Archive for the ‘Devs’ Category

How To Change Windows Form Project To WPF

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

My project is moving to WPF! Yay! To minimize the pain I had a critical part of the UI migrated to WPF already using ElementHost from the System.Windows.Forms.Integration namespace. That went pretty smooth and now the rest is going through. Since I have not done a complete WPF project before I created a new WPF project and to my surprise there isn’t a Program.cs file in the project. I copy the App.xaml, Windows1.xaml and their .cs counterparts over to my winform project and tries to compile. The compiler spits the dummy as the project now has two main entry points. The WPF app.xaml implements Application, which if you look under it has Run(), which is what I use to start my winform main window in my original main method. I then comment out the main method thinking it would start from app.xaml instead. It turns out that you need to add couple of lines to your .csproj file like:

<ApplicationDefinition Include="App.xaml">

    <Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>

    <SubType>Designer</SubType>

</ApplicationDefinition>

Change “App.xaml” to what you are using and voila!

The first Scrum sprint

Monday, May 18th, 2009

The team consists of me (also the Scrum master), Mark the tester, Dave the documentation manager/product guru closed off the first sprint in my group last Friday. I must say, to work just one user story to the “done” criteria is not easy. All of us are working hard to pull through the transition, which is typically 3~4 sprints in literature. I manage to really stick to the Scrum material and only vary the process if we need to work with the external processes (alpha, beta and release processes).

What worked:

  • The done criteria is very solid. Having completed a user story with all the items in the criteria checked off really boosts the confidence for both developers and testers.
  • The team worked together well and more focused on task, which the progress is easier to gauge than working directly off the whole spec.

What didn’t work:

  • User stories are too big. The amount of work involved is not clearly understood resulting in bad estimation.
  • Many one-off jobs are not documented as they came in mid sprint and have higher priority than the other sprint backlog items

Overall the team work is fantastic. On record we only completed one user story in the whole sprint (we targeted three) and the perfect hour estimate is so off that the resultant chart did very little in gauging our velocity in the last sprint.

Lots of work left to be done but I’m glad I implemented the process. It has got the rest of the group involved in the project and development decisions are getting made. I’m certainly doing more work but I find it much more interesting now as I’m not coding away in the dark and have limited feedback on what I do.

    Extra Lines Inserted When Using Insert Code Snippet Plugin For Windows Live Writer

    Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

    Not many geeky blogs can get away without delivering some real juice via example code and certainly not this one. If you happen to be Live writer then you can’t ask for much more than the almighty “Insert Code Snippet” plugin by Leo Vildosola. Couple of weeks ago something (coupled with lots of WTFs) happened and the output started to have lines inserted between each line of code. Arrrgh yuk! I found that switching view in WLW to HTML view allows me to manually delete the inserted line but as soon as you return to normal view the brat is back at play. The only work around I’ve manage to get working is to edit the Markup Types to HTML in “Edit Weblog Setting”->Advanced instead of XHTML (default). The code seems to stay tight even after you post it onto the blogger though I now think it might be an issue with WLW.