Jim @ imason

Are you with us or Against us?

2008-11-18T04:40:00Z

At imason, we generally enjoy conversations about a wide variety of topics, whether it be at the water cooler, on an e-mail alias, over lunch, or conversations at our desks. Our Co-CEO, Scott Howlett even hosted some lunch election roundtables where we discussed the issues of the Canadian election, dissected each party's stance on the issues, and heard each other's opinion on whether their platforms would be effective. They were very stimulating conversations.

As readers of my Urban Country blog know, I'm very passionate about Politics and the Environment, so it was a treat for me to have in depth discussions about these things at work where we generally don't engage in these sort of topics.

One topic that has come up a few times over the last few weeks is the conversation about divisive politics. In the United States political system, there is a lot of "us vs. them" or "you're with us or you're against us" or "Republicans vs. Democrats" or "Red States vs. Blue States" or "Capitalist vs. Communist", and the list goes on.

A more recent conversation led to the question of "Agile" vs. "Not Agile" when it comes to project methodologies. At imason, we have our own project methodology, and we try to employ components of other methodologies where we think it will help to improve our process. The way we see it, Agile isn't binary. A methodology can become more agile or less agile simply by tweaking the approach.

I had a great opportunity this spring/summer to work with some very talented developers from ThoughtWorks out in Calgary. They were on the more "Extreme" side of Agile software methodologies (Literally, they use the Extreme Programming (XP) approach developed by Kent Beck). Like any software development methodology, Extreme programming has its advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this article isn't to delve into such an analysis, but to point out some of the neat aspects of their methodologies that I've taken with me back to Toronto.

First of all, I'm a huge advocate of automated builds and continuous integration. I've been pushing this on all of the projects I've worked on and NAnt has helped us achieve great things in the world of automated deployment. Secondly I am a big fan of the disciplined approach to project management (Mostly from the Scrum methodology), including set daily standup meetings, timeboxing, story cards and story boards.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Agile approach that I've taken away is incorporating "fun" into your project discipline. Some examples include bringing in a box of doughnuts if you break the build, doing pushups if you're late for a meeting, or hanging a rubber chicken around your neck.

At imason, we work hard to dramatically impact our customers and ourselves, and if you can have fun while you're working hard, that's the most important way to achieve success. To me, success isn't measured by what kind of car you drive or how big your house is; it's about spending your day with people you enjoy being around, and doing work that gives you satisfaction. It's about waking up in the morning and not dreading going into work.

Silverlight 2 Upgrade Experience

2008-10-14T20:14:00Z

As many of you probably already know, Silverlight 2 was released in the wee hours of the morning (3AM EST or 12AM Microsoft-time). We've noticed some inconsistencies with the upgrade process from Silverlight 2 Beta 2 to the Silverlight Release, so I figured I would share our findings with you here.

It looks like there was an issue with the Silverlight Auto-Updater in Silverlight Beta 2, so a Windows Update was pushed this morning to rectify the auto-updater. The windows update pertains to Microsoft Support article KB955011.

As a result, users who didn't install the Windows Update yet were prompted with what I call a "not-so-intuitive" upgrade process for Silverlight 2. They basically have the same experience as users who don't have Silverlight at all:

Those who did install the Windows Update will see what I call the "More-intuitive" image:

So to accommodate for those users who didn't install the update, we've created our own custom image that explains why Silverlight has to be updated:

So now everything should be as smooth as we can expect it to be.

Canada’s Top 100 Places to Work

2008-10-06T16:29:00Z

MacLeans recently ran an article about the Top 100 places to work in Canada. After reviewing the perks that a lot of the top companies were providing to their employees, it really surprised me that imason isn't on that list. At first I thought maybe it was because we are too small (We have approximately 36 full time employees), but then I noticed there were several companies with less than 30 employees that made the list. We must not have applied to make the list; otherwise I’m sure we would have been listed.

