Seems that I have not been reading my own blog on the site, and apparently the CSS was more than a little jacked up. If your read this @ the site, you may notice that it's now a fluid layout, and hopefully the font sizing makes a little more sense.

Anyhow - I'm also planning on updating my actual website (It's on the long list of "stuff" to do while out of the office and not a) hanging with my family, b) cooking or c) riding).  I've gotten quite a bit of feedback on the fundamentals section, and I've got some ideas on other topics that could be covered there. We'll see if I can get to that over the next few months.

Yesterday we sent out a press release via Chris Spagnuolo's GeoScrum blog. Thus, I think it's now ok to say that my entire team and I are now with Data Transfer Solutions.

The team is super excited about the new opportunities this change brings (the blazing workstations, "green" servers and build out, IKEA workstations, great chairs, and a strong interest in adopting agile methods doesn't hurt either!).

On the technology front, we are still sticking with .NET and ESRI for the most part. We expect to be doing much more web work than in the past, and with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 this will be very cool. I expect we'll be working with ArcGIS Server / tile caches on the back end, as well as Virtual Earth and Open Layers for the client UI. Mix in some unit testing, and it should be lots of fun.

We're also going to be adding some new capabilities - specifically Agile Consulting and Coaching. This is still in the early stages so I'll be posting more about it as things develop, but I'm very excited about some things we have planned, and the opportunity to share our experiences, methodologies and practices with others.

I'll wrap this up by saying that I'm also very excited to work with the existing DTS development team. Although I've only met a few of them, and only very briefly, but their depth and breadth of skills are pretty amazing -- I heard that someone wrote some ArcGIS Desktop tools using Boo (scratching your head - here's a hint: Boo is a Python-like scripting language for the ECMA CLR implementations such as .NET and Mono.)  I think they will be keeping us on our toes!

I'll be posting more about starting up an office, and getting things rolling over the next few weeks. Some tasks on our current backlog - order & setup some servers, get a firewall (advice welcomed!), move out of Chris's living room into our "temp" space, finalize the build out plans for our "real" space... fun!

Windows Live Writer is a pretty good off-line blog editor in most ways, but one thing that just does not make sense to me is the setting of the publish date.

I can understand that you may want to publish something at a future date, and that's great - but it seems like there is something amiss in it's defaults.

When you start a post, the publish date is not set...

If I use the pull down to expose the calendar to set the date...

it does not seem to re-set the TIME - note 7:15pm is still set. Ok - so what - the time is off by a few hours. The issue comes in RSS and aggregation, where the time stamps will control the order in which posts appear. So, my post on Visual Studio Memory Use (posted about 10 minutes before this one) may actually appear to be pinned to the top of aggregators like PlanetGeospatial and ArcExperts until the post date & time pass.

Anyhow - if you are using WLW, this is something you may want to be aware of.

Windows Live Writer is a pretty good off-line blog editor in most ways, but one thing that just does not make sense to me is the setting of the publish date.

I can understand that you may want to publish something at a future date, and that's great - but it seems like there is something amiss in it's defaults.

When you start a post, the publish date is not set...

If I use the pull down to expose the calendar to set the date...

it does not seem to re-set the TIME - note 7:15pm is still set. Ok - so what - the time is off by a few hours. The issue comes in RSS and aggregation, where the time stamps will control the order in which posts appear. So, my post on Visual Studio Memory Use (posted about 10 minutes before this one) may actually appear to be pinned to the top of aggregators like PlanetGeospatial and ArcExperts until the post date & time pass.

Anyhow - if you are using WLW, this is something you may want to be aware of.

One way to get a conversation started is to bring up something the entire group has in common - in this case the "G" in GIS... and so the un-conversation continues.

[This started as a comment on Aaron's GISDevCafe, but got longish, and so it's here.]

I agree that there is something of a lack of cohesion and conversation between the various users/bloggers/analysts/forum-ers/managers/conference-ers etc involved in "GIS".  And I think the reason is quite simple - I believe that the GIS "world" is fracturing. Or, looking at it differently - people have been specializing. 

