Windows Vista RC1

I finally took the plunge and installed Vista on my laptop the other day. So far it’s been pretty good, but one thing thats really bugging me is that for some reason when I’m connected to the network at work, internet access via our proxy is slow as hell. Access to internal sites is fine, and if I use the same computer and the same user account from home, without a proxy, theres no problem. It also happens if I am at home and use VPN to connect to the work network. Prior to connecting in, everything is fine. As soon as I’m connected via VPN, and have to go through our proxy, its slow as….

Wierd. I’m not sure at this stage whats causing this. It doesn’t seem to matter which browser I use – IE7 does it, but so does Opera 9.02…

So far I haven’t found anything on the net that sounds like my problem, or at least, nothing which provides a resolution…\

Mondayitis

I normally don’t mind Mondays – a fresh start to the week (unless I was unlucky enough to have been called out over the weekend!!), other people have yet to discover nasty problems they need help with, the TFS server is under minimal load as people are only slowly getting back into work, etc, etc.

But TODAY!!!! Damn!

I had a presentation scheduled at work. Every so often we have a lunchtime presentation (EDS call them Brown Bag presentations, apparently in the US they all bring their lunch to work in a brown paper bag!!) and today I presented an overview of Team Foundation Server, including how it fits in with our other tools at work.

This raised a bit of last minute interest with our Process Improvement people as they have heard we want to (er….have already started to) use TFS for .net projects, and they need to understand what it can do/why we want to use it instead of VSS, ClearCase or most importantly Borland Starteam. SO, I didn’t finish writing the powerpoint slides on friday (last-day-of-the-week-itis hit me BAD on Friday), and I wanted to set up a local TFS VM for running demos during the presentation (again, that became a friday afternoon casualty). I figured I had the weekend to do this in, but forgot about a BBQ for my daughter’s netball team (which wife also coached) on Friday night, and a birthday dinner for my mum on Sunday. Also, with the netball season finally over, we have our “family day” back again (saturday), so I didn’t get round to progressing this over the weekend at all.

Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up working from 6am this morning doing ppt slides with one hand and installing TFS into a VM with the other (no, not literally – jeez!!!).

I finally got everything ready with 20 minutes to spare before I was due to head up to the presentation room to set up. I get there and the network for the TFS VM I had set up, decided to go mental. My laptop siezed up, and I had to reboot – somewhere along the way Virtual Server decided it was going to refuse to network properly.

So I was forced to do my demos on our production TFS box (we have a sandbox project on it that I was able to use)…using NetMeeting to link up with our boys and girls in Hamilton and Auckland, plus a stray Upper Huttian or 2, I shared my desktop and got through about half a dozen slides before someone told me I had the slidshow underneath something else on my desktop, so everyone who was remotely watching with NetMeeting missed the first part of the powerpoint!!

With this, and the network screwup making everything slow down, I ended up running over time and having to skip one of my demos, which made the whole thing seem a bit rushed. Finally, to top that off, I got stuck afterwards in a discussion (which was a bit one-sided) with one of our Process Improvement people about what she wants to see in a decent SCM tool, for another 10 minutes.

AND THEN, to make matters worse, I get back to my desk only to be called into a meeting where we all get told that the project (a BIG one – actually a multi-year programme of work, rather than just a project) that has been just around the corner for the past 12 months or so, will not be starting up in the beginning of next month - instead, it’s not likely to be ready to work on till probably the end of Q1 next year now, and theres no guarantee we’ll get to do the work either!!

Anyone else have a crappy monday? :/

Why do I hate documenting Application Architectures?

As a general rule, I dislike writing documents – MS Word seems to be able to put me to sleep every time. But when it comes to Application Architecture documents, it’s even worse than usual.

Why? I’m pretty sure that it’s got to do with generalisation – I love thinking about application architectures, and I love building them, but when it comes to writing about them, the fact that everything needs to be so general really puts me to sleep.

To think about an architecture I like to look right through it, and try to come up with a picture of a complete implementation of it. The problem with documenting the architecture I think stems from the fact that I have to “switch off” the part of my brain that automatically looks for a concrete example in order to validate the architecture I’m writing about. By forcing myself not to think about that part of it, I can concentrate on documenting the architecture itself. But that leaves a large percentage of brainpower that is now doing nothing. The only other time I’m not thinking about 5 different things at once is when I am sleeping, so my brain tries to make me fall asleep.

So if my boss is reading this - THAT’S why I was snoring this afternoon!!!

TFS and Team Projects

So, at the work, I am currently our teams TFS administrator and “guru” (for want of a better term – I’m sure I don’t know that much about it!!).

We’re in a state of flux at the moment, with a range of projects spread across (now) 3 CM repositories – Clearcase (mostly VB6 code) several VSS databases (the two I have access to are both well over 2GB in size) and now TFS Version Control.

TFS has been chosen as the “way forward” for our .net competency worldwide, and according to ET, our global TFS Guru (and a TFS MVP), EDS have the largest TFS user base in the world…so with more and more of our devs needing to use it, I’m going all out to try to figure out what the best way to organise Team Projects is.

I’m struggling a bit with the granularity of Team Projects – I can do one of two things: Firstly, we could do a Team Project per dev project, but as some of our dev projects consist of a team of 1 whole person, that seems a bit like overkill! The other option is to do a Team Project per client/customer. The problem with that however is that we’ll get work items (in particular) that belong to one dev project showing up in the reports, queries, etc for the other dev projects in that Team Project.

I’m hoping that Areas are going to be the answer to this….if anyone has any other ideas, by all means, please post comments. I’ll also post a followup to this post once I’ve tried it out…