first at their offices and a day later at the museum and had a chance to both grab some bears, and to talk about the current gray areas of DNN, as well as future developments to ensure some of the grey areas become white.


As I know a picture speaks a thousand words… here is a little photo story from that part of the my DNN @ Summit experience

1) Meeting in the DNN offices - What can I say, the DotNetNuke team, a few MVP’s and a 2 and a half hours of talking:

2) Met them while strawling around the airplane museum - Again, no comments are needed, a little bit less of technical talking, a few bears more… but still allot of fun

All in all, we have an interesting year ahead of us in the DNN community, the team has accepted all the comments and gave us some insights into some of the great solutions we can expect in the coming year which will help us keep our users even more happy with the framework.


One more thing… Cheers to Cathal Connolly… one of the greatest guys I’ve met on the summit, fun when drinking with (a real Irish fellow :)) and serious when talking about DNN, Security or other tech topics!

For some time now I have a need to sumarize all my resources on certain subjects. This need has been capitalized today by opening a new section of this website called “Resources”.

Currently it only has DotNetNuke 4 Module development resources links, some of the sites and resources I’ve encountered in recent time.

The current page, and the current resources are only the starting point… I hope to put there every interesting resource I encounter duirng my work, for both you and me to have reference to in the future.


One more thing… as currently only the DNN 4 Module dev. section is opened, I am currently only accepting links for that part. So if you have any resources on module development that are interesting, and not mentioned there… feel free to email them to me via the contact page.

I’ve thought about how I can get more involved into the Forums scene; especially the ones on ASP.NET and DotNetNuke site.

What I’ve decided is to do it like this:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - one hour beginning the day - I will answer posts on DotNetNuke site.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - one hour ending the day - I will answer posts on ASP.NET site

One extra thing is that I’ve agreed in my company to get 1 hour 3 times a week to surf the DotNetNuke forums, so actually that time spent on the DNN forums is covered by my company, which is GREAT!

So, let’s start with this plan and see where we end up…

Cheers! And see you on the forums

One nice link I found this morning, it’s a site that has great cheat sheet documents on all the various subjects:

- NET Format String Quick Reference
- ASP.NET 2.0 Page Life Cycle & Common Events
- Visual Studio 2005 Built-in Code Snippets (C#)
- ASP.NET Page Life Cycle Diagram
- Visual Studio 2005 Default Keybindings C# | VB
- Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Library
- VB.NET/C# Comparison
- HTML Character Entities
- CSS
- JavaScript
- XHTML
- Regular Expressions
- Microformats
- ASP/VBScript

Look it up, it can be really usefull:

http://john-sheehan.com/blog/index.php/net-cheat-sheets/


Cheers!

On this day (my final day before vacation and the new years) I wish you all a Merry Christmas and alot of Happiness in New Year 2007.

Also, I wish that you will have even better both personal and proffesional results in the new-coming year!


Enjoy the holidays!

It’s been quite a while since my last post,

What have I been upto?

Well, over the last time I haven’t done any specific community work because I’ve been jammed up (the jam is still active unfortunatly…) on a large new project. After the jam has calmed down a bit I went on vacation and have been out of office for the last 11 days, as simply I was a little “burn-out” over the last year.


What else? Well, in my spare time I’ve been reading up and learning about Guidance Automation Toolkit, Domain Specific languages and such… all in the purpose of driving BlankModule in a completly new direction.


Now, what are the plans? There are none concrete at this time (I am still in the planning phase) - what I know is that I will release BlankModule 1.0 + Deployment script package shortly so that people can reuse it (and have option to use first package or an advanced other one) - and then go back to the “drawing table” and plan how I can apply my newly found knowledge of the above technologies with BlankModule.


Also, for all of you who have sent me mails over the last week or so… I will answer them probably today as the day goes by and I catch some time to dedicate to you.


enjoy!

Microsoft decided this year to give me the MVP Award (Most Valuable Professional) in the field of
Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET.

You can checkout the site of the award itself; or checkout my profile on their site.

I’m very thankful for the opportunity to do more in my community and expect that this award will help me to get my voice and the voice of my community to be heard louder!