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After working intimately with IntelliJ and Eclipse on previous projects, Visual Studio seems like such a beast for doing very simple things. Resharper makes it bearable though has a cost of its own. Our team has been playing around with trying to speed up the responsiveness. Here’s a few things we’ve tried that have worked at least most of the time:

• Close the Toolbox tab – Even with just the tab closed, VS2005 still seems to use resources to keep it up to date. By removing it from your workspace, the project pane and other windows appear much more responsive.
• Turn Off Animated Windows – When VS2005 gets sluggish, expanding and hiding tabs can appear horrendously slow as the screen repaints. Turning this option off helped a little bit. Uncheck the box found under Tools … Options … Environment … General … Animate Environment
• Turn off the VS2005 File Navigator – With resharper installed, you don’t need VS2005 to update the list of methods and fields at the top of the file (CTRL-F12 does this nicely). I’ve hardly even noticed the small panel that sits at the top of the file you’re editing but apparently it takes quite a lot of effort for VS2005 to keep it up to date. Disable the Navigation Bar checkbox under Tools … Options … Text Editor … All Languages … Display.
• Disable Startup Page – Wondered why VS2005 seemed sluggish on start up? It’s probably because it’s trying to download something from the Internet by default. Turn off the main startup page and the “live” content by unchecking the box found under Tools … Options … General … Startup … “Download content every”. I’d also change the “At Startup” option to “Show Empty Environment”.
• Install Cool Commands – When you use Track Active Item in the Explorer pane, collapsing projects to run tests of various kinds can be hard. Cool Commands has some helpful things like Collapse All Projects so you don’t have to do it yourself when running tests.

I’d enjoy hearing anything else that anyone else may have tried to continue making VS2005 productive for you.

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Photo taken from Sean Stayte’s photostream under Creative Commons.

Its Purpose?
Big Vision Business Problem helps team members form a common understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. It introduces them to a number of high level domain concepts and puts the work they will do into an overall context. The Big Vision Business Problem must be driven by a real Business Need.

How Did We Execute It?
The entire team sat down at the start of the project, and using a whiteboard, we started drawing people (represented as stick figures), systems (as boxes) and talked through a number of workflows. We incorporated both technical and non technical systems as we talked about the needs of the users, how the system satisfies or doesn’t satisfy those needs and how they interact. We kept mainly to the main “happy flow” or the “common walkflow” through the system because it is such a big system.

Techniques Found Useful For Running It

• Personas – We leverage personas a great deal during requirements gathering, and found this same technique helps new people grasp with the system for many of the same reasons. Giving a name to a person playing a role in the overall business problem is much easier to understand than simply labelling them with that role.
• Physical Diagrams – Talking over a set of boxes at a high level and seeing the users interact with each box helps give context to what is really going on.
• Whiteboard – Nice big diagrams are great, but simple lo-fi diagrams that you can edit in response to people’s questions and around discussions is much easier

Why Is It Important?
Putting people’s work into context is important for me, and by talking over the business problem as a team, helps people understand what it is they are contributing to. Technical solutions may seem strange and may appear clearer if people understand the business constraints. It also allows people to offer alternative solutions that might be more practical and less costly. I can imagine that if you are having difficulty expressing the business problem, perhaps there is no problem, or it needs to be simplified or clarified as people focus their energies on work that may not contribute to solving the same overall problem.

Next Time I Might Try:

• Taking and Showing Photos – Could be quite useful for showing people using the system
• Drawing a Timeline – Doing a simple walkthrough over a well spaced out timeline to discuss stages of an older system, and what the business would like to achieve in the future.

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In the last month and a bit, I’ve been heads down starting with a new team on another release of an old project I worked on last year. Onboarding new members to a team or to a project is important to me – namely because I’ve been in positions where if it’s not done right makes people a less effective team member. Tight schedules and the overall lack of domain knowledge in new team members meant that successful or unsuccessful onboarding a huge influence on overall project success.

Perhaps it’s my emphasis on coaching, learning and sharing that means that my interest naturally gravitates towards onboarding activities. Just like well-run company inductions help new employees in their overall position, I feel project onboarding is important for setting the scene, establishing the role and efforts of new members. The last thing I wanted was for a bunch of really enthusiastic people to be pulling in separate directions. After talking with some people at the pub, I realised that the techniques I applied aren’t naturally that apparent to people, so I thought I’d write up about them, how we used them, how unsuccessful or unsuccessful they were and then what I’d change about them. In a way, these patterns are a combination of learning/teaching patterns that might be useful to someone (if so, I’d really like to know and please leave a comment!)

I’ll continue to categorise/tag each of these as “Onboarding Strategy” so it’s easy to find. Read on for the first one here.

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I get a certain amount of satisfaction when I find the right way of modelling something in code. I’ve been working with a Zebra printer lately, and is one of those really annoying devices you must send “special” instructions to. I ended up building up some generic commands for representing the language, and then built a small Domain Specific Language (DSL) for using it in our application.

Here’s an example of our code (modified for public consumption of course):

    public class StandardLabel
    {
        private string instructions;

        public string ToZebraInstruction()
        {
            return instructions;
        }
        
        public StandardLabel(string barcode, string name, string passion)
        {

            instructions = new LabelBuilder()
                .IconAt(485, 10)
                .BarCode(barcode).At(10, 10)
                .Label(“Name:”).At(10, 150).WithValue(name).At(150, 150)
                .Label(“Position:”).At(10, 250).WithValue(position).At(150, 250)
                .Label(“Passion:”).At(10, 350).WithValue(passion).At(150, 350)
                .ToZebraInstruction();
        }

    }    

The code above is useful for representing the layout for a label similar to the following (also modified for public consumption):

I think the best bit about this block of code, is that it didn’t take any longer to abstract, and I’ve been able to get our Business Analyst to actually change the layout with only a minimal amount of hand holding. In fact they ended up modifying the label’s entire layout to suit the customer without needing to involve a developer. I like to think it’s a great outcome.

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