Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

For those who requested it, here is the TechEd talk on Software Team Best practices in PowerPoint 2003 format. 12 meg download this one…

Over at Rod Drury's blog there is a massive debate on Microsoft's Open XML standard desires. Very interesting reading indeed.

Hi folks, apologies for the delays – I know a few of you have been waiting for this post – but here is the PowerPoint from the session I did at TechEd NZ 2007 on Best Practices for Software Development Teams.

Download it from this link – its 8 Megs. If you plan to use to beyond just your personal reading, all I ask is that you let me know (LUKAS AT SVOBODA DOT CO DOT NZ) and give me credit for the content source.

I've been told that this is related to the leaked SP1 beta of Vista floating over the internet, but you can now manually download and install two Vista patches that improve performance and compatibility. I'm sure these will filter through to Windows update eventually but what I heard was that they were specifically supposed to be part of SP1 instead. Interesting! Download the Performance Path here, and the Compatibility Patch here. I haven't installed them yet, but plan to today.

Almost forgot to blog it J. This morning at TechEd NZ, I'll be talking on best practices for team based software development. I'll be looking at principles and recipes for success, how Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can help the process and giving the benefit of my experience of using team system with a specific customer case study. If you are at TechEd NZ today come and listen to my talk @ 10:45, I think its NZRoom1 or NZRoom3 from memory.

I'm using Vista as my primary OS on my laptop, but tonight I decided to install Windows XP. Mainly because I have a few multimedia things that don't work under Vista but I still need to use them every now and then (For those curious, the main one is the BlueMic Snowball – A high quality USB mic I use for Podcasting). XP and Vista ship with too different bootloaders and only the Vista bootloader will pick up an existing XP installation. For design and forward compatibility issues, the XP bootloader will not recognize any existing Vista partitions. Once I had XP installed, I then had to do a few things to make both dual boot happily. I searched quite a bit on the net before I got all the answers, I had to review a few of commands as they were pre-RTM vista. I certainly didn't find anything that documented the process fully. So here it is – hopefully someone else will find this useful:

Part 1: Installing XP

• Before you install XP, be sure to use the Vista Disk Manager (Right click on Computer and select manage) to resize down the vista existing partition and create a new partition. You don't need anything like partition magic if you have Vista
• Install XP into a new partition directly after the vista partition you created
• Restart – you should boot back into XP and have no ability to boot into Vista

Part 2: Vista Bootloader re-setup (From Windows XP)

• Once into XP, make sure you have your Vista DVD in the DVD player and your user has admin rights
• Open a command prompt window (start, run, "cmd")
• Change to your CD Rom drive by typing the drive letter and colon, e.g. E:
• Change directory to \boot, e.g. "cd boot"
• Run the following command: Bootsect.exe –NT60 All
• Restart the machine – the machine should now boot into Vista and have no ability to select Windows XP from any bootloader

Part 3: Using BCDEdit to get XP booting again (From Windows Vista)

• Once into Vista, make sure your user has admin rights
• Open a command prompt window (start, run, "cmd")
• Change directory to \Windows\system32, e.g. "cd Windows\System32"
• Run the following commands to create an XP boot option:
  • Bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Windows XP"
  • Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=x:
  • Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
  • Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast
• Reboot
• You should now have a boot option menu for Windows XP, select it to make sure it works

Part 4: Copying over ntldr files to ensure a successful XP boot

• If you get a "status: 0xc000000f" error with "Windows failed to Load" when you try and load windows XP, do the following steps:
  • Place the follow files from your Windows XP setup CD: NtDetect.com and Ntldr into the root of your XP partition
  • These files are in the i386 directory on your Windows XP directory
• Reboot and you should now be able to select and boot into Windows XP okay

Regarding Part 4, I'm not sure whether everyone needs to do this – but I did notice that Windows XP did not place these folders into root directory of the XP probably because the XP setup wizard thought it was a single boot environment.

Disclaimer: Use at your own peril, this worked for me but I can't guarantee this works for you!

I posted on the weekend a new ARCast NZ podcast on Interaction Design which I recorded with Phil Cockfield. This is my favourite to date and looks at how the concept of interaction design works with the concepts of IT architecture. The overview of the session:

Join Lukas Svoboda and Phil Cockfield as they discuss the concept of Interaction Design (ID) and how it fits with the discipline of Software Architecture. The relationship between ID and Agile Software Development is also discussed as well as the notion that Interaction Design is the missing link in Architecture. Lastly Phil discusses how an Architect can get into using Interactive Design approaches to help develop architectures for software today.

Well Microsoft TechEd New Zealand is finally upon us again and it's kicked off well. This year the company my company Fronde is a major sponsor and I've had the pleasure of putting our stand together. I was at TechEd this morning but I've gone and found some peace and quiet to prepare for my session which is on Wednesday around team system best practices (I'll blog more later today…). If you are at TechEd, go checkout the stand, we have a professional masseuse to ease your conference tensions, prize giveaway of 1 Gig USB hard drives and iRiver music players. The stand also features video testimonials of our employees and customers.

Apparently the private beta of Vista SP1 was leaked recently. There is an interesting view of this Service Pack here at APCMAG.com. The article is particularly interesting around the issues of speed of Vista and the fact that the service pack drastically increases the performance of vista.

Right now, people who work with me can MSN me, Skype Me, Yahoo me, Email me, call me on my Cell, call me on my desk phone, text me, track me down on my blog or on LinkedIn, walk over and see me and god forbid send me snail me. Is it just me or are we too connected in this day and age? The thing I find hardest is to concentrate on one task for more than a few hours without being disturbed. These days if I need to concentrate I usually end up turning everything off - not ideal but necessary. Anyone else got any thoughts with managing being in contact versus distraction and focus? (It's Friday arvo, and it's noisy in the office and all my contact channels are going mad – and I'm trying to write two documents – I might as well give up! J)

A good article on Stuff showing the NZ government is largely ignoring SME businesses in general. I think this shows a very sad story for NZ and tends to be typical around the current mentality shared by many government departments – that the big NZ companies or the fastest growing ones are the only ones to invest time and effort in. I'd certainly like to see this change into the future.