Two Excellent Tools for AWS S3 and Google Docs

I wanted a way to mount Google Docs and an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket as local drives on Windows. This makes life a lot easier when moving things in and out of these repositories.

These two are very good:

Memeo Connect for Google Docs ($9/user per year)

TntDrive for S3 ($39.95 with discounts in volume)

Each mounts a local disc on Windows that works like any other disc in Explorer. Memeo Connect is available for lots of platforms including Mac, iPhone and iPad; not for Linux apparently. A Memeo user license covers all clients the user uses.

Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010

Productivity Power Tools is a decent extension for Visual Studio 2010 that combines Solution Explorer and Class View.

Resharper Aids With Localizing Code

Resharper 5 (Jetbrains.com) recognizes embedded strings and moves them to resources for you. It does a great job of telling the difference between user-visible string, which you probably want to localize from diagnostics and logs that you probably do not.

Looking At Thunderbird and Outlook as Gmail Clients

We compared Outlook 2010 + Google Apps Sync to Thunderbird 3.1.4 + Gmail Conversation View 1.2.4 + Google Contacts 0.6.33 + Lightening 1.0b2 + Provider for Google Calendar 0.7.1.

Both give you synchronized Gmail, Contacts and Cal in Outlook and Thunderbird respectively. The Thunderbird combo is better for a bunch of reasons including:

• Synching is almost instantaneous over broadband. Google Apps Sync for Outlook is painfully slow. If you get a lot of email it can easily take a couple of minutes waiting for the Google service to let you read new email - unless you leave Outlook running 24/7. That's a Google problem.
• MUCH better threaded view in the "reading pane". That's an Outlook problem.
• Thunderbird gives you more control over IMAP folder subscriptions if you care.

Of course none of this applies to you if you don't mind using a web page to use Gmail. I find using a desktop client like Thunderbird gives me a nice side-by-side treatment of the inbox contents and the conversation thread in a reading pane. The web UI makes you scroll up and down.

Google combines mail, cal and contacts synch into one plug-in, Google Apps Synch for Outlook. Using Thunderbird you have to install separate add-ons for these functions.

Subversion hosting at Assembla

Assembla is a nice hosting service. They offer free source-control-only accounts and upgrade for various development tools. Creating an account and an SVN repo is fast and easy.

Search and Replace in Windows Registry

This is an excellent add-on to the familiar regedit.exe.

Using SVN and Go With Visual Studio For Continuous Integration

Combining Subversion and Go provides a very lightweight and low-cost alternative to Team Foundation Server for continuous integration with Microsoft Visual Studio. Setting this up is easy and takes only a few minutes.

Requirements:

TortoiseSVN integrates elegantly with Windows Explorer. It’s free. We combine this with VisualSVN, a very nice extension for Visual Studio, but this is not required.

Go from ThoughtWorks Studios. The Community Edition is free.

Setting all of this up is straight forward. Just follow the documentation for each. You’re safe with default options across the board.

You have various options for building a Visual Studio solution from Go. The easiest approach is to install Visual Studio on the build machine and configure the Go Pipeline to call devenv.exe using the “Exec” build option in Go. Wrapping the command line execution of devenv in a bat file is advised. For example:

Let’s say you have a solution called MySolution.sln. Create a bat file and call it MyBuild.bat. Put this in the bat file:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" -clean
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" C:\Users\me\src\project\MySolution.sln -Build "Release|Any CPU"

A basic Go Pipeline to build this looks like this:

<pipeline name="BuildBlueDiamond">
  <materials>
    <svn url=http://frodo:81/svn/project username="me" password="me" />
  </materials>
  <stage name="defaultStage">
    <jobs>
      <job name="defaultJob">
        <tasks>
          <exec command="C:\Users\me\src\project\MyBuild.bat" />
        </tasks>
      </job>
    </jobs>
  </stage>
</pipeline>

Tuning The Performance Of SharePoint 2010

This article peaked our interest.

Highlights:

1. SharePoint doesn’t like big iron.

After looking at our test results as well as collecting their own data, Microsoft SharePoint® Support indicated that SharePoint® was apparently unable to make use of such large hardware (8 processors with 16G of RAM). In an effort to validate that the problem was indeed caused by the large hardware, they recommended that we reduce the number of processors to 4, and then later suggested reducing it to 2. In each case, this resulted in a surprising performance improvement but the stalling behavior remained.

2. Tempdb database contention in SQL Server.

After additional testing and data gathering, Microsoft Support engineers found that contention on tempdb allocations within SQL Server was causing delays processing queries from SharePoint®. This problem is described in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (#328551).

The fix required creating additional tempdb databases within SQL Server (one for each processor) and enabling a startup parameter (-T1118) that instructed SQL Server to use a round-robin tempdb allocation strategy. This change reduced resource allocation contention in the tempdb database, improving performance on complex queries.

