Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

Last year on November 7th Jakob and I held an event at Aalborg University celebrating the launch of Visual Studio 2005. During this event Jakob and I held some short presentations on different topics that revolved around .NET 2.0 and VS 2005.
And now after a small 6 months I can share at least one of the presentations done at this event. I’ve had some different content elements lying around on the my hard drive, and last night I completed an assembly of it, so you can view it as a webcast.

The webcast includes a short introduction to the .NET Compact Framework, and what’s new in 2.0, but the bulk of it is a hands-on demo session where I build an application that displays my pictures from Flickr.
The video in the beginning of the presentation was shot by Tinus, who’s a buddy of mine from university, and the demo was recorded during an initial test run of the presentation. The audio from the last slide was recorded last night.
A couple of notes. The webcast is in danish, it was created with Microsoft Producer, and yes you need to use Internet Explorer to view it. So Firefox lovers: sorry about that! The webcast may take some time to load, if you get impatient click the “Loading files…” text in the upper left hand side. It may stutter a bit during the presentation if you do this, but the upside is you get my fabulous content quicker

So there you have it, a mish mash of content turned out to be a webcast. So without further ado, I give you the link:
FlickrViewer with .NET 2.0 Compact Framework by Kristian Kristensen

You can find the slides and demo code at Studentpartner.dk – the Danish Microsoft Student Partner site.

As I wrote in a previous post, I was yesterday in Copenhagen to hear a talk by Steve Ballmer at the IT University of Denmark. Steve Ballmer is a very energetic speaker, and very interesting to listen to. He started of with a 20 minute talk on different topics such as education, globalization, and the future of computers. This was followed by almost 30 minutes Q&A. Examples of question topics were competing with Google, and the pricing of Microsoft software.

Preceding yesterdays talk by Ballmer I attended a short meeting with the rest of the Microsoft Student Partners in Denmark, where 2 students and a teacher from a business school in Copenhagen talked about Software Factories.
I think that the important element of Software Factories, the one that you should take away, is that they are about maturity in the software development field. It encapsulates the professionalism that’s needed in order to develop software of high quality and low price.

Regardind globalization and education Steve Ballmer repeated what I’ve heard before. That the problem of outsourcing is not that jobs are moved from Western countries to Eastern countries because the labour is cheap, but because the labour is present there. He said that India (I think it was only India, but maybe China was included aswell) annually graduates 50% of all Computer Science graduates in the world, and that this number is increasing. And in the west this is quite the opposite, the number of Comp Scis graduating is dropping every year. Eventually the monetary compensation in Eastern countries will be that of Western countries, and so the issue becomes where to find the talent required to get the job done. As of now this talent doesn’t exist in Western countries. At least that’s is his hypothesis.
On a personal note I must say that the argument has truth in it. From friends and business contacts I know that recruiting new employees is almost impossible at the moment. There is a huge demand for IT people of all kinds, but there’s not enough to go around, at least not the people with the talent required by the industry. So what is the solution to all of this? Listening to the government in Denmark the answer seems to be that we need to educate more people. Push more and more people through a Computer Science education, and the problem will solve itself. However, I don’t think that’ll help much. What we need is not quantity, we’ve got that already (just call your local unemployment office), what we need is quality. And obtaining that is a matter entirely in its own. I think we need to be way more aggressive in the way we educate people in the IT industry. Students need to get the theoretical foundation for computer science or software engineering degrees, but they also need to get skills in producing software, and train in developing and delivering software of high quality. This means that through your education you need to develop experience with not just the actual code writing, but also testing, debugging, ensuring quality, getting from spec to deployment, and getting from a customer or idea to a spec in the first place.

Preceding yesterdays talk with Ballmer was a meeting where the danish Microsoft Student Partners met with 2 students and a teacher from a business school in Copenhagen, where we talked about Software Factories.
I believe that the key takeaway from the idea of Software Factory is the maturing and professionalizing of the sofware field. It deals with how we get high quality in our software while maintaining low prices. Software Factories deals with how we incorporate different ideas into a cohessive whole, and uses it to develop software. In that sense it follows in a long line of continuing and advancing the state of software development. Go read Steve McConnells great book Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers and of course the bible and only published book on Software Factories. Also if you can get your hands on a presentation done at last years TechEd by Scott Hanselman (Scott’s post on it), you should definitely check it out aswell. Unfortunately it isn’t online anymore, but you might be able to get it from somewhere.

