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Something to Think About
"Failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
-Henry Ford
Dr. Neil's NotesTales and thoughts from the life of Dr. Neil. Your child is ugly! I was recently asked what tools a team should have to support SCRUM. - As many big whiteboards as you can make space for in the developer area
- Lots of whiteboard markers, never be in a position where it is hard to find a marker
- Open communication channels.
- A developer ego extraction utility ( this is the hardest tool to find IMO)
- A developer passion insertion tool ( somewhat easier to come by)
4 is important, let me expand on this.
Software creation with passion becomes very personal, the creation is a child of the developer. Flaws found and pointed out in peoples children are often not taken well by the parents. Developers often take suggestions for improvement very personally because they see it as an attack on their ability. The product created needs to be an output of the team. A team that works great together will deliver great software. Often the weakest part of a team is the team member with the biggest ego. If you find you have a team where certain members of the team are not performing as well as they could it be, you often find the ego of another team member blocking their growth. The team member that wants to be the hero in the team is commonly blocking the growth of others, as it helps them feel more important.
| Microsoft Surface in the Spring You may remember in February I was in Munich delivering Surface Training. I was back in Munich again this week delivering more Surface Training and it is a very different place in the Spring. I think I was lucky as the weather was fantastic.
Here is a picture of the same train station that was covered in snow last time I was here.
This month Surface Service Pack 1 was released and so in addition to all the usual goodness in the Surface Training I now have a session dedicated to the features in Service Pack 1. The course outline looks like this:
The Surface Vision
The Architecture of Surface applications
Setting up a Surface device and the out of the box applications
Working with the Simulator
Integrating with the Surface Shell
Designing Surface experiences
Using the Surface Controls
What is new in Service Pack 1
Vision Recognition with Surface
End to end building a Surface application
---insert---- I received an email from someone telling me I was just teasing them and I should divulge what I cover that is new in Service Pack 1. These are some of things in Service Pack 1 that we cover in the training:
- Richer feedback of touch input, the built in visualizations that now indicate when the Surface receives input
- Object Routing, how to launch an application by placing a tagged object on the Surface
- Single Application Mode, running only one application on the Surface and hiding the launcher and access points
- Library container WPF controls, Library Bar and Library Stack. Discussion about what these are good for and how to use them
- Element Menu WPF control, putting the GUI into NUI, why this control is useful and why it is not always a great idea. How to code this control.
- Drag and Drop support, how to add drag and drop to your multi touch and (more importantly) multi user Surface application.
--- / insert --- If you would like some help building amazing Surface applications please let me know. We are providing consulting and support services to help you bring out the magic in your Surface applications.
| Technology information for those that do not care I recently reinstalled Vista on my laptop and I keep finding little things that I don't have installed. Today it was Windows Live Photo Gallery. I like Photo Gallery because of the photo stitching feature to create panoramic photos.
I went to the download page to get Photo Gallery I am confronted by this screen telling me about the scary technology being installed as part of this application. Why should a consumer care about this? Instead this space would be better used informing the user of some great things they could do with this application or a tip on how to get more out of the application.
Come on Microsoft you are not some little garage software start up anymore.
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