3. Single-threaded cache access in a multi-processor system.

…problems with the size of the TokenAndPermUserStore cache in SQL Server. When the server has a large amount of physical memory (in this case 32G) and the rate of random dynamic queries is high, the number of entries in this cache grows rapidly. As the cache grows, the time required to traverse and cleanup the cache can be substantial. Because access to this cache is single-threaded, queries can pile up behind each other waiting for the cleanup to complete. This queuing slows performance and prevents a multi-processor system from scaling as expected. The remedy was to start SQL Server with a “-T4618” parameter, which limits the TokenAndPermUserStore cache size. (This was not one of the solutions listed in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for this issue – it was provided by a Microsoft Support Engineer).

Distraction Factor and Agile

In my last assignment I led a couple of teams using SrumForTeamsystem. We followed the process guidance religiously. We had the teams located in open bays with full line of sight to each member. We thought we saluted and followed the spirit of agile pretty closely. We were productive - much more so than before we switched to an agile format - and much more predictable in release punctuality. But, then we stopped improving after about a year and plateaued. I wondered why.

Last January, I got everyone (20 people or so) into a room for lunch and a rap session. I planned on an hour and we went two and a half. I wanted to know "How is it working? Are you happy with how we do things? Are you happy with our pace? What can we do better?" Far and away the biggest complaint was the interruption factor. Time and again people complained that the open office format was too distracting during coding and construction when distractions are particularly harmful to productivity and quality. 

The emphasis there is important. I believe there are times when communal living is hurtful to forward progress in software development and actually harmful. Yes indeed, private offices are a good thing when it's time to get "in the zone" and code. Elaboration is done. Design is done. Implementation approaches have been hashed and rehashed. Now it's time to lay bricks. Coding is generally not a community project.

What's that sound? I think I can hear the "agile community" writ large howling from the rooftops. The XP people are seething. Nevertheless, I'm convinced controlling the distraction factor is something we in the agile community need to recognize as a real problem. Sometimes interruptions are best left until later.

How do we deal with it? My team had a couple of ideas. One was that people simply hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign for all to see. By the time you say "not now please" it's too late. You've been interrupted. Another was to separate a "quiet area" in the office just for uninterrupted work. Working from home is also a good isolation tool for the right people at the right time.

A high level conclusion I drew from this feedback was to remember that the team needs to feel comfortable. If half of them are fighting the environment then it's something to fix. One of my roles as a leader is to tear down the obstacles inhibiting my team. I'm completely comfortable doing things outside the lines of "the book" if the team wants it that way and produces more that way.

Cross-posted here.

Mingle With Postgres on Ubuntu 10.0.4

We’re evaluating Mingle, an agile project management solution from ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks offers versions of Mingle for both Windows and Linux. It’s integrated with either Oracle or Postgres databases.  We recommend using Linux and Postgres.  ThoughtWorks also provides canned installations of Mingle and Postgres on VMWare virtual machines for download. Our style is to get the full experience, so starting from a pre-installed VM isn’t for us.

After struggling to get Mingle working with Postgres and Oracle on Widnows 7 we were told by Mingle’s support team that only Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are supported by Mingle at this time.

Since we’ve been diving into Linux more aggressively the past several months we decided to bring up an Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.0.4) virtual machine using VirtualBox and start there.  Installation of Mingle is pretty straight forward. Begin with Postgres, create a mingle user with DBA privileges, create an empty database for Mingle, unpack the Mingle tar ball and follow the installation instructions.

Update 29 June 2010

We have Mingle 3.1.1 running on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with Postgres SQL 8.4. Following the defaults works fine. Install Postgres first, create an account called mingle with the create databases role. Create a database called mingle. You can call the user and the database anything you like. Finally install Mingle.

Installing SharePoint On Windows 7

Microsoft supports installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 on Windows 7. This is quite useful if you want to do custom development for SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010, which requires the SharePoint server to be installed on the same machine as the development environment. Prior to the 2010 release local SharePoint development required running Windows Server as your desktop OS or running a VM.

We installed SharePoint Foundation 2010 on a 64-bit Windows 7 desktop box today. The process went smoothly. If you develop for SharePoint we recommend Windows 7 as a solid platform from which to build.

Microsoft’s official article on this is here. There’s a comment on the thread that elaborates a bit on the experience here. Click on the date-time stamp to expand the comment text.

We’re happy to answer questions in comments in this space.

Windows Startup Analysis

RunAnalyzer by Safer Networking is a great tool for digging in to tune Windows performance. It gives you a deep look at everything in the system that initiates a service or task tray program on Windows launch. This tool is not for the meek, because you can easily manipulate the Windows registry, although registry access is structured just for things related to starting Windows. Here are a couple of screen shots.

