Adobe Flex 2 XML Schema for MXML markup

If your interested in using some other tool besides Flex Builder 2 for building Flex applications, you'll probably end up looking for an XML Schema (.xsd file) for MXML markup. I found one here.

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Installing Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows Vista

It seems that the Dreamweaver CS3 installer will not work with Windows Vista x86 directly out of the box. I tried it a couple of times and every time it complained with an internal error 2739. Here's what needs to happen to make it go smoothly:

1. Open up a command prompt as Administrator by right clicking the command prompt icon and selecting Run as Administrator.
   


2. Navigate to \Windows\system32 directory.


3. Run the following command from the Command Prompt: regsvr32 jscript.dll

That seems to solve the issue.

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Good article on why agile adoptions fail

Jean Tabaka lists 11 reasons why agile development method adoptions fail. Good article.

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User Account Control (UAC) on Vista

I've been fascinated by the amount of User Account Control or UAC dialog prompts I've been getting in Vista. Think of UAC as a graphical sudo. Basically you don't run as Administrator in Vista--you are prompted to allow administrative authority when a process needs it. It's actually pretty annoying, given that most Windows .NET development software needs administrative privileges. My Visual Studio development experience is vastly different on Vista than it is on XP. Not sure what to think of UAC. It certainly clues you into heightened access by programs, but it never prompts for an administrative password (for example in Linux when the adept notifier is opened, it will prompt you for a sudoer's password).

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Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Linux

1. Install RubyGems: sudo apt-get install rubygems


2. Install Rails: sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies


3. Download and unzip Eclipse.


4. Get Ruby Development Tools via Software Update: http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/release


5. Get RadRails via Softwware Update: http://radrails.sourceforge.net/update


An in-depth tutorial on the use of these tools (using Ruby on Windows) can be found at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6998.

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Flex Builder 2.0.1 - Terrible first impression

I downloaded Adobe's Flex Builder 2.0.1 for trial drive. I'm interested in rich client development and Flex and Flash seem to be where the action is at. I'm currently doing WPF in the .NET world, but that necessitates installing .NET 3.0 on the client machine and XBAP deployment is still a bit shaky these days (partial vs. full trust issues come to mind). Anyways, I thought I'd try out Flex Builder 2 for 30 days. Well, it only took me a few minutes to see that this tool probably won't be very productive for me. The thing is terribly slow in source code mode, to the point that it becomes unusable. The design mode seems to work OK, but switching to source mode just brings the tool to its knees. It is built on Eclipse 3.1.2 and I've been lukewarm on Eclipse these days too. Not sure if its the Flex Builder stuff or Eclipse causing the issue, but it ain't good either way. Now looking for other tooling to help with Flex development. Luckily, it does look like I could just use a text editor and use Ant and the Flex build tasks to build stuff up. Stay tuned.

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When pair programming rocks

I recently spent about 2.5 days pair programming with another developer at a client gig. We camped out in a small conference room for the entire time and set up a laptop with a nice 20" widescreen LCD monitor so both programmers could easy see what was happening. Wow!! What an awesome experience and when the time was up, we had refactored some nasty eventing code into a thoughtful design that has a nice set of unit tests around it (where as the previous code had no unit tests). An awesome agile development experience. Probably one of the only times I've truly felt super-productive on this project. Looking for more opportunities like this at this current client engagement. Kudos Mike!

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Goodbye, ankhsvn!

Well, I and a couple other developers at my current gig stopped using ankhsvn within VS 2005. Cool tool and it works great if your solution doesn't get too big. But our stuff is getting huge and it just became a drain on resources. It needs some serious perf tuning, but I'm hoping that it does improve to the point that I can one day use it. Just not ready for prime time at my client. Now I'll have to manually maintain the svn adds from TortoiseSVN. Not real excited about that, but I can't take the hit on performance that ankhsvn subjects me to.

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SharpDevelop's SVN support

Seems SharpDevelop is using the excellent TortoiseSVN component to handle Subversion integration in the IDE.  I'm really impressed at how far SharpDevelop has come in the past few years.  It's a very capable IDE and much faster than VS 2005. 

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New Dell 2407WFP monitor

Just received a new 24" Dell widescreen flat panel LCD monitor. It's quite nice! I have it hooked up to my Dell XPS M170 laptop and its a dream. I had a Dell 20" widescreen flat panel LCD monitor previously connected to this laptop, but the 24" will run at the Dell XPS native resolution of 1920x1200. Sweet! I paid $569 (no including tax); there was a email coupon offer that I used to get the monitor at that price. If you have the money and a video card that will drive a monitor of this resolution, it's well worth the cost.

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Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed

Beautiful book, at least from the aspect of color. The whole book is published in rich, glossy, colorful pages. Code examples are syntax highlighted, just like they would be in VS 2005. The content of the book looks excellent. I have Sells and Griffiths Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, which actually seems quite out of date. That book seems to be based on early Avalon releases and has many errors now that WPF has been released. I think there is some value to the book. but not being up-to-date hurts it greatly. I also have Moroney's Foundations of WPF. This book is scant on hardcore WPF information. It tries to use the Expression Interactive Designer tool to demonstrate designing UIs. I much prefer Nathan's book, which really goes into the deep internals of WPF. Looks like a winner.

