I have setup Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the team carefully considering the culture of the company along with the required dynamics of the team. I have provided a maximum score of 10 to each KPI. Please note that the score is based on both perception and raw facts.

Here is the scoring guide:

• 1 to 4 is concerning
• 5 to 6 is ok
• 6 to 7 is good
• 7 to 8 is very good
• 8 to 9 is excellent
• 9 to 10 is outstanding

Personal goals

This is something that the team member would have done as a personal goal to add value to him/herself or to the team, e.g. document legacy systems on the wiki or improving the deployment process, etc.

Time to market

This is where the team member considers things like risk identification, prompt bug fixing, handle positive risks, review project progress, risk mitigation, etc. to ensure that the project that he/she is working on gets delivered before time or on time.

Operations and Support

The team member will need to also actively participate in operations and support of current systems.

Quality

The team member must ensure that the product he/she is delivering is of high quality and not ok quality. This can be done in a few ways – have code review done, also self review code, identify lack of requirements and/or design, design systems for scalability and performance, conduct design reviews, identify cost reductions, etc.

Consolidation

The team member will be consolidating older systems and write new systems which allow for scalability, performance and reusability.

Reuse of code

The team member will need to write code for reuse. If he/she is not reusing code then he/she must justify the reason for not reusing code.

Customer service and communication

The team member must always maintain continuous and consistent communication with their stakeholders. This applies when the project is on time or being delayed. The team member must also provide the best customer service to the clients that shows that they have gone beyond their way to help them out. An example of this can be that he/she has provided their customers with multiple solutions to choose from rather than only one solution, etc.

Learning and development

This is where the team member will be spending time to self-develop themselves in technology or processes and then distribute that knowledge to the team through training or documents on the wiki or any other means.

Schema

• Normalize first and then denormalize for performance.
• Define all primary keys and foreign key relationships.
• Define all unique constraints and check constraints.
• Choose the most appropriate data type.
• Use indexed views for denormalization.
• Partition tables vertically and horizontally.

Queries

• Know the performance and scalability characteristics of queries.
• Write correctly formed queries.
• Return only the rows and columns needed.
• Avoid expensive operators such as NOT LIKE.
• Avoid explicit or implicit functions in WHERE clauses.
• Use locking and isolation level hints to minimize locking.
• Use stored procedures or parameterized queries.
• Minimize cursor use.
• Avoid long actions in triggers.
• Use temporary tables and temporary variables appropriately.
• Limit query and index hint use.
• Fully qualify database objects.

Indexes

• Create indexes based on use.
• Keep clustered index keys as small as possible.
• Consider range data for clustered indexes.
• Create an index on all foreign keys.
• Create highly selective indexes.
• Create a covering index for often-used, high-impact queries.
• Use multiple narrow indexes rather than a few wide indexes.
• Create composite indexes with the most restrictive column first.
• Consider indexes on columns used in WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, and DISTINCT clauses.
• Remove unused indexes.
• Use the Index Tuning Wizard.

Transactions

• Avoid long-running transactions.
• Avoid transactions that require user input to commit.
• Access heavily used data at the end of the transaction.
• Try to access resources in the same order.
• Use isolation level hints to minimize locking.
• Ensure that explicit transactions commit or roll back.

Stored Procedures

• Use Set NOCOUNT ON in stored procedures.
• Do not use the sp_prefix for custom stored procedures.

Execution Plans

• Evaluate the query execution plan.
• Avoid table and index scans.
• Evaluate hash joins.
• Evaluate bookmarks.
• Evaluate sorts and filters.
• Compare actual versus estimated rows and executions.

Execution Plan Recompiles

• Use stored procedures or parameterized queries.
• Use sp_executesql for dynamic code.
• Avoid interleaving data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) in stored procedures, including the tempdb database DDL.
• Avoid cursors over temporary tables.

SQL XML

• Avoid OPENXML over large XML documents.
• Avoid large numbers of concurrent OPENXML statements over XML documents.

Tuning

• Use SQL Profiler to identify long-running queries.
• Take note of small queries called often.
• Use sp_lock and sp_who2 to evaluate locking and blocking.
• Evaluate waittype and waittime in master..sysprocesses.
• Use DBCC OPENTRAN to locate long-running transactions.

Testing

• Ensure that your transactions logs do not fill up.
• Budget your database growth.
• Use tools to populate data.
• Use existing production data.
• Use common user scenarios, with appropriate balances between reads and writes.
• Use testing tools to perform stress and load tests on the system.

Monitoring

• Keep statistics up to date.
• Use SQL Profiler to tune long-running queries.
• Use SQL Profiler to monitor table and index scans.
• Use Performance Monitor to monitor high resource usage.
• Set up an operations and development feedback loop.

