I'm trying to use NAnt/NAntContrib build script to build a web application on Windows 2008 (IIS 7.0). In the build file, there is mkiisdir task, which fails with: [mkiisdir] The webservice at 'localhost' does not exist or is not reachable. All the documents/posts I found so far (non for w2k8, only Vista) say to install IIS 6 Compatibi...
There is a lot of talk on why outsourcing (and off-shoring) of software development jobs in a long run has an adverse effect for a business. However, most of these arguments are well understood only by folks who are heavily into software development themselves and there is an apparent difficulty in putting these arguments across to "poli...
We are developing a web application which is available in 3 languages. There are these key-value pairs to translate everything. At this moment we use Excel (key, german, french, english) for this. But this does not work well ... if there is more than 1 person editing this file, you have no chance to automatically merge the different fi...
That is something that literally affects any engineer in a bigger organization. You have a project that takes longer than expected, but for a good reason. Project you depend on did not ship on time. In the meantime you discovered that infrastructure you planned to use is going to be deprecated and when you have finished coding someone ...
Provided that you have all setup available to work from home, does it really work to work from home for programmers? What are your experiences? And Is it beneficial for industries? ...
What books should someone who manages programmers read? This includes supervisors, internal customers and project managers. Vote for what you think or add it if it doesn't exist. ...
Hi All Need recommendations for this... I have 2 teams Enterprise SOA development with InfoPath 2003, BizTalk 2006, MSCRMv3, custom .net2 website and a bunch of webservices using VSStudio 2005 with TFS. Web Team focused on public facing websites - using Adobe Suite, VSStudio 2005. As mentioned team 1 have TFS- we dont do daily/wee...
This is specifically focused on a startup hiring its first employee, but also applies more generally. 37Signals says remote works well, but other people say only hire locally. This seems like a related question but is not exactly the same. ...
Does anyone have any good suggestions, based on experience, for dealing with a VP/CTO who doesn't come from a Software background, but is very self confident in the ability to architect software and software development processes, even though all of the experience and recommendations are against industry standards, and often technically ...
Come the stand-up meeting every morning I frequently (usually during early/mid code iterations) have difficulty describing exactly how I created value for the company the previous day. The words out of my mouth usually sound like "I further iterated the code". Which, while true, is pretty undescriptive. I think it comes from my inbuilt...
What approach did you take to describe the benefits of SCRUM to clients / business units who do not have a technical background? Please list any analogies you thought were useful. Finally, how did you address the concerns that the Waterfall camp had? ...
I am currently having a bit of an internal war with myself. I am studying for the MCAD, and for reasons which I won't go in to here, the course has been dragging on for a few years now. The course expires in March of next year (2009) and I am very close to sitting the exam for the Web Developer cert. (70-315). Now, I think I can get th...
We've all seen it. The project's running late and a penalty clause is looming, so the management resort to aggression and scare tactics to get the project out the door (described well here BTW). Examples of management behavior in this scenario: they expect lots of unpaid overtime they quietly schedule one developer to work late, exp...
I'm working on a project that has fairly large scope and a lot of work to be done. One of the members of my team has a great work ethic and is very bright yet a little defensive. The problem is, he takes on too much work and delivers everything late. I need a way to say to him, "stop overloading yourself" without turning off his enthus...
Hi, I'm a team lead/dev who manages a team of 10 programmers. Most of them are hard working talented guys. But of late, I've got this one person who while highly talented and has delivered great work for me in the past, has just become completely unreliable. It's not his ability - that is not in question - he's proven that many times....
I would like my programming team to be more productive and it has been suggested that the way to achieve this is to provide incentives to make them work harder and / or longer. Does anyone else work in an environment where bonuses are offered for completed work? And if so, does it help? It's been suggested that an Xbox or Wii could be...
I include myself in a group of thinkers in this "small" company. In order to gather suggestions and improvement ideas from my development team members, I was put in charge of mounting an Idea/Suggestion Management system. Some of the enjoyable features are: provide user based (possible anonymous) suggestions mechanism provide voting m...
In my experience, generally speaking, CS PhDs are used to work hard and put in many hours are more motivated than others professionally can analyze a problem effectively can communicate very well in presentations and reports Thus, what is the best reason not to hire a PhD on your development team? And how do you recognize this nega...
Everyone in my office uses Macs and therefore most use Safari. We have a page that has 30 checkboxes on it, I didn't even do the HTML myself but no matter if I use the html input checkbox with a label or an asp:Checkbox usig the text property for the label my boss is irritated because the checkbox is a little below center on the label....
We have a program that is about 15 years old and on version 6. It is in a niche market and used by very small departments in very large companies all over the world. It works in a very highly regulated environment and has been heavily influenced over the years by the customer needs making it almost like a bespoke system. One of the mai...