Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide

So if any of you have a burning desire to read 121 pages of Analysis Services performance tuning goodness, step right over to the Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/e/85eea4fa-b3bb-4426-97d0-7f7151b2011c/SSAS2005PerfGuide.doc

With a name that long how can it be any less than 121 pages.

Anyway, it should be a good thing, especially for those long dark nights when you having trouble sleeping. The Tuning Process Performance (starting on page 61) should excellent for that.

Adventures in Agile Development

I've started a new project, with a new team, under a new development methodology. And for the most part I am happy with that. We have a small team of two developers and an architect/manager/used to be coder, and we are going as agile as possible.

Now Agile development means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It is so bad that saying that you are an agile shop can mean almost anything you want it to. So to alleviate some of the confusion, here is some of what we are doing.

1. Daily Scrum. This is a 10-15 minute meeting every morning to talk about what is going on with your code. Where are we at, what are we trying to do.
2. Test Driven development. This means having tests for as much as possible (NUnit in our case). Granted, you cannot test everything, but there are development patterns that allow you to test most of what you do. Chief among them is the MVP pattern (Model-View-Presenter). I'll talk more about this later.
3. Frequent check-ins. It goes like this. Write a test for your code. Write the code. Make sure the test works. Check in. This means you are checking in up to four times per day. It also means you are less likely to get lost in all the things you are trying to do. And it means you need a source control system (we are using Subversion), and an automated build process (we are using NANT and Cruise Control).
4. The customer is allowed to get the daily build. This way they can keep up to date with what you are doing.
5. Now throw in an alphabet soup of other best-practice-somewhere technologies like Rhino Mocks, Spring, and NHibernate . You see there is a lot to learn.
   

Luckily, Agile and Test driven development have reached a critical mass such that there are now tools to help you with this process. I've already mentioned NUnit, NAnt, Subversion, and Cruise Control. But there is also the excellent Microsoft Team Systems that has all of those tools bundled together.

Another tool that wasn't listed that we are also using is ReSharper. Very cool tool with a lot of enhancements to Visual Studio.NET -- and a little bit of pain as well. ReSharper has an extremely large collection of shortcuts, so many that it actually overwrites a number of Visual Studio.NET shortcuts. But, it does have a feature to deal with that. Any time you his a shortcut that both ReSharper and Visual Studio.NET want, a dialog pops up asking which short-cut to use. I guess that is the best compromise. Anyway, for the side of ReSharper, the refactorings, and unit test integrations make it worth the cost of entry (a little over $100).

Now, this is enough for right now. I hate overly long rambling blog posts, and I'm afraid this will have to turn into a series. So, next time I'll write up what MVP, Spring, NUnit, and Rhino Mocks have to do with each other.

Christmas of puke and poop

OK, now that we are seemingly out of this, I can finally look back, reflect, laugh, and try not to grows myself out. Good luck.

From the first week of December until last week my family has been sick. I've got a wife and three kids -- all sick. I would count 4 cases of the flue, 3 bouts of diarrhea, and what seems like a dozen colds.

My son had the worse of it, two cases of diarrhea and a flue. The first case lasted 4 weeks. 4 weeks!!! And we just got him potty trained -- that did not help things any either. Both my daughters had the flue, I got both. And my wife...well, as the mother of three children, stuck at home with them 24/7 and not leaving the house because they are contagious -- she go the flue twice as well. Once early on, then again after everyone else was healthy. It aint always good to be the momma.

Lets just say, last Christmas when my wife lost her voice and got an ear infection, that was a lot more fun. There is just something hilarious about having an extremely social person with no ability to talk.

But now we are over it. Everyone is healthy and considering the case of cabin fever we should have right now, reasonably happy and getting along.

Here is hoping for healthy spring.

5 things about me

Like a bad chain letter, the 5 things about... has reached me via David Starr.
"thank" for this.

OK, here it goes.

• In college I was in the Dance Guild (we did 2 performances per year. The ratio was something like 20 good-looking, spandex-wearing girls for every guy...and I met my wife there), and I studied classical guitar. But, unlike most of you Johnny come latelys, my degree is in computer science.
  
• I was raised in a barn. Ok, I grew up on a dairy in southern Idaho, far away from the bad influences of school friends and cable. Just don't blame me for leaving the door open. This is also where I developed my love of computers. My dad bought us a computer (AT&T 6300) to manage the dairy back in 1985. I was hooked as soon as I saw Word Perfect with spell check and Kings Quest.
  
• My first love growing up was newspaper comics. Peanuts, Heathcliff, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side are all on my bookshelf. Note: Calvin and Hobbes is the best.
  
• I was a ranked ranked fencer, lettered in three sports (football, wrestling, and track), and I have studied Judo and Judiko. So much for my bumbling computer geek image. The only sport I play anymore is golf.
  
• My other passions are wood working, BBQ, beer, and NFL football.

So, no good deed goes unpunished. I tag Jim McKeeth, Dave Herron (who doesn't blog enough), and....? I guess I'll just stop there.