Harvey Norman asked me to come back on a Sunday promising me that they will fix the issue on the same day and I will not have to come back again. Therefore keeping my hopes up I went into the store and they tell me that their technician does not work in the weekend and I will need to leave the desktop at the store for them to investigate during the week days.

Should I be asking them for compensation for the number of hours I have lost and the misleading guidance they have provided me with?

using System;
using System.Data;

public static class DataRowExtensions
{
    public static int ConvertToInt(this DataRow row, string columnName, int defaultValue)
    {
        int value = int.MinValue;

        try { value = Convert.ToInt32(row[columnName]); }
        catch { }

        if (value == int.MinValue)
            return defaultValue;

        return value;
    }
    public static string ConvertToString(this DataRow row, string columnName, string defaultValue)
    {
        string value = null;

        try { value = Convert.ToString(row[columnName]); }
        catch { }

        if (value == null)
            return defaultValue;

        return value;
    }

    public static DateTime ConvertToDateTime(this DataRow row, string columnName, DateTime defaultValue)
    {
        DateTime value = DateTime.MinValue;

        try { value = Convert.ToDateTime(row[columnName]); }
        catch { }

        if (value == DateTime.MinValue)
            return defaultValue;

        return value;
    }

    public static bool ConvertToBool(this DataRow row, string columnName, bool defaultValue)
    {
        var value = false;

        try { value = Convert.ToBoolean(row[columnName]); }
        catch { }

        return !value ? defaultValue : true;
    }
}

Step 1: Click on Tools -> Options

Visual Studio 2010 - How to show default solution file for a single project - click on tools and options

Step 2: Under Projects and Solutions click on General and then click on the check box Always show solution and click OK

Visual Studio 2010 - How to show default solution file for a single project - settings window configuration

Business

• A development manager will need to be flexible. He will need to understand the business domain fully and also should carry the vision of the future of the domain.
• A development manager must bridge the gap between the business and the development team.
• A development manager must also be aware of situation outside his team. If a QA Team is not setup then he must take the appropriate actions to setup a QA Team. If a Product Management group does not exist then he should take appropriate actions to setup a Product Management group which will take ownership of the strategic development of the products.
• A development manager must always adapt to changing or evolving business domain.
• A development manager must be a great communicator.
• A development manager has to be a fantastic juggler and be able to set priorities appropriately.
• A development manager must be a great project and risk manager.

Team

• Bridging the gap between the business and the development team will ensure that each and every engineer in the development team understand the business domain fully as well as the short term, medium term and long term plan of the company.
• A development manager must lead by action.
• A development manager must lead with hands on.
• A development manager is not only responsible for the delivery of business critical products he or she is also responsible for the growth and development of each team member in the development team.
• A development manager must provide the right tools to his team to enable the team to be efficient and productive.
• A development manager must identify wastage and also setup processes to identify wastage.
• A development manager must ensure that there is an autonomous knowledge transfer environment setup within his team.
• A development manager must always proactively identify ways to improve the efficiency of existing processes.
• A development manager must understand his team – both the strengths and weaknesses.
• A development manager must initiate knowledge wave in his team and also must ensure the continuity of the wave.
• A development manager needs to be able to quantify the performance of the team so that the team understands the expectations.

Innovation

• A development manager must instill the concept of innovation within his team and the business. In fact he should take the appropriate actions to ensure that an Innovation Group is setup.
• This involves both process and product innovations.
• A development manager must also be to initiate new product creation as means of side effects of existing product creation.

Solutions Architecture

• Sometimes a development manager takes the role of a Solutions Architect to guide the technical direction of the team and the company.
• As a solutions architect he or she must manage risks associated with the domain and provide solutions that will facilitate the growth of the company.
• A development manager cannot afford to be blinded by a fantastic solution but must focus on the underlying problem to derive the right solution.
• A development manager should be able to challenge business decisions and guide the business towards more cost effective solution through his negotiation skills along with extensive domain knowledge.

I might have missed something. If I did then please let me know and I will update this article.

I will also keep updating this article if something does pop up.

You can learn more about this from the following sites:

• http://github.com/openrasta/openwrap/
• http://wiki.github.com/openrasta/openwrap/

In the meantime I will experiment with this and will get back to you with blog articles on this.

This has not been explicitly specified anywhere. However I have posted a question on StackOverflow and the response to this is below:

NuPack cannot be installed on VS2008

It uses Visual Studio extensions, only VS2010 compatible ones are now available.

However David Fowler expects NuPack to be released with a command line for VS2008.

NuPack for VS2008 - David Fowler and Salman Jamal in conversation

The venue was fantastic – Eureka 89. The people were great. Everyone was buzzing around two words – social media. The main question ringing in everyone’s mind – How can they improve the exposure of their business through Social Media?

