Thursday, July 23, 2009

First Iteration in itinere

For the second time in the sprint - but the first one does not count because we merely cut funcionalities that were not needed anymore - our Burndown chart clearly express what everybody has felt in the last weeks, even if it was unsupported by facts (at least until yesterday): we will deliver.


Once more I'd like to stress the importance of such a tool: we always know what is going to happen, and we can take informed decisions.

As I said, the first big slope is a cut due to a modification of the contract; the second came after most architectural decisions had been tested and taken, just as expected. For this first iteration we choose the part of the system we knew best and that - not by chance - is the basis upon which we will build the whole system. Nevertheless, we mostly focused on architecture, even if we will deliver actual funcionality. The project follows a test driven approach and a domain driven design, and we just anticipated a little more than we needed at the time because we know we will need it within a couple of months (so the YAGNI thing does not apply here).

So the bar is green, our Hudson happily smiles and so do I; first demo next week, maybe more on this after the retrospective.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Feed for tags in Blogger

Should you need to provide feed to just to some particular posts with a specific tag in Blogger, all you have to do is to use the address http://${yourblog}.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/${tag} e.g http://andreamoz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/NetBeans.

There are many more possibilities, as you can find googling around, but if you just have to get your blog on Planet NetBeans that should be enough (at least I hope so).

NetBeans and libraries

I just upgraded my NetBeans to version 6.7, and being quite lazy I didn't want to recreate all previous libraries and references, but obviously I need them. Yes, I might have decided to keep all settings from the previous version(s), which I regularly backup, but my interface had something strange and the dimensions of some widgets were quite quirky and my knowledge of the program does not go that far.

Anyway, after restoring the project I'm working on, NetBeans informed me of some missing references, just as expected.

Happy as a clam, I took the previous build.properties file, restored the lines that referred to my libraries (libs, sources and all) and... NetBeans stabbed me in the back! Still, it couldn't see the libraries!

After some restartings of the program and of the system (hey when you're working with Windows you get used to it... isn't it sad? and it often it works... isn't it sadder?) NetBeans still ignored my cries. It turned its back on me, despite all my affection steadily grown in all these years.

I gave up and recreated the libraries manually, but immediatly thereafter I checked the latest modified files in the .netbeans directory and found out what was missing... what I was missing, so actually NetBeans didn't stab me in the back so we're still in love. Yes, if you're wondering it, I had to apologize, but it happily welcomed me back.

Anyway, romances aside, when you create a library NetBeans not only adds the references in your build.properties file, but it also create an xml file in the config/org-netbeans-api-project-libraries/Libraries directory.

Should you need it... now you know!

As a sidenote: apparently NetBeans doesn't always allow the removal of different plugins at the same time, and it took me several tries to disable the profiler (actually I had to remove it, as I didn't manage to just disable it). More on the new version will probably follow, up to now I just can say that my peer likes the new colors of the splash screen.

While you wait, go get it yourself!