A 2 week snapshot of my MS life

Apologies for dropping out of the blogging world. Life got a little busy in C# land with us hitting ZBB and looking to wrap up Beta1 and looking to ship the Community drop. Oh and we did an Appweek.

I love Appweeks. For three days we get a conference room far away from out building, and spend all day getting our apps running. One of the canonical problems we have is whether to:a) Input every bug we find as we find them, and pretty much not write our app or b) Collect the bugs till a later date, and then input them all at once. This has the advantage that you get your app done faster. I picked the second one this time, just because I wanted to get my app done.

I chose to fix a simple problem I run into. I dislike explorers functionality that when I want to see file & dir sizes I only get file sizes in explorer. So I wrote an app to walk the directories/files on my machine and, enumerate them in a tree and display their sizes. I had an alternate view somewhat coded up when our time ran out, to show the files and directories as boxes, visually. I also needed to finish the delete functionality (so you can delete those massive files and directories you dont need anymore).

I also liked the opportunity to tour around campus too. We holed up in a building for 2 days which was almost empty! - the team there had recently moved to its new building and the new team hadnt showed up. It was a nice change of scenery to eat in new cafeterias and calculate what it would cost to move our team into that building.

Apart from that, we recently hit ZBB so we had some major planning to take care of. We're now in “get the Beta to release mode“. We have a daily shiproom meeting where all the teams meet and discuss how many bugs they fixed today. We call this tell mode - where you tell all the teams what bugs you fixed and where your bar is. Soon ask mode is going to show up - where you ask for permission to fix your bugs. The idea is to slow down the number of fixes, which lessens the chance of regression. Every day the bar for bugs we fix goes up too.

Along with that we have another community drop on its way, and we've been going through the normal ship processes for those too. As soon as that is released, I'll post some gotchas you might find in it (we've documented most in the readme).

Till the next post, which should be soon.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 13, 2004
  Thanks for the update. Can't wait for the beta :)
• Anonymous
  May 18, 2004
  Hi!
  
  A while back, I wrote a similar application. However, I made it a shell extension. I have a brief writup on my blog. I would love to take a look at your implementation, if you wanted to make it available.
  
  See http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/000045.html for mine.