Want to use this short post as sort of planning slate for some things I want to do, loosely defined as goals, for the current month of May 2010 in the realm of training (in diverse formats) and some posts I want to write which in themselves would imply some training and thought organization exercise.

I recently completed the process of deploying TFS 2010.  Used mainly as a production SCM but also leveraging some basic ALM features.  This included conversion from Visual Source Safe, bug & issue item tracking and sprint tasks planning & reporting.  I want to “document” that process and highlight some of the gotchas that I went through, and the dos and don’t that I gathered from my experience. I think they’d add value to anyone else looking to do just that: Deploy TFS 2010 as a source control repository, migrate projects and get the groove going to plan and track your development projects.  I think a critical part of this process is indeed the planning phase, as the execution is pretty straight forward once you have a good solid base plan.

Sometime in the next 2 weeks, i will be rebuilding my ESXi box, because the PS took a crapper and I was just waiting for an excuse to upgrade the iron anyways.  As it was this is 3.5 environment because the proc was an oldie but goodie 32bit.  Looking to migrate to ESXi 4.  I am running 2 instances of Server 2003, 2 of Server 2008 and I will now look to add 2008 R2.  Here I ran my labs, and most recently had my TFS environment.  Great excuse to do it all over again if I wanted to, but for now it is just a host box swap keeping the VMs as they are.

Videos, podcasts, screencasts, MIX10 content I haven’t assimilated, and hopefully get suckered into it enough to justify a yearly subscription to tekpub.

I will attend the 2 day WebCamp event in Chicago over June 11th and 12th.  Suffice it to say, this is a great chance to learn from others including industry and technology leaders at Microsoft.  Topics include ASP.NET MVC, EF, JQuery, IIS, etc.  Great stuff.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I am considering, and haven’t yet decided, working on a worthy submission to Thomson Reuter’s mobile app contest, which they named The StreepApps Challenge .  I think I can convince my buddy Benny to go in with me on this project and if so, we are half way there.

All of this while I embrace the search and quest for a new full time role.  This time I am not looking for a job, I am looking for a home amongst those that are “my peeps”, those that appreciate what I bring to the table, people whom I can actually learn from… an environment that generates “good” stress.

On the path to my new “8 to 6” home, I am hoping to get my hands filthy dirty with some good code, good problems to solve, great challenges that push my limits and all nighters that leave you with a smile on your face.

So ok, slight inaccuracy in the post tile, because May…be some of the things that are listed here I’ll be doing in June.

The following was extracted from a post I recently read, that is totally and completely off topic.  But the principles in the idea is what I focused on.

Don't tell me what you're against; tell me what you're for.
Don't tell me who to blame; tell me what you're working on.
Don't tell me what's wrong with "them"; tell me what's going to work.
Tell me the kind of change you're championing and the commitment you're ready to make to make it happen.

The concepts illustrate the positions I wish I saw people, my peers, my teams take rather than what has been my pet peeve with the common communication style that I have observed as prevalent amongst most of my recent work environments. 

People complaint, they rehash the past, they blame and they pout, but seldom do they solve the problem on their own… it takes so much effort to guide them to that point.

What am I doing about it? (I won’t fall prey of the same trap) I am nipping whiners and complaints in the bud.  I have to ask sometimes more than a few times, for actionable initiatives, doable items, far from pipe dreams (which also tend to be used as excuses).

Yes, I have gotten results, most good.  Getting small wins tend to give people the boost of confidence and positive reinforcement they need to mold behavior and drop bad habits.

According to Baseline Magazine, you should make room on your bookshelf for the following books:

1. Managing the Human Factor in Information Security: How to win over staff and influence business managers by David Lacey
2. Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance by Randolph Kahn, Barclay Blair
3. The Truth About Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter by Paul Osterman
4. Strategic Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams by Terry Schmidt
5. Growing Software: Proven Strategies for Managing Software Engineers by Louis Testa
6. Identifying and Managing Project Risk: Essential Tools for Failure-Proofin​g Your Project by Tom Kendrick PMP
7. The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment by John Lamb
8. Winning the Hardware-Softwa​re Game: Using Game Theory to Optimize the Pace of New Technology Adoption by Ruth D. Fisher
9. The Deciding Factor: The Power of Analytics to Make Every Decision a Winner by Larry E. Rosenberger
10. Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) by Johanna Rothman

Once I stumble across a list like this, I’ll likely read a couple… already ordered one of them.

It appears the word/verb “Refactor” is absent “out of the box” from all if not most of the environments that provide a spell checker service or feature.  At least the ones I’ve used lately and since I started to notice.  From (this) Live Writer to Word to within the browser on the update textbox of twitter, you name it, I keep having to “right click, Add to Dictionary”.

Wikipedia does have an article for the term “Refactoring”, and so does Dictionary.com but the “verb” Refactor is not on either (Wikipedia redirects to Refactoring) and Merriam-Webster comes up empty when searching for either.

Is there a way to carry around one’s dictionary from environment to environment and use it on all if not most of the aforementioned tools? 

I guess I have to do a little bit of research, and no I won’t hold the post until I do.  I’d rather note my observation and I *should* then later do the legwork and update with my findings.  I reserve the right to slack on such task, do nothing and instead keep “right clicking, Adding to Dictionary” as I go.

Image by hisks

If you take the approach to clean up after yourself as you progress through whatever maybe your daily routine, and create this good habit for everything you do, you’ll end up avoiding what is almost unavoidably natural for most of us: procrastination.

Whether it is while you cook, write code/implement software solutions, do the laundry or go though things on your desk at the office, if you let things pile up… well, you’ll end up with a pile of <insert appropriate noun here>.

Why not keep your projects, solutions, classes, layers, frameworks, third party components et.al. in an organized manner right off the bat?  Regardless of the size and scope of the project, platform or technology…  Why wait until it becomes a tangled mess of bad historic legacy waiting… clamoring for someone to come in, criticize, refactor and “waste time” cleaning up your mess?

Why wait until your roommate, spouse, parent or sibling comes around and has to deal with piles of dirty dishes, filthy counters or messy bathroom?

I believe it is one of the easiest forms of procrastination to avoid with the highest payback in quantity, quality and immediacy of satisfaction.

Be it with the proverbial or actual dirty dishes, don’t be a slob, love yourself and those around you and Clean as you go… whatever that may end up being.

This literally just came into my inbox… (cut edited for obvious reasons)

And what exactly am I supposed to do with this?

If we keep having to include copy like this one, without making basic assumptions, I can't help but realize we are in deep trouble...

Via Jeff Attwood's post, in summary (because his posts tend to be very, hmm, thorough):

The primary improvement here is that we're only accepting a whitelist of known good URL characters. Allowing arbitrary random characters in URLs is setting yourself up for XSS exploits, and I can tell you that from personal experience. Don't do it!

We only allow certain characters to "end" the URL. Ending a URL in common punctuation marks like period, exclamation point, semicolon, etc means those characters will be considered end-of-hyperlink characters and not included in the URL.

Parens, if present, are allowed in the URL -- and we absorb the leading paren, if it is there, too.

The regular expression is:

\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]

I love these as a quick, hands on way (my favorite) to get up to speed with skills and technology you may otherwise miss or take longer to catch up to.

Here is the training kit from the horse’s mouth:

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.

Download the kit from here.

this includes most of those on facebook that don't quite get what its about.

follow this simple decision tree: