My experience with Kanban

Snapshot of my latest Kanban-driven project.

I’ve been running Kanban projects for over a year and I should tell you that I find this methodology working wonders.

Kanban is not for everyone, but I find it very useful in the environments with the geographically distributed sparse teams and, especially, in the agile-non-friendly team members and management.

You may notice that titles are duplicated. This was done to accommodate discrepancies in the acceptable and familiar dictionaries of my teammates and management.

One of the best features of Kanban is to detect and expose bottlenecks. This is exactly what happened in this project – notice the pile up of tasks in the “Ready for QA” slot due to lack of resources.

Wintellect Toolkit

Check out a great article about the tools used by Wintellect folks.

My blog is ranked 19th

My blog is ranked 19th on the top 25 Engineering Blogs

TAD- Test Assisted Development

In real world TDD doesn’t always work. I’m a great supporter of TAD – Test Assisted Development

Putting SOAP to REST – Cape Code .NET User Group @ Hyannis, MA

I’d like to thank the Cape Code .NET User Group for giving me the opportunity to talk about SOAP and REST and, specifically, Todd Kittredge and Venture Hyannis for hosting the event.

I’ve posted the slide deck on the Slideshare:

 

[Update: 12/31/2009]

The landing page for the REST in WCF will point you to the location of the REST Starter Kit.

 

I’d like to remind you that everybody is invited to the upcoming Northeast Roadshow. You can find more information on Chris Bowen and Jim O’Neil blogs.

While these guys are working on the main Roadshow page, you can access their staging location for the near-final info.

Messaging Platform and Service Bus Resources

On the recent project we’ve put in place a messaging platform. Apparently my engineers had a vague understanding what that is. To save you the same trouble I’ve gathered a bunch of interesting resources that can help you get up to date:

Open source Service Bus implementations

• nServiceBux (NSB)
• MassTransit (MT)
• Rhino Service Bus

nServiceBus

• Udi Dahan and NServiceBus (Podcast)

MassTransit

• A First Look at MassTransit
• Producing and Consuming Messages using MassTransit and StructureMap
• MassTransit Endpoints
• MassTransit Samples (Ayende)
• Performance Counters Added to MassTransit

WCF (misc)

• A Developer’s Guide to the WCF REST Starter Kit
• WCF Templates and Tools

Git for Windows developers

Just moved to Git on Windows. It gives me more flexibility for the local repositories and distributed development for my new team.

Found the following series very helpful for the beginners (my engineers never used Git before):

Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 1

Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 2

Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 3

 

Take a look at Tortoise Git as well. Reduces all the command-line noise drastically:

Now I have ALL of the Microsoft developer certifications – long journey is over!!!

Now I own the full deck of the Microsoft certifications and I can sit back and relax (beer is in order . Unfortunately, in the startup world that I operate most of the time, it’s not very recognizable achievement, but it’s nice to put these logos on my presentation slide decks and, especially now, I have a very powerful bragging rights – I have ALL of the Microsoft developers certifications !!!

It was a lengthy path and, I should add, a very confusing one. It wasn’t very obvious what certification is a prerequisite to which one and, I must add, I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the road until I’ve discovered a developer’s certification map by Jorgen Thelin that put everything in order and cleared all the confusions.

WCF Certification (70-503) is mine!!! Now I’m a certified (MCPD) Enterprise Application Developer

If you were wondering why there was a silence on my blog – I was preparing for a battle with the Prometric testing computer And I Won!!! Last week I’ve passed my LAST (for the near future) certification exam: Windows Communication Foundation. This gave me another MCT certification -

And finally enabled my long overdue certification MCPD Enterprise Application Developer.

To those who are looking into passing this certification you may use the following materials that I found very helpful (after the break):

Feeling Azure the first time? Check this getting-started resource …

Check out this great article about how the DinnerNow.net application was ported to Windows Azure – Article.

Don’t forget to listen to the DotNetRocks #471 podcast about this whole process.