Blog http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification http://fnxstudios.com en-US FNX Studios 0.000000 0.000000 http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/9/19/HTML-Is-Beautiful-8-Tips-To-Keep-It-That-Way-Part-2 jim e188e456-8633-42d9-9126-db842142ffa7 Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT jim http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback e188e456-8633-42d9-9126-db842142ffa7/post e188e456-8633-42d9-9126-db842142ffa7/trackback This month I was invited to speak at the Agile Conference in Dallas in lieu of Jon Galloway, who couldn’t make it, about HTML and CSS. Thank you to everyone who attended for listening to me go on about this stuff. I was excited and truly honored to present for the folks in Dallas. I have published the tips here for general consumption. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/8/24/html-is-beautiful jim 692b0101-2abf-4d01-9266-87e00051ba8c Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT jim http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 692b0101-2abf-4d01-9266-87e00051ba8c/post 692b0101-2abf-4d01-9266-87e00051ba8c/trackback The worst-kept secret about being a PM is that the nuts and bolts of the job are important, but pretty easy. The schedule calculations can be done by anyone who isn't an idiot (and even by a few who are). Maybe you've always suspected this, too. Maybe you've even asked a PM what his or her job consists of... http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/5/14/The-Velvet-Glove kayvon e98d5755-500e-41c4-aa3f-74bca11fd2f8 Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT kayvon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback e98d5755-500e-41c4-aa3f-74bca11fd2f8/post e98d5755-500e-41c4-aa3f-74bca11fd2f8/trackback In any given Scrum project, the hardest decision that the team has to make is the order in which to build any given set of features on the backlog. The value of that order is of less importance than other considerations (such as quality, completeness, appropriateness of feature, etc.), but it is still a decision that has to get made. The main reason why it is so hard to make that decision is because it is almost always based on shoddy information! A good Scrum team thrives on data to make decisions, and using real data to make decisions takes a serious commitment. I think there is an approach that can enable a team to prioritize their backlog with real data, will address the above issues, and will help the team achieve some other ancillary goals. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/4/23/Assessing-Business-Value-in-Product-Backlogs brandon 9ac4706a-313d-4904-87a5-f4fedb20ed48 Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 9ac4706a-313d-4904-87a5-f4fedb20ed48/post 9ac4706a-313d-4904-87a5-f4fedb20ed48/trackback Adventures in how to get a clue about what's going on in health IT. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/3/1/What-s-going-on-in-health-IT Ibra 8d2c0f78-e663-48bd-b0a9-0cd78cc472bc Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT Ibra http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 8d2c0f78-e663-48bd-b0a9-0cd78cc472bc/post 8d2c0f78-e663-48bd-b0a9-0cd78cc472bc/trackback We here at FNX are proud to introduce our Scrum Consulting 1 Sheet, Mastering Scrum. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/2/21/FNX-Presents-Mastering-Scrum kayvon c5353592-be09-4f69-962b-41e0a55bdaed Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT kayvon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback c5353592-be09-4f69-962b-41e0a55bdaed/post c5353592-be09-4f69-962b-41e0a55bdaed/trackback Testing a large application can be difficult to manage. Recently, we tested an application that required 3500+ manual and automated test cases. Microsoft Test Manager 2010 (MTM), while not perfect, provided an easy way to centrally manage the test plan over several regressions with a team of 4 testers. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/1/24/MS-Test-Manager-2010-In-The-Wild jean 36c142c0-4725-451a-a206-3f3a14e9e656 Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT jean http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 36c142c0-4725-451a-a206-3f3a14e9e656/post 36c142c0-4725-451a-a206-3f3a14e9e656/trackback Have you ever been playing Halo and realize you have no clue where the next objective is? You just killed the last gold Elite and… now what? Just as you start thinking, "Where do I go now?" the watchful eye of your partner Cortana gives you the, "The door is this way, Chief," nav point on your HUD. Of course, it was so obvious! How could you have missed that door? On the flip side, Cortana’s not nearly as good with an assault rifle--she'd be useless on the battlefield without you, despite all her snark. Both of you bring something to the universe-saving table. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/1/13/Co-Op-Coding kayvon 9f372903-fd78-431f-9d6b-b597c1bc3638 Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT kayvon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 9f372903-fd78-431f-9d6b-b597c1bc3638/post 9f372903-fd78-431f-9d6b-b597c1bc3638/trackback FNX Studios is a pretty new company, but we take time to review those things that have gone before. Like any good Scrum team (and we ARE a good Scrum team), we perform a regular retrospective ritual to review and understand what is going well, what sucks, and what is unacceptable. 2011 was a pretty amazing year for us, and we would love to share our stuff. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2012/1/10/FNX-Studios-2011-Year-in-Review Brandon 2079f79f-6cd4-470c-b107-27ee732953c2 Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 2079f79f-6cd4-470c-b107-27ee732953c2/post 2079f79f-6cd4-470c-b107-27ee732953c2/trackback The Grand Master of the Jedi Order, Yoda, is one of the most beloved movie characters of all time. You will find references to him in almost every context of working life. In technology services start-ups, we talk about how certain people are the 'Yoda' of some given topic, where the term Yoda is meant to indicate they know all things, and are the go-to source for acquiring said knowledge. That is all fine and lovely and good, but I think there are several things about Yoda's approach to teaching and mentoring that are actually not great practices, and are perhaps even counter-productive to the process of teaching, learning, and collaborating with others. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/12/22/Terrible-Teacher-and-Mentor-Top-10-Reasons-Why-Yoda-Was-Hmmmm- Brandon e8061c58-f049-4edb-b896-74345adaa487 Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback e8061c58-f049-4edb-b896-74345adaa487/post e8061c58-f049-4edb-b896-74345adaa487/trackback FNX Studios has a new website, a new brand, and a great deal of moxy! Please check it out, and contact us. We love that. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/12/1/FNX-Studios-has-a-new-brand-and-a-new-site- Brandon fd8f1e53-393c-4d13-b1c4-537bc23b0334 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback fd8f1e53-393c-4d13-b1c4-537bc23b0334/post fd8f1e53-393c-4d13-b1c4-537bc23b0334/trackback They said that space was the final frontier…so FNX Studios has heard the call, and embarked on a journey to new digs. We love our new space, and would love to have you come visit. We’ve got coffee, and a 50% chance of donuts. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/12/1/FNX-Studios-moves-to-a-new-space-Glorious- Brandon d6152c0c-d88f-4ade-a9c6-1d684e8a258c Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback d6152c0c-d88f-4ade-a9c6-1d684e8a258c/post d6152c0c-d88f-4ade-a9c6-1d684e8a258c/trackback FNX's Toll Troll application was mentioned today on King5's New Day Northwest program by Hanson Hosein as part of a segment on popular, useful, and ridiculous mobile applications. We are so pleased! We know Hanson through one of our consultants, and are excited by his work http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/11/30/The-Toll-Troll-Makes-an-Appearance-on-King-s-New-Day-Show Brandon 60caffbe-b6ed-4493-b59e-73a21ee63704 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 60caffbe-b6ed-4493-b59e-73a21ee63704/post 60caffbe-b6ed-4493-b59e-73a21ee63704/trackback You have some code. You want to write an automated unit test for your code because that’s how you roll. But, the code is asynchronous. So, how do you write an automated unit test that knows how long to wait for your code to finish? http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/10/6/Avoiding-ThreadSleep-in-Unit-Tests Jim fb42c797-aa5f-476f-b36d-2c0c5c3c199b Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT Jim http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback fb42c797-aa5f-476f-b36d-2c0c5c3c199b/post fb42c797-aa5f-476f-b36d-2c0c5c3c199b/trackback The Sith Lord Darth Vader, of Star Wars fame, often gets a bad rap, particularly in what we all think of as his 'dark years'. From a certain perspective his mass murder, brutal oppression, and frequent deception to serve his own ends makes him seem like a pretty bad guy. But if you look past all that to his action, you will find a very capable and effective project manager! In the name of finding silver linings in dark clouds, I'd like to present the top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing project manager. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/9/29/Top-10-Reasons-Why-Darth-Vader-was-an-Amazing-Project-Manager Brandon bca36a6b-7f82-461a-a0ec-2c527f39ceae Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback bca36a6b-7f82-461a-a0ec-2c527f39ceae/post bca36a6b-7f82-461a-a0ec-2c527f39ceae/trackback I have come to prefer a very simple approach to this common problem. Numerous approaches exist. I encourage taking a look at them and learning the pros and cons to each. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/7/5/JavaScript-Inheritance Jim c9679f3b-e94c-4dad-a2af-4de632f1816a Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT Jim http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback c9679f3b-e94c-4dad-a2af-4de632f1816a/post c9679f3b-e94c-4dad-a2af-4de632f1816a/trackback When I started WPF development, my heart sank. Things were just more manageable with ASP.NET MVC. Along came Magellan by Paul Stovell with a port to WPF. Now that we have Windows Phone, I was craving another port of Magellan. Below is that port. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/5/9/Porting-Magellan-to-Windows-Phone Rocky 6aacbc09-d46b-4ab0-912f-e12a907ebc0e Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT Rocky http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 6aacbc09-d46b-4ab0-912f-e12a907ebc0e/post 6aacbc09-d46b-4ab0-912f-e12a907ebc0e/trackback SharePoint MySites can be a good place to store data unique to individual users, but since they are usually provisioned only when a user first visits their MySite, we often need to check ahead of time whether the MySite exists. One way to solve this problem is to create a simple user control that checks whether the current user's MySite exists, and provides the URL if it is found. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/4/19/SharePoint-Check-If-MySite-Exists Roxana ccb80281-d744-426e-9778-d0d6a6fecb73 Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT Roxana http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback ccb80281-d744-426e-9778-d0d6a6fecb73/post ccb80281-d744-426e-9778-d0d6a6fecb73/trackback There are a number of other rating solutions out there for SharePoint 2007, but we didn't find quite what we were looking for - an item rating feature with simple inline interface that was flexible enough to be used in out of the box and custom web parts. We were looking for functionality pretty similar to the rating feature in SharePoint 2010. Essentially, we created a custom field type, made use of an existing jQuery star rating plugin, and used web services to store the ratings in the list item as well as user's MySite. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/4/18/SharePoint-2007-Ratings-Custom-Field-Type Roxana 7d3533e7-a683-444c-9f14-d73e14e6bd5b Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT Roxana http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 7d3533e7-a683-444c-9f14-d73e14e6bd5b/post 7d3533e7-a683-444c-9f14-d73e14e6bd5b/trackback Last year, I had the pleasure of helping deliver a new product for a local legal electronic discovery company with a great team using a strict SCRUM development model. We evaluated several Team Foundation System 2010 work item templates, and selected the (then in Beta!) Scrum for Team Systems V3 template built by EMC Consulting. This posting reviews the main pros and cons we experienced with the template. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/4/15/Scrum-for-Team-Systems-V3-Template-Review Brandon 9ec4cdbd-9ef5-49e6-9d40-dec256678ce7 Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT Brandon http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 9ec4cdbd-9ef5-49e6-9d40-dec256678ce7/post 9ec4cdbd-9ef5-49e6-9d40-dec256678ce7/trackback A stripped down single file generator powered by Razor. Similiar to other generators available with the exception that is an absolute minimal implmentation. It's easy to tweak and very flexible. Driven in part because I love Razor and I would love to see it on WPF/WP7/Silverlight http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/3/13/Empty-Razor-Generator Rocky 71647b36-f4b3-4764-aed9-5be8c9c4e518 Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT Rocky http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 71647b36-f4b3-4764-aed9-5be8c9c4e518/post 71647b36-f4b3-4764-aed9-5be8c9c4e518/trackback There have been times in my life as an analyst when I have needed a list of all the files in a folder. I don’t mean copy/paste. I mean a list of the file names that windows explorer can’t offer. The list is often used in content inventories and I’ve even had occasion to use it for data entry... http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/2/22/File-Inventory Ann 1958e48f-bbf6-4514-955f-4bf87514a694 Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT Ann http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 1958e48f-bbf6-4514-955f-4bf87514a694/post 1958e48f-bbf6-4514-955f-4bf87514a694/trackback There's something to be said about putting some polish and professionalism into your deliverables. One of the ways of doing that is to make sure they have headers and footers with some basic information... http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/2/22/Excel-Headers-Footers Ann aa95a4dd-39d4-4dea-9a12-a1a6e08a0d78 Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT Ann http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback aa95a4dd-39d4-4dea-9a12-a1a6e08a0d78/post aa95a4dd-39d4-4dea-9a12-a1a6e08a0d78/trackback Castle's DynamicProxy will not work on Windows Phone 7 because Reflection.Emit is not there. So given that, we need a different tool help us write the boiler plate code. We are going to use T4 to template a INotifyPropertyChanged proxy class. T4 is a huge topic but basically it's a text generator whose syntax looks like ASPX. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/2/12/How-to-keep-INotifyPropertyChanged-out-of-your-code-Part-3-of-3 Rocky 6f65562c-e142-489d-852e-ec11b2020ae5 Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT Rocky http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 6f65562c-e142-489d-852e-ec11b2020ae5/post 6f65562c-e142-489d-852e-ec11b2020ae5/trackback Let’s consider Reflection.Emit. We can create a class at run-time with this class. Specifically, we can leverage Castle DynamicProxy. . At run-time we will create an inherited class with the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/2/10/How-to-keep-INotifyPropertyChanged-out-of-your-code-Part-2-of-3 Rocky bc7fdd27-b64c-4322-9170-724027bc33fb Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT Rocky http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback bc7fdd27-b64c-4322-9170-724027bc33fb/post bc7fdd27-b64c-4322-9170-724027bc33fb/trackback Adding INotifyPropertyChanged requires a level of complexity that feels like it should not be hosted within our contracts. However there is a very small edit you can make to a clean contract to open the doors of acceptable solutions: virtual properties. http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/2/7/How-to-keep-INotifyPropertyChanged-out-of-your-code Rocky 6c2b011e-0013-4c08-a11a-f62db908c975 Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT Rocky http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 6c2b011e-0013-4c08-a11a-f62db908c975/post 6c2b011e-0013-4c08-a11a-f62db908c975/trackback Follow along as we take on the perilous task of converting the vaunted BlogEngine.net from a Web Site to a Web Application project. As you can see if you are reading this post, it can be done! http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/post/2011/1/30/Converting-BlogEngineNET-to-a-Web-Application-Project Jim 69387645-cb8a-4de2-ae57-e4f8eff2e608 Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:22:00 GMT Jim http://www.fnxstudios.com/blog/pingback 69387645-cb8a-4de2-ae57-e4f8eff2e608/post 69387645-cb8a-4de2-ae57-e4f8eff2e608/trackback