Last week I spoke at the CalgaryAlberta Tech Fest. My first talk was on enabling partial trust for asp.net applications. Not many people knew what partial trust was comming in which I am finding to be the norm. There were lots of good questions about this technology and great audience participation which I always enjoy.Partial Trust.zipMy second talk was on implementing cryptography and cryptography best practices. Again this talk was a lot of fun and due to the smaller audience size it was more of an open space feel. I was getting over a cold and started loosing my voice towards...

Under agile, risk mitigation is a very key concept. Instead of talking about and being aware of risks, the first thing we try to do is to eliminate the risk.   When starting a project take a look at overall project risks and attack them so they are no longer a risk for your projects success. A possible example is: will WPF work as a technology for us? The first thing the team should do is create a quick prototype application to see if I can get WPF to work for our situation.   With every iteration take the time to look for...

This is the most common defense I hear when I talk about implementing testing on a legacy project. To this I want to walk through a scenario for finding and fixing a bug in a common organization. I know that not every shop runs like this and that every bug is unique but just humor me for a minute. Role Task Time (in hours) User User notices something unexpected and tries to work around it themselves 0.5 User User finds the number for the helpdesk and reports the issue. The helpdesk attempts to troubleshoot the...

So a Rational Unified Process Group started up here in Edmonton in October. I have no knowledge of RUP so I thought I should go check it out and Scott Ambler was the first presenter. Although by the end I did not have a real feel for what RUP entirely was I got loads of good information from Scott about the realities of software. It was also interesting to have about five people from Calgary join the presentation via a phone conference. Software Development, Agile, and RUP In the U.S. the Department of Defense funds 60% of Computer Science...

Every year we have a party around Halloween and carve some pumpkins. Normally knives and drinking don't go well together and this year was no exception. This year was even bigger and we started out with a bigger pumpkin patch than ever! Everyone did a great job and we had some really really well done carvings As I said really well done. The one on the left was drawn freehand and slowly peeled parts away with a potato peeler. The one on the right was done from a template but still looks great.... cheater.   Here is my...