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Using SharpDevelop for WPF programming

It can be done! It seems that SharpDevelop 2.1 Final (which I just downloaded and installed) can be used to develop WPF apps. There's no XAML-aware editor; you get the XML editor and you have to come up with everything by yourself. But the tool understands the binding between the XAML file and the code-behind partial class file. Very cool. I tried to use C# Express Edition 2005 with the WPF and WCF extensions installed and that didn't work out so well. I wonder how difficult it would be to develop a XAML addin for SharpDevelop. Heck, one could use Kaxaml to prototype the XAML and then move to SharpDevelop after the XAML is complete. Anything to avoid purchasing a license of VS 2005.

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Concepts in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Found a PDF of Adam Nathan's third chapter from his WPF Unleashed book. This chapter goes over dependency properties, routed events, and commands, all important core concepts which are heavily used in WPF. Might be worthwhile to the WPF developers out there. I ordered a copy of his book, though it hasn't arrived yet.

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KNetworkManager, part 2

Just dropped into a local Dunn Brothers Coffee shop here in Shakopee and effortlessly connected to their WiFi with Ubuntu 7.04 (development snapshot). Why is this a big deal you say? Because it was so easy to do with new KNetworkManager applet on the panel. 10 seconds after logging in, I was able to auto-discover the network and connect to it with two clicks of the mouse (one to open the applet popup menu/configuration and the other to select the Dunn Bros. network to connect to. Much, much easier than in previous version of Ubuntu. I really dig where 7.04 is going.

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Test-driven development is hard!

I'm on a consulting gig at the moment and the team is collectively trying very hard to embrace test-driven development (TDD). We have an agile process lead or meanie as he likes to be referred to and this meanie does a great job of keeping us focused on having a good test suite and a thriving, evolving code base. However, we're under a tight deadline for the first release of our product and I keep wondering when the ax will fail from the business. When will they tell us that we either make the deadline with all the features or we're looking for new gigs this summer. I absolutely believe in test driven development and the benefits that TDD affords to software projects. Unfortunately, businesses typically don't understand or cannot evaluate the importance of TDD. Come hell or high water, we're going to hit this date. Our project team is already behind in the amount of features that we should have implemented by now and I really feel like our development velocity has been all over the board and has not settled out into a semi-predictable range. Time will tell how this goes off, but I have learned the importance of driving development with tests. I've done testing before, but this time we're really focusing on pulling development forward with tests. It takes an enormous amount of discipline, at least for me.

On a related note around TDD, one beef I have with Visual Studio 2005 is that it's not geared for incremental compilation and testing cycles. It's always compile and packaging bytecode into DLLs and EXEs. That really starts to hurt when your solution has lots of projects and the projects start to get a lot of source files in them. Java is much nicer in this regard. You compile to .class files and run your tests. No packaging required. Heck, if you're using an incremental compiler like the Eclipse compiler, the compilation step is almost negligible. I am becoming a big fan of NUnit and attributed tests and test fixtures.

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Eye candy in Feisty Fawn, part 2

I've been playing around the development snapshot of Feisty Fawn and the new transparency stuff baked into KDE seems to be working well. I didn't have much luck with any of this stuff before Feisty, so this is a welcomed change. I don't believe any of these effects are provided by Compiz or Beryl, as much as I can tell. I've played with Beryl about 3 months ago and the effects provided by Beryl were trippy and fun...but alas it was quite unstable at that point. I would assume that Beryl would be stabilizing in the near future and that we could expect some of its graphical goodness in a future version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I think Suse already uses Compiz or Beryl in some fashion in their desktop product offering.

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Man, I've been away from Java for a while...

I've been working in the .NET world for my day job for the past 6 months. Wow, when I work on my home Java project in IntelliJ running on Linux, I'm continually amazed at the speed that I can work at. Much, MUCH faster than our .NET development environments. Some of it is the corporate laptops that we're given to work on, but I will say that Java 5 and 6 are blazingly quick on Linux when compared to the .NET stuff I've been doing. I really miss IntelliJ--ReSharper helps, but it's not IntelliJ. I've been doing some Swing programming lately and enjoying some of the new effects coming out from various Swing gurus at Sun. Romain Guy and Chet Haase have a new Swing book coming out that looks very interesting.

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Eye candy in Feisty Fawn

There does seem to be more eye candy in Feisty Fawn. Immediately noticed the expanding ghosting effect when click on app launchers on the panel. Seems to be more transparency and fade in/out effects also. For the most part, the effects and animations are working and you can tweak them to your liking (which I did not see in Vista when I was using it). Feisty seems very fast compared to Edgy. Apps pop open and things seem quite spry in the new Ubuntu development snapshots I'm working with.

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KNetworkManager

There's a new KDE app out that seems to be a major step up for wireless network configuration in Linux--KNetworkManager. It came down with the upgrade to the development snapshot of Feisty Fawn and it's been a dream to work with. Discovers broadcasting wireless networks and seems to make switching wireless network effortless. A much improved user interface for networking in Linux. Lots of information is displayed about current network connections also. Very cool. Kudos to both the Ubuntu community for including it and the OpenSuse.org community for bringing this tool to life. Thanks.

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OpenOffice.org updated to 2.2 in Feisty Fawn

Looks like OpenOffice.org is getting an update in Feisty Fawn. I just upgraded to the Kubuntu 7.04 development snapshot and opened up OOo Writer, and lo and behold, the splash screen states it's version 2.2. I can't tell any other difference than the new splash screen. It does look like the issue with greyed text in OOo has been fixed. Save dialog is different than the one in 2.0.

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