So this turned out to be quite a long post, that’s what happens when you’re having fun!

I’m currently reading Scott Berkun’s excellent book on Project Management. In one of the chapters he mentions the following question:

What problem are you trying to solve?

The more I think about it the more I get the importance of asking this question. It’s so simple and obvious, that you tend to forget. But nevertheless so empowering. The beauty of it is that you can apply this principle/question to many things in life. It helps you clarify what it is you trying to do, and where you want to go. As I’m typing this I’m reminded of a monologue in the movie Wall Street starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, and directed by Oliver Stone. Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gecko, a hard core, rich 80’s yuppie, and at an annual meeting for company he delivers a speech on greed:

The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of it’s forms – greed for life, for money, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you.  

In that sence the monolgue and the question shares common attributes: it deals with simplicity and clarifying what’s important and what needs to be solved. 

Scott writes that he has a big poster with this question hanging in his office – I think I’ll follow his example.

Tomorrow at 07:00 I will meet with Jakob at Aalborg Banegård, and take the train to Copenhagen where I’ll be attending an event where Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft will speak. In Aarhus we’ll pick up Niels, Claus and Mark who are also Microsoft Student Partners. In Copenhagen the first hours will be spend at Microsoft Technology Lab at the IT University of Denmark, where the event will also be held. Int the Lab we’ll have a MSP PowWow, until Steve Ballmer enters the stage to speak to us and a whole lot of students from ITU and Copenhagen University and different kinds of entrepreneurs.

And then in the evening Jakob and I will hop on a train once again. Returning to Aalborg at approximately quarter to 1 Saturday morning.

Today I got an email with the following much awaited sentence:

Congratulations, you have been admitted to WVU.

So, this means that my next semester (Fall 2006) will be spent at West Virginia University in USA! This is just super great!
Students from WVU are called Mountaineers, so that’s what this posts title refers to.

Today I also received my official TOEFL score report. Last month I went to Aarhus to take the test demonstrating my abilities to use English as a foreign language. Apparently I’m okay good at it, because I scored 660 out of 677

Somehow I found Josh Kaufman’s site and via it the Personal MBA. This quote from the movie “Good Will Hunting” catches the essence of what the Personal MBA is:

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” – Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon), Good Will Hunting

It’s a collection of books that you should read, and coupled with actual doing in a real job, you should gain some of the competencies that you would normally get from studying an MBA at a university.
The list of books looks promising, and I’ve already reserved 6 of them from the university library. Which will probably mean that the stack of books on my bedside table will increase heavily towards the ceiling.

Anyway, the idea of having a public subject syllabus is very intersting, and something that I think you could benefit from in a great deal of contexts. Since I’m into software development, I would of course like to see a similar list for software engineering, development, architecture, etc. And some of these thoughts also sparked the page “Classical CS books” which you can find a link to on the side (it’s neither updated or complete, consider it a work in progress).
I know that Steve McConnell has created such a plan, and more importantly the ACM has a task force which has created a set of reports containing sample curricula for Computer Science and Software Engineering.
Maybe starting from this a more digestable list could be created, and maybe that could be published as a short manifesto like the Personal MBA.

I wrote about SuperFetch in a previous post. Recently Brandon LeBlanc from Longhornblogs.com wrote about the rest of the performance booster package that are coming in Vista.

It appears I mixed a couple of technologies, but nevermind, the concept is still mighty cool!

It appears that there is a plethora of new gadgets coming out over the coming months that look very appealing to me. Those that know me may say oddly enough, or maybe not

Anyway, as I wrote in my previous post the Origami PC’s are coming. I sooooo want one. And just 10 minutes ago I saw this new review of the upcoming HTC Star Trek aka Qtek 8500. I’ve seen the phone before, but the review doesn’t lessen my appetite for the gadget.
Interesting times indeed.

jkOnTheRun has made a video review of an Origami device - the TabletKiosk eo v7110 UMPC.

I definitely want one!

I found this blog post via Sam Gentile, on how to enable SuperFetch in Windows Vista.

SuperFetch is a new memory scheme that allows Vista to use external memory devices as extensions to the system memory. So you can plug in a USB memory Stick with a gigabyte, and automatically have Vista use this as extra memory, thereby boosting system performance.
I saw Jim Allchin demo it at PDC, and it was very impressive. Good to see these kinds of things coming.