Here are some of the perks that we have at imason (that we sometimes take for granted):

· Paid birthdays off (if it falls on a weekday)

· Annual company trip to Canadian destination (Usually a 3-4 day trip)

· Paid week between Christmas and New Years off

· Free Home Internet and subsidized Cell Phone

· Pool table, XBox and beer fridge at office

· Profit Sharing program

· Vacation starts at 3 weeks (In addition to Christmas break / birthday / company trip)

· Monthly Gym membership / sports activity coverage

· Fundraiser matching for charity work

· Subsidized training / education for career growth

· Comprehensive benefits plan for employees / spouses and family

These are some of the things that I think could put us on the list. But for the time being, we'll enjoy our beer fridge and pool table while the employees at Procter & Gamble can keep their 3 paid personal days off and their health benefits transfer plan.

Automated Publishing of InfoPath Forms (Part 2 of 2)

2008-08-19T20:31:00Z

We’ve now surpassed 50 InfoPath forms on the InfoPath 2007 / SharePoint 2007 project I’m currently engaged on. If you’ve done InfoPath/SharePoint development before, you’ll know that it can be really painful to publish forms and then deploy them to SharePoint.

In Part 1 of this 2 blog series, I showed you how to automate the deployment of InfoPath forms to SharePoint using NAnt. This time around I’ll show you how to automate the publishing of an InfoPath form.

If you’ve published an InfoPath form to an Administrator-approved form template before, you’ll be all too familiar with the process of clicking next a whole bunch of times in order to publish the form. Why should you have to go through all these manual steps every time you make a change to a form?

To automate this, I first found some VB code on this blog article to publish a form. I then converted it to C#, and built it as a custom NAnt task. So now I can publish a form by simply calling a custom NAnt task like this:

In order to use this approach, you’ll need to either build your InfoPath form using the Visual Studio template, or you’ll need to extract the form source files from the XSN. To extract the source files from the XSN, choose “File” -> “Save As Source Files”. Then you can work with your form template by right clicking on “manifest.xsf” and choosing “Design”.

Here is the code to build the custom NAnt task:

using System;

using System.Diagnostics;

using System.IO;

using System.Xml;

using NAnt.Core;

using NAnt.Core.Attributes;

namespace My.Build.Tasks

{

[TaskName("publishform")]

public class PublishFormTask : Task

{

[TaskAttribute("outputfolder", Required = true)]

public string OutputFolder { get; set; }

[TaskAttribute("formname", Required = true)]

public string FormName { get; set; }

[TaskAttribute("cabsdkpath", Required = true)]

public string CabSdkPath { get; set; }

[TaskAttribute("xsffilename", Required = true)]

public string XsfFileName { get; set; }

[TaskAttribute("formsourcepath", Required = true)]

public string FormSourcePath { get; set; }

protected override void ExecuteTask()

{

string makeCabPath = CabSdkPath + "\\MAKECAB.EXE";

BuildCabFile(makeCabPath);

}

private void BuildCabFile(string makeCabExe)

{

try

{

if (!File.Exists(makeCabExe))

{

throw new Exception(string.Format("CABSDK not found. Please check your CABSDK property value. Couldn't find makecab.exe @ '{0}'", makeCabExe));

}

var tempName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Path.GetTempFileName());

//var tempName = Path.GetTempFileName();

var tempFolder = Path.GetTempPath();

var tempPath = PathCombine(tempFolder, tempName);

var ddfString = string.Empty;

ddfString += ".Set DiskDirectoryTemplate='" + tempFolder + "'" + Environment.NewLine;

ddfString += ".Set CabinetNameTemplate='" + tempName + "'" + Environment.NewLine;

var xsfDom = new XmlDocument();

xsfDom.Load(PathCombine(FormSourcePath, XsfFileName));

var nm = InitNamespaceManager(xsfDom);

ddfString += QuoteString(PathCombine(FormSourcePath, XsfFileName)) + Environment.NewLine;

var fileNodes = xsfDom.SelectNodes("/xsf:xDocumentClass/xsf:package/xsf:files/xsf:file/@name", nm);

for (int i = 0; i <= fileNodes.Count - 1; i++)

{

ddfString += QuoteString(PathCombine(FormSourcePath, fileNodes[i].InnerText)) + Environment.NewLine;

