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This week I've mostly been...

Reading
Excession by Iain M. Banks, great book so far and thanks to Howard for recommending this series of books to me.

Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit by Mary Poppendieck. A colleague (and fellow Certified Scrum Master) of mine Ian, has just come back from this two day course (pdf) run by Mary herself - quick chat over email about it and Ian is full of good things to say about the event, can't wait to catch up properly with him and also nab his copy of Software Factories, the authors of which are currently making waves at Microsofts Strategic Architects Forum in Redmond this week. Our CTO Colin was there so I should be able to get the low down from him when he returns.

[I'm very interested in this Software Factory concept and will be investigating further - I think I can apply some of this to the .NET CF mobile component framework I am building - expect to see some more posts on this]

Installing
MCE2005 - I've dual booted my current media server (XP Pro, ShowShifter, WebShifter, Nebula DigiTV) with MCE. Update: Installed! - but it deosn't support my DVB card (apparently the Nebula card has some sort of hardware filter and MCE requires cards with a software filter). The UI looks very nice...I can either wait for Nebula to implement MCE compatible drivers (rumours of which started back in the summer) or invest in a Nova-T MCE card. Wonder if my IrMan remote control receiver will work or will I need the MCE controller too?

Programming
Embedded Visual Basic 3.0! Some new features for a field force service solution I had a large part in creating several years ago (and still in faithful service). After being fairly heads down in VS.NET it's like a slap in the face with a wet fish! For the first few days I kept putting semicolons on the end of each line!

Discussing
CSLA - Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture with Howard... not much of discussion really but something on both our "radars", we need to catch up and chew the techno-cud (tm) on this one I think. I'm in a quandry about how to do this logical partitioning, my last project used a DTO style approach and this didn't work out as expected and wasn't as clean as I'd hoped it would be.


Next week I'll be...
  • Playing with .NET transparent Winforms to create a desktop version of our Windows Mobile application KPI dashboard.
  • Writing some documentation/slides to describe the security in KPI dashboard
  • Starting the KPI/Mobile Device MMC management snapin using one of the MMC .NET shims listed here.
  • Having my first horse riding lesson after a months break from it...put the radox on standby!


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