bouchaet's blog

Here is how my kanban board looks after two weeks. There are some improvements from the original board. A backlog appears at the top, a garbage section on the right. I also keep completed tasks over than an week on the far right. Not sure why for now. Let's see in two more weeks.

For many years, I have tried different systems to realize the GTD principles. Since 2006, I have used tracks.tra.in website. And I still use it today. Before, I have tried todo's (or tasks) in Outlook, reminders in a mindmap (freemind), checkboxes in a logbook, gtdtiddlywiki  (that one didn't last at all). Most of time, I used a mixed approach and keep tasks in two to three system at the time. Which is not recommended... I know.  My reality is: a new task comes up, no time to loose so I write it down in my logboook and transfer them back to an "online" system. This double re-entry process forces me to re-think my tasks, which is not a bad idea. However, the "online" version always take a bit to much of time: boot up the software (outlook, browser ...), login, click here and there (date selection is never fast), choose a tag, add information (that may or not help).  Exchange+Outlook never worked great for me. Category (or tag, or label, or project, or contex

I think I may have found an inconsistency with BizTalk promotion mechanism. Context The system is using – roