James Simmonds

As part of my education on Continuous Integration and automated builds from the ground up I've been playing with CruiseControl & SDCBuild . As a consequence the project I'm working on has a slick automated build process with unit tests being run etc...I've not got as far as getting CruiseControl and code coverage in yet but it's early days but I've got some great help on tap from Howard . I wanted to add a setup project to the .NET solution so yesterday evening I went to add the new setup project and the solution file was checked out...and the developer had left the office! Grrr! It got me thinking - if I could MSN the guys on the project with messages at a scheduled time (eg: 17:30..."Check your code in!") and also be able to send them build progress messages from SDC scripts it would be cool! So I wrote a little utility application to do this and you can download SendMSN binaries from here or full source code from here . It's a .NET console ap...

Larkware turned up this free Microsoft SMS addin for Outlook2003 that allows you to send (but not receive) text messages within the Outlook2003 client. Great...except I can't get it to work with my C500 smartphone acting as the modem it requires to send the SMS - apparently the "Standard Modem over Bluetooth link" that the c500 provides to the PC does not support PDU format messages :( As a freebie this would have been great to use - I'm not sure I send enough SMS's to warrant buying something like this software from Jeyo to do this although it's pretty cheap and gets good reviews....oh well!

So I got a new c500 and one of the tasks is re-establishing the favourites in Pocket IE - I think I had a few nifty ones in there to help run everyday life - what links do you have that you couldn't do without? My "killer" link is for the train timetable - what's yours? http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ldb/livedepartures.asp Any guesses on the number of " Mobile Naked News " I'll get? PS: If you have a quick way of sync-ing IE favourites from desktop to mobile then could you enlighten me please?! I have a sneaky feeling that there is a special Favourites folder that gets replicated from IE to PIE...am I on the right lines?

I had to get my hands on a c500 smartphone for myself, I just couldn't wait for my Orange contract to expire in 6 months so I upgraded my e200 at the weekend for £75...and the clincher was, TomTom Mobile works* on it! So there I was Saturday morning idly scanning the pocketgps forums and low and behold...a forum posting on TomTom Mobile finally working on the c500....15 mintues later I had a c500 on order, ebay provided me with a good deal on the TomTom software (£189 inc P&P) with a 265mb mini-SD courtesy of Expansys . So this morning it's all hooked up and working like a dream - This solution for SatNav is fantastic, I carry one device, my smartphone and it does everything you would need for the consultant/gadget man on the move, Email, Calendar, Tasks via company Outlook Mobile Access or Local Client IM with MSN Messenger Web Browsing with PocketIE SatNav with TomTom Mobile Speed camera locations inside TomTom with the PocketGPS Camera Database Windows Media...

As you may have read in previous posts I've been using Wise Installer to create MSI files of our software for the PocketPC and Smartphone. However a deadline on Wednesday to go and demonstrate one of our applications and a still non-functional Wise installer led me to return to basics and get down and dirty with .CAB, .INF, .INI & .MSI's...and guess what? It's actually not too unbearable! Starting on Tuesday afternoon I had a working MSI installer with custom actions and multi-cab install in about 4 hours. The problem with getting this stuff to work is that there really isn't a great overall guide to it all. I Googled a couple of links and used the MSDN Compact Framework FAQ and after reading through it all understood pretty much what there is to know and plugged it all together. These are the links I used... CodeProject - Packaging and Deploying PocketPC applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetcomp/html/netcfd...

What do hitting a golf ball and software development have in common? Well I'll tell you... consistency and quality . Tad-da...I present to you, AGA .. Agile Golf Analogy ...that's right folks, you heard it here first. The next time you hear "We've just duffed the project into the rough" or "We're in a bunker with the workflow components" you know there it originated. I've have a couple of conversations over the last few days about our experiences using SCRUM and as usual there was lots of interesting thoughts and theories to emerge. It wasn't until I was at a driving range with some other guys from work and one of them said "it's the same swing just a different club" that it hit me. The key to a great golf swing is absolute consistency in the rhythm, effort, control and technique you use. The golf club does the hard work for you. Your shot is your Sprint . Your swing is your project team . Your club is your engineer...

If you work with the developer who did this ....you have my deepest sympathy. If you are the developer who did this...please give up the day job.