Installing Plugins In Eclipse on Ubuntu 10.04

You get this when installing a plugin to Eclipse on Ubuntu 10.04:

An error occurred while installing the items session context was (profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null --> [R]org.eclipse.cvs 1.0.400.v201002111343,  action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).

  The artifact file for osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.cvs,1.0.400.v201002111343 was not found.

We got this when installing the Aptana Studio plugin. The fix is to install PDE. On the command line run this:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pde

Ubuntu Linux Release 10.04 Shines

We're running the final production bits for Ubuntu 10.04 Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine with 1GB of memory on a Windows 7 host with 4GB of RAM on the hardware. Deliciously zippy and stable.

We advise setting stepping the default font size for OS down to 8 from its default of 10 to get much more efficient use of screen real estate. It's easy to do this using System -> Appearance -> Fonts.

TFS 2010 With MOSS 2007

Is supposed to work. I have not tried it though. Blog post on how to do it is here.

Just Enough or Pack Rat?

Software craftsmanship is like life. Some people plan their lives to the hilt, load up with contingency plans, ready for anything. They save things for years – packed into closets, files and attics – just in case “I need them”. Let’s call these folks “pack rats”. Others take each day as it arrives, flexible in spirit and time to new opportunities without worrying about changing tons of plans and rearranging the calendar.

A full SDLC development process attracts pack rats. They plan and plan, establish contingency plans and stack the process so they don’t make a mistake. Along the way they pay huge “carrying costs” of keeping an inventories of plans, processes, documents, meetings and calendars. Their users are frustrated by not much delivered in lots of time.
Agile methods are the “just enough” approach. We do as much as we need to deliver great, usable software that delights our users and no more. We’re constantly open to change – able to turn on a dime, because we don’t have a fifty-page plan to revise and four levels of approval to obtain. Our users are thrilled because we spend our time focused on their needs rather than on “process”. We deliver maximum bang for the buck where bang is defined as usable software solving real problems. We have way more fun!

Are you a “just enough” craftsman or a “pack rat”?

Technorati Tags: Agile,SDLC,Process

TFS In The Cloud

Our work bringing up TFS 2010 on the Amazon EC2 cloud is bearing fruit. It’s been a bear dealing with EC2’s stubborn dynamic IP addresses; you get fresh ones each time you boot an instance. This, well, sends DNS on Windows Domains into a tizzy. We’ve solved it for now with a workaround. We’re thrilled about some secret sauce we’ve designed for running very large domain networks on EC2.  We’ve had a system up and under test for about six weeks. It is hyper-fast!

Interested in giving it a try? Ping us.

SQL Server 2008 @ Amazon EC2 “Event 17508 File not found”

(Cross-posted here from an 18 March 2010 post on my personal blog at markr.com.)

Ran into an interesting little glitch this afternoon bringing up SQL Server 2008 at Amazon EC2 using one of their packaged instances. I got this error:

Log Name: Application
Source: MSSQLSERVER
Date: 3/17/2010 10:00:14 PM
Event ID: 17058
Task Category: Server
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: ip- xxxxxxxx        
Description:
initerrlog: Could not open error log file ''. Operating system error = 3(The system cannot find the path specified.).
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="MSSQLSERVER" />
<EventID Qualifiers="49152">17058</EventID>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>2</Task>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-03-17T22:00:14.000Z" />
<EventRecordID>1583</EventRecordID>
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>ip-xxxxx</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data>
</Data>
<Data>3(The system cannot find the path specified.)</Data>
<Binary>A2420000100000000C000000490050002D0030004100460030003300390038004300000000000000</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>

After a little digging – actually a lot of digging – I discovered this article that says you can get this if the SQL Server machine is also a Windows domain controller. I applied both Workaround 1 and 2 to ALL of the SQLServer* security groups on the domain.

TFS Check-in Policy for Exactly One Work Item

Enforcing work item associations on check-in is vital for assuring traceability. Here’s a handy TFS policy for forcing check-ins to be associated with one and only one work-item.

http://blog.accentient.com/2009/12/15/CustomCheckinPolicyForExactlyOneWorkItem.aspx

Using Subversion With Visual Studio

There’s a nifty tool called VisualSVN, which comes with a separately usable server (free) and VS client plug-in ($49). You can get by with the server and use the included management console plug-in to handle check-in, check-out, branching and merging. The client plug-in delivers nice integration into Visual Studio’s solution explorer and a full-service menu to boot. The server includes Subversion 1.6.9.

If you are switching from TFS to SVN you’ll want to make sure and unbind your solution and component projects from TFS using File –> Source Control –> Change Source Control. If you don’t do this you risk getting confused results, because the normal TFS sub-menu items like “check-in”, “get latest version”, etc. do not map to VisualSVN. SVN is a separate collection of items toward the bottom of the sub-menu for elements in Solution Explorer. Unbinding removes TFS from the Solution Explorer sub-menu.