Saturday, May 20, 2006

It's a Good Life



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Nothing unique happening today. It's a kid weekend, and if you live your life according to a parenting plan, you know what I mean. For the rest of you, it means the kids are staying at my house this weekend, and I'm loving it.

We live in a terrific neighborhood with a park across the street and lots of playmates as neighbors.  I guess I'm feeling grateful that I can provide this environment for these amazing little humans.  They're doing great, and I'm doing better than I ever have in every aspect of my life.

++Alan

 Thursday, May 18, 2006

Real Hosting for Cave Markings



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I finally gave in and purchased hosting.  I hosted this site myself up until yesterday.  I have been intending to secure hosting for months.  This week, I sent a link for one of my posts to a Microsoft employee, and he couldn't access the site.  That was the motivation I needed.

Yesterday, I migrated everything to BoundGrid Technologies and turned off my web server.  This morning DNS appears to be sorted out.  I didn't move the DNS hosting, but just updated the A records. 

BoundGrid was recommended as being dasBlog friendly, and they certainly are.  I used their web file management tool to move my directories to their server, renamed index.html, and et voila!  Cave Markings was live.  I'll post some pictures of my previous "hosting" configuration soon.

++Alan

 Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Requirements Authoring Starter Kit



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Last November, I attended the Visual Studio 2005 launch event in Atlanta.  At the event, I spent some quality time discussing issues I was having with Team Foundation Server with Bindia Hallauer, a Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System.  When I expressed my frustration with the limited requirements management in TFS, she counseled patience.  Bindia said that Microsoft would be releasing a starter kit very soon, that would allow me to manage requirements linked to workitems.

Yesterday, 167 days after my conversation with Ms. Hallauer, Microsoft announced the release of the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Starter Kit: Requirements Authoring Starter Kit.  This looks like an interesting solution.  I like the architecture of the solution, and  I'm sure Softagon did an excellent job developing this tool. 

My problems began with step 2 of the download instructions:

Double-click the RASK.msi program file on your hard disk to start the setup program.

RASKinstallThere is no rask.msi, but there is a VSTO2005RASK.exe file.  Double click it, accept the license and you get the following very confusing dialog: 

Don't even try to decipher it.  I've tried both options.  I can't figure out what the first option does, or if it does anything.  The second option at least creates some files for me to play with.  It also completely dispenses with the folder hierarchy of the original projects and solutions, so nothing compiles. 

I had hoped to demo this solution tomorrow at a requirements workflow meeting, but I have given up.  Didn't anybody at Microsoft even try to install this mess before posting it to the web?  After waiting 167 days for this junk, I'm more than a little disappointed.

There is a video showing how it is supposed to work here.

++Alan