The Schedule

I spent about three hours today doing a functional decomposition and schedule pass for a new project I have going on that is due on March 11, 2009.

I didn't have enough information left to properly estimate work on about 10% of the tasks, but I have good figures for the rest. I put in work estimates in for the other 90% in a column in Excel next to each work item and let it sum up at the bottom.

It worked out to just enough work to be done on March 11, 2009.

There is still 10% of the work unscheduled.

Eep.

That doesn't include testing time, stabilization, integration, dependencies on third parties, user testing and approval, documentation or training...just the development work necessary.

I have a feeling I'm going to be working a lot of overtime...a bit more considering that I'm also going to be moving next month.

Workaround: Ektron CMS400 7.5 Integrated Editing Breaks After Upgrade

Symptoms:

Your ASP.NET website is in a nested virtual folder underneath your Ektron CMS400 installation folder. For example, your Ektron 7.0 install folder is /CMS/ and your website is located at /CMS/Website/.

After upgrading to CMS400 7.5, integrated editing no longer works. You no longer get the green border or the white editing bubble.

Cause:

The session cookie for the CMS no longer matches the session cookie for the site.

Workaround:

Create a page on your site that contains three things. One, an IFRAME pointing to the login.aspx file in your Ektron CMS400 folder. Two, a button that calls in order in the code-behind the functions Session.Clear() and Session.Abandon() in that order. (I've tried them individually, but for some reason, it takes both of them for this to work in my testing environment.) Three, a link back to the home page of the site you want to edit.

Log into the CMS through your IFRAME.

After logging into the CMS, click the session kill button.

After clicking the session kill button, click the link back to the home page.

You'll have your editing environment back.

PDC2008 Day 0 & 1 Recap

PDC2008 Day 0 consisted mostly of reacclimitizing myself to the LA Convention Center and a six hour session on Silverlight from Jeff Prosise (pronounced like precise, but with a pro at the start instead). I learned a lot of things that really explained some of the goofy corner-case problems I ran into. I'll be doing some posts this weekend summarizing all of what I learned this week.

Day 1 was strange from beginning to end. During the Windows Azure keynote, I was seated next to a transvestite Dutch reporter who was wearing fishnet stockings. Stranger things have happened.

First session was supposed to be a deep dive into the IE8 layout engine, but it ended up being more of a design pattern overview. Fascinating, but generally useless talk.

Next was the Expression Blend Tips & Tricks course, of which two tips were excellent, one didn't work in the demo, and then time ran out. That said, there was one wonderful tip. If inside Blend you are getting broken XAML (Blend can't render this blah blah) and the exception you are getting isn't giving you any information, close the XAML form, open the project in Visual Studio from Blend, attach Visual Studio to Blend, and reopen the XAML in Blend. The exception that is thrown will be caught by Visual Studio and have significantly more information. If you are using things like HtmlPage in your Silverlight code-behind that don't exist within Blend, this will help out.

Next was the ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap and it was great hearing how about 80% of the existing pain points are going bye-bye, although it sounds like some of the cures will be worse than the disease (like the caching system redo).

From there I headed to the expo floor to try to get a lot of information from vendors I am going to have to be dealing with over the next six months. Ektron let me know that 7.5.4 is on track for the end of November and should fix the nested application issue. ComponentOne has their lighter ASP.NET components coming out around the same time.

Finally ended the day with the Framework Design Guidelines class. It was good hearing that most of the plans I had for our site code revamp matched up with the guidelines, but after hearing the talk, I'm going to be rewriting some parts because their explanations really explained why I shouldn't do things the way I was going to do them.

Well, better go. I'm sitting about eight rows back from the stage at keynote #2 of 4 and I'm afraid that the Dutch transvestite is stalking me now.

Rough PDC Schedule

This is a rough recap of my schedule for the next five days. If you are going to PDC or live near downtown LA, let me know. Contact me at romsteady -at- gmail.

Sunday

• Creating Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight

Monday

• Keynote
• Deep Dive: IE8 Renderer
• Expression Blend Tips & Tricks
• ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap
• ASP.NET MVC
• Framework Design Guidelines

Tuesday

• Keynotes 2 & 3
• Coding4Fun
• SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence and Data Visualization
• ASP.NET Deployment
• Silverlight Optimization

Wednesday

• Keynote 4
• Parallel Development for Managed Code Programmers
• XNA
• .NET Application Performance/Scalability
• ASP.NET for Server Core
• Architecture without Big Design Up Front

Thursday

• RESTful web services using WCF
• ASP.NET Caching or Silverlight Control Model...haven't decided yet
• Designing Apps To Scale

I'm leaving straight from the LACC on Thursday to head to the airport so I can get home. I'll be walking in my door sometime between 12:30a and 1a, and I have work on Friday as well.

This is going to be an exhausting week. That said, the above schedule is subject to change.

Lost E-Mail

Due to a server configuration issue, all E-mails sent to my @romsteady.net E-mail address since October 9 have been lost.

If you needed to get through to me, please re-send your mail.