Laurel Papworth kicked off the evening with great presentations on online communities and social media. A representative from RIM also showed off a few tools found in the upcoming Black Berry models that will help promote social media.

Well here is how it all came together in my mind. Please note that the following content is generated from my mind, the tweets on the Twitter wall at the conference and the presentations from the delegates:

The Need

All the businesses want more exposure. They want to market their products and services to the consumers and also at the same time want to be able to measure the success of the process. They want to know what people are thinking about their brand. They want to be connected to the consumers. Most of all they want to achieve all these in a cost effective way which entails having the best return on investment.

The Tools

Twitter

Twitter is the first thing that comes on my mind. Why?

• It is simple to use.
• Less number of distractions.
• To the point.
• Exponential rate of exposure.

Fastest way to get in touch with your consumers.

Twitter

Throughout the evening most of the attendees at the conference were interacting with each other in the room via Twitter. At the end of night the Twitter wall showed the Trends that were generated from all the tweets. There were a total of 137 tweets generated by the attendees in the space of slightly more than 2 hours. #Cloud89 was one of the prominent trends. Cloud89 was the name of my table. I have given my table the most exposure in the room by making sure that it took a prominent realestate on the Twitter wall.

Tweets from the conference #VFHBSM

Ok. So how can you help your business gain exposure through Twitter? Take a look at how Microsoft and Google are using Twitter to reach out to their customers. Here are a few ways you can achieve this:

• Firstly create a Twitter account for your business. The username must reflect the name of your business.
• Then you simply start tweeting about your products and services. In those tweets you need to choose your words carefully. Ensure that you mention the name of your business and use hash tags (#) to explicitly set a trend, e.g. #SocialMedia in Twitter is a trend.
• You can take this a little further by searching on Twitter on your brand or your products and services and analyze what people are saying about them.
• Once you have found people talking positively about your brand and products you can create a list on Twitter where you can add people to. When a person belongs to a list, it means that the particular person is actively thinking about the item that the list concerns.

P.S. the more you tweet the more exposure you will get. But make sure that you are to the point and your tweets are informative to your followers.

Facebook

Alright. I am not a Facebook fan. So I don’t have a Facebook account. It is just not my “thing”. But my wife has a Facebook account and that’s how I know about the services that Facebook provides.

Facebook

What can you do on Facebook?

• Advertise your products and services for free.
  • You can upload videos and pictures to communicate to your customers.
  • Tag your products appropriately so that it can be searched with great exposure.
  • Yes. Search for anyone and anything.
    • You can find your consumers and ask them to add you as a friend. (although this is a bit risky).
    • Create applications/games on Facebook to promote your brand, products or services.

Here is something important that you must consider. Not everyone is on Facebook or Twitter. So you cannot only depend on these two media for exposure of your business.

Mobile/Mobile Apps

This set of tools is ever growing in terms of market share in social media. Why? Only one reason:

• Information at hand

Here are the three market leaders:

Mobile Phones with the best market share - IPhone, Android, BlackBerry

• IPhone
• Android
• BlackBerry

Why have the above companies been successful in promoting social media?

• They hold a significant amount of market share.
• They also provide a market place for purchasing apps.
• The apps are easy to use.
• They have provided the development community to develop apps and upload on to the market palce or app store.

So what can you do here?

• You may create apps that promote the services and products provided by your business to your customers.
• Definitely use Twitter and Facebook increasingly as the access to both of these media is in redundance via mobile handsets.

Also you should advertise the apps via Twitter and Facebook to your customers.

Online Communities

This is a fantastic tool to reach out and interact with your customers and increase the exposure of your business. How?

• You invite your customers to your online community website where they will be able to interact with each other.
• You will also be able to generate feedback, reviews and surveys on your products and services.
• Improving the SEO of your online community will make your site more visible to the search engines and therefore more exposure to your business.
• You will be able to understand your customers better.

Colmar Brunton specializes in building online communities for both the private and the public sectors. One of the recent public online community published by Colmar Brunton concerns the Murray Darling Basin Community.

If you or your business requires help to setup an online community please get in touch with me in the following ways:

• Twitter: @salmanjamal (http://twitter.com/salmanjamal)
• Email: salman.jamal@cbr.com.au

Blogging

Blogging is another form of social media. Here you are able to act as a freelance journalist and provide your opinions. Or you can use your blog to outline and sell your products and services to your customers. Your blog will be visible through the search engines and your customers can provide direct feedback to you through your blog.

If you want to understand how to improve the SEO of your blog then you may read some of the articles written on SEO in this blog.

The online community package provided by Colmar Brunton already comes with blogging abilities. So if you are keen to get your business involved in this form of social media then please do get in contact with me.