For a long time GIS users were all-around technologists. Pretty much everyone worked directly with data. We all handled weird projections and conversion of strange data formats. Serious thought was put into how to run an analysis because the processing would take so long that you could not simply run it again. Automation was limited but we did what we could and many poor souls took on sed, awk and grep with reckless abandon. Although we may have been using GIS for different purposes, we could all talk about the largely shared experience of "doing" GIS. 

Over the last 5 years, this specialization has been accelerating. I think this is especially prevalent in the developer community, where we have, by necessity, jumped into the software development/engineering pool. Heck we now have our own ESRI conference. The spatial analysis people have headed towards Model Builder / Python land and lived with days of processing time, or gotten all serious and hit it with C++ and GDAL/OGR to get some performance. Data Managers have become DBAs. The meta data crew are now working with Xml and Xslt .  And the web crew have ripped into Xml, REST, Javascript and Ajax. Hell - Google Maps pretty much defined "Web 2.0". Throw in open source & mashups and you've got quite a ruckus just in "online maps".

As for me, I spend much more time reading .NET & software development blogs than PlanetGeospatial or anything from ESRI. Sure the ESRI blogs are good, but they are still very much about the mechanics. I've specialized to the point that I know we can solve the mechanics (sometimes with hacks) but I want to know more about the best way to design the software - for testability, re-use and maintainability. And these topics are never discussed in the GIS "space". Thus, I spend my time and consequently my "conversations" at locations where these topics are discussed. And this same thing is going on all over the place. Specialization is rampant.

Add to that the fact that there are few really "new" core GIS concepts, and the "GIS Community" as a whole has little to talk about - other than ESRI licensing or other "shared experience" items - Google's new re-routing feature etc. We are now a whole set of smaller communities, specialized in our own areas, and united by the "where" of the data we work with. And Aaron put it quite nicely...

I see a microcosm of isolated islands loosely held together by the ocean of Geography

And essentially that's where we are - the "Archipelago of GIS".

Some may see this as "bad", but I don't think so. It's just a function of a maturing Information Technology sector. Back when Databases were the "new" thing I'm sure there were loads of discussions about all kinds of stuff - like normalization and set theory. Do you think DBA's are all yearning for those old days? Nah - I'm thinking they kinda like stuffing Xml documents into tables and being able to use SQL and XPath to query them and still getting response times only dreamed of back in the day.

GIS is merging into mainstream IT, and I for one welcome our new better-paying overlords.

Just a quick note that I've added 5 feeds to the ArcExperts.net aggregator. They are:

• Chris Spagnuolo's GeoScrum - I work with Chris and his blog is really his insights into project management and lessons learned by our team as we adopt Scrum.
• ADC Develpers Blog - looks to be a great technical blog written by and for developers.
• Raba Shani's Human-Debugger blog. Kudos for also running dasBlog!
• Flat out GIS blog with Shane
• Jeff Germain's blog on ArcGIS development in .NET

Just a reminder - if you write a GIS Development blog and want to see it in the ArcExperts aggregator, just use the contact me link at the top (and I promise to add feeds faster in the future!)

As I sit here looking at my little $10/month hosting account, I'm seeing that ArcDeveloper.net is taking up a lot of space, and getting relatively little traffic. In addition, I believe that the vast majority of the "1279" the registered users are actually spam accounts which never activated because their email addresses were bogus. And you can bet I'm enthusiastic to dig in there and clear them all out. 

On the bright side, Google Analytics shows a consistent 100 or so visits a day, with 70% of the traffic coming from Search Engines - at least it shows that people are searching for what the few participants are discussing.

And I know from talking to some of you that it has been a good resource from time to time. But, as ESRI is now fully supporting .NET 2.0 (a primary reason for starting this up), and their forums are threatening to add RSS feeds any day now, perhaps this site's time has come and gone.

The question for me (and I guess for you) is - should I keep it going? I've got a lot of other stuff on the go, and so promoting/maintaining the site is just not happening. The wider ESRI Developer crowd has not jumped in either - I'm guessing it has too much overlap with the main support forums.

If people think it's still useful, please let me know in the comments, or via the Contact link at the top of this page. Is there anything else you'd like to see on the site? Different forums? Should it be running on different software (Community Server does many things "ok", but nothing really well in my opinion - and it's a pain to administer).

What would drag me in is one or two simple forums:

1) Agile Development and ArcGIS - which would cover things like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Automated builds, WiX, Sandcastle, and all the other good "goo" that goes around a successful development team.

2) Quick Hits - killer questions and  simple solutions. Kinda like a light-weight community blog where you can post questions that just are not going to get any play at the ESRI forums, and where people without blogs can post how-to's.

Another option would be to kill Community Server all together and slap up a semi-secured wiki (i.e. read-only for public, editable for email validated users). Much more free-form, but that also has it's uses.

Anyhow - let me know what you think the future of ArcDeveloper.net should be. If someone else wants to take over the site (and move it to their hosting account) I'd be up for that too.

Back at the 2007 ESRI Developer Summit, I did a presentation on "Being Agile". At that time, I mentioned that we simply followed general agile principles, but did not particularly follow any doctrine. For a variety of reasons we have had to become more formal in our quest for agility, and have adopted Scrum.

For those not familliar with Scrum, it's a very light-weight project managment methodology that's based on agile principles. Work items are managed in a set of backlogs and are done in a series of 2 or 4 week sprints at the end of which they produce a "potentially shippable product increment. Here's a good diagram that shows it all. Every day the team meets for 10-15 minutes to repost status - this is the "scrum".

What's really nice is that there are alot of success stories that one can reference with "selling" Scrum within an organization and to clients. Not to mention a slew of great books. Including what I'd recommend as a really good intro to the topic  Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) by Ken Schwaber.

Thus far, I have to say that it's the best way to develop software that I've ever seen. It's easy - nothing in it seems to be "extra" - to put it another way - no TPS reports. Things proceed smoothly, the team is all bought in, and we are cranking out the code. Last week my co-worker Chris Spagnuolo and I attended a "Certified Scrum Master" training course in Denver. Led by Mike Cohn (blog), this was a great two day class that covered everything you need to know to run a scrum team - aka being a "scrum master".

We liked this initial class so much that we are heading out to Orlando in September for Mike's course on Agile Estimating (here's Mike's book on the same topic and YouTube videos - part 1 and part 2 - of a presentation he gave @ Google in March 2007). We are really excited about this because it will be driven by the detailed historical data from our team's sprints and it should be more much more accurate than other "gut-based" estimating systems.

If this sort of thing strikes your fancy, Chris Spagnuolo (our "scrum master") has started a GeoScrum blog where he will be covering the on-going journey of managing a cutting edge geospatial development group with Scrum. We are constantly adapting the process and our tools and Chris will share tips on what works and what doesn't, as well as general project managment zen.

At it's current 0.3 release, JRN's blog roll configuration is a semi-colon delimited list, stored in the web.config file. Since this was kinda kludgy, I grabbed an OPML parser from Bruno 'Shine' Figueiredo's site http://www.brunofigueiredo.com . By folding these two together, I'm able to manage the blog list as an OPML file (download here), and still leverage the bulk of JRN (which actually is pretty lean).

I also took this opportunity to play with XmlDataProvider and found out just how easy it is to work with Xml files in ASP.NET. The blog list is literally 5 lines of code... I'm going to do post about this since it was just so crazy easy to use.

Getting on the Roll...

Steve of the Sacramento Citron-Pousty's tagged me for this little disclosure.

 
1) While programming, I really like to crank trance / techno music. Can't stand it any other time, but I've got a big pile of Paul Oakenfold etc. for hammering out code. Go figure...

2) Despite being a life long geek (I had a Commodore PET way back in the day), I somehow also got into skateboarding. Apparently I was pretty good, as I was sponsored by a local skateshop (or maybe there were not many skaters). Being as I lived in Ottawa, Canada, and skateboarding was not socially acceptable at that time, there were very few skate ramps. The one time I did get on a big ramp (16 footer), I slammed and busted my nose.

3) I am a chill/ambient music junkie (maybe this transcends from the techno thing?). Ambient Nights is a great free collection if you've not checked this out before. Reminds me of chillin on a beach in Thailand, sippin Mai Tai's.

4) When I started at COGS (wow that's a podunk web site for a very good school!), my plan was to go work for ESRI in Redlands. HOwever, the plan changed when I met (now my wife) Jill, and thus we are in Fort Collins.

5) Despite egging on every American I know to get out and vote, I have not voted in a Canadian election in 10+ years. Maybe it's because I figure that if the most extreme lunatic gets elected there, they will have little net negative effect on the world. As we have seen, this is not the case in America. 

Apparently I get to pass this on. Who's up? How about Art Haddad, Brian Flood, and Glenn Letham.

I just gave Steve's post about how ESRI's fleeting movement towards community based, open communication seems to have been quashed by a segment of the organization who are wed to 90's communication paradigms - slick marketing, throw sheets, and a tall shiny enterprise facade with nary a human in sight.

It is an interesting post, and although I've never been on the "inside", the people I know at ESRI are all fantastic and very dedicated to building great software and systems. This is what makes ESRI more than the sum of it's software. Yet this is sorely lacking in their communication strategy. So, being on the outside, the thing that comes to my mind is that there must be some layer in ESRI which is just not "getting" the whole open discussion = better control of the message. Since Jack seems to have

As Steve notes, open communications can also head off heated threads...

There was not one official word from ESRI anywhere clarifying this new stance on licensing. There was a heated thread going on and we all know that the ESRI folks read blog threads. We never see them officially answer anything there but from my logs and discussions with others, I know they read those kind of threads. Even if they don’t respond on the thread there should be somewhere they can address this issue in a formal manner. There was enough heat there to deserve a little bit of light.

While it's a small step, David Maguire's blog is just too "happy+shiny" to be taken as much more than repackaged marketing. For more on what it takes to have a good "CEO" blog (or any blog for that matter), check Seth Godin's free e-book 'Who's There?' 

Anyhow - to the point of the post - in the comments on Steve's post, Sean Gilles noted that someone posted to the OpenLayers mailing list re: an ArcGIS Server connector. A little digging on at OpenLayers.org, and here's the posting...

I'm working toward creating a layer class for the ArcGIS Server 9.1
MapServer Object web service.  So far I've created the AGS layer class by
extending OpenLayers.Layer.Grid and it seemed that I also needed to create
an AGS tile class by extending OpenLayers.Tile.Image. [continues...]

-- Brian Hatchl on OpenLayers "Dev" Mailing List Nov 29,2006
 

A Call to Action!
If everyone who does not like the ADF licensing model simply contributed 8 hours to this effort, we could have a free, robust, open, alternative that would address the needs of many many organizations. I mean - if I want to edit versioned vector data in a browser, then sure, I'll pay for the ADF because that's the powerful part of it's power. But if I just want to server up a simple map, with simple functions, then OpenLayers would be just fine. Just look at how many mashups were created wit GoogleMaps - clearly pushpins and seamless panning can cover a lot of use cases!  

Anyhow - looks like it's time to signup for the OpenLayers "Dev" list and dust off my Javascript! 

Ok, we've seen them all over the place, clogging both blogs and  aggregators - the ever so nice "Temporary Post Used For Style Detection" post which Windows Live Writer uses to fetch style information.

While I'm not nearly as angst ridden about this as Jeff Atwood, it's annoying that you get one of these posts for every system you setup Windows Live Writer on. So, I had one a few months back from home, one a little later from my notebook, and one yesterday from my workstation. Fun.

In a bigger sense, I have to wonder about these posts - as Jeff pointed out,  a quick google search now shows 24,800 hits for "Temporary Post Used For Style Detection".

While it may not be a "design feature" of the software, it does make it possible to track the spread of Live Writer. Granted that in time people will delete the posts, but if they are left up long enough for Google to index them, then they will show up in the search.