Bill Blogs in C#

A while back, I read Mary and Tom Poppendieck's "Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash". That tag line, "From Concept to Cash", is the thesis for the book: By minimizing the time between receiving a customer request and delivering value (for cash), a company can obtain a long term competitive advantage.

This book is primarily aimed at management (where the Poppendieck's first book was aimed at the development team). If your biggest challenge is convincing your management to go lean, give them this book. It contains a number of case studies, from the Boeing 777 program to the Polaris missile program to PatientKeeper (a mid-size software development company), to Open Source project. It uses those case studies to justify the claims that lean techniques will bring success. 

Of course, as a developer, you may need to convince management that these techniques will pay off. If that's you, you should read this book. You'll be able to convince management why techniques like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Short Iterations will help the bottom line. That will get traction when a strictly technical argument won't.

Just a quick post:  My latest column on C# Exception handling practices is online.

Here's the summary:'

Thrown exceptions break the normal flow of execution in a program to report error conditions. A few simple techniques can help you preserve execution flow and give users and administrators the information they need to understand what went wrong.

Follow the link to read more:

Thanks to Chris Auld for pointing out this site: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test.

Our site seems to be blocked in China. 

There's a few interesting points behind that: I don't believe either Dianne or I have ever discussed anything political here. (Yes, we have strong opinions, but neither of u believe that's why people come here). Is there something about our technology blogs that trouble the Chinese government? Is i a bug? Is it intentional? And, if it's a bug, is it in the site, or in the censorship algorithm?

There are times when it is too easy to take our freedom of information for granted. Take a look at the site, and try many of your normal sources of information. It took me several minutes to find a site that wasn't blocked. Interesting.