}

var ddfPath = PathCombine(tempFolder, "makecab.ddf");

SaveToFile(ddfString, ddfPath);

ShellExecute(QuoteString(makeCabExe), "/V1 /F " + QuoteString(ddfPath));

File.Delete(ddfPath);

if (File.Exists(PathCombine(OutputFolder, FormName)))

{

File.Delete(PathCombine(OutputFolder, FormName));

}

File.Move(tempPath, PathCombine(OutputFolder, FormName));

string[] oScratchFiles = new string[] { "setup.inf", "setup.rpt" };

foreach (string strScratchFile in oScratchFiles)

{

if (File.Exists(strScratchFile))

{

File.Delete(strScratchFile);

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

throw new Exception("Could not create XSN file from files.", ex);

}

private static void SaveToFile(string data, string filePath)

{

var fs = File.Create(filePath);

fs.Close();

var TextStream = new StreamWriter(filePath);

TextStream.Write(data);

TextStream.Flush();

TextStream.Close();

}

private static void ShellExecute(string command, string args)

{

var info = new ProcessStartInfo(command, args);

info.UseShellExecute = false;

var process = Process.Start(info);

process.WaitForExit(60000);

}

private static string QuoteString(string s)

{

return "\"" + s + "\"";

}

private static string PathCombine(string folder, string fileName)

{

return Path.Combine(folder, fileName);

}

public static XmlNamespaceManager InitNamespaceManager(XmlDocument xmlDOMDoc)

{

XmlNamespaceManager xnmMan;

xnmMan = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDOMDoc.NameTable);

foreach (XmlAttribute nsAttr in xmlDOMDoc.DocumentElement.Attributes)

{

if (nsAttr.Prefix == "xmlns")

xnmMan.AddNamespace(nsAttr.LocalName, nsAttr.Value);

}

return xnmMan;

}

public void RunTask()

{

ExecuteTask();

}

Silverlight in Desktop Applications

2008-08-13T14:49:00Z

Earlier this year I headed up a development team to build 2 Silverlight applications for The Weather Network. The first application to be released a few weeks ago is “WeatherEye Golf” (press release) which provides weather information for over 17,000 golf courses in Canada and the U.S. The second app that was just released last week is called “TrafficEye” (press release) which provides up-to-the-minute traffic information for the Greater Toronto Area (With plans to expand out to other areas). It includes traffic flow, highway conditions, traffic incidents, and traffic cameras. You can save up to 10 of your favourite highway cameras (If you download it now, you will be entered to win 1 of 2 Xbox 360 Game Consoles!!).

These applications were quite unique because they needed to be downloadable and run on the desktop. Silverlight has several benefits over the other options we had explored. First of all, Silverlight runs as a web application, so it’s very easy to update in the future; you don’t need to push out updates to the desktop, and the user doesn’t need to re-install anything. One of the issues with the flagship WeatherEye product (Which is purely a desktop application) is that they need to push out updates to users which can be very time consuming since there are approximately 2 million active users of the WeatherEye product. With Silverlight, the IT Staff simply needs to update the Web Application and the next time the user runs the app, they will have the latest version.

Another benefit of Silverlight is the fact that you can easily port the application over to any web site, by simply adding an <object> tag to the HTML. Whether it’s a PHP page, ASPX, JSP, HTML, you can display the Silverlight application anywhere.

The third benefit of Silverlight is the platform independence. We have a Mac version of the TrafficEye application that we are planning to release in the near future. It’s pretty neat to see a Microsoft solution running on a Mac desktop.

To display the Silverlight application on the desktop we built a Visual Basic 6 application that displays a browser frame, (while in Mac we are using a Cocoa application developed using the XCode tools). The desktop shim is very basic and allows us to consolidate the application functionality in Silverlight. Silverlight uses Isolated Storage to persist user settings. We chose VB6 so that it will run on various desktop configurations without requiring the .NET framework, and also to keep the installation as small as possible.

Overall I’m happy with the result of the applications. There are a couple kinks on certain desktop configurations, but overall the response from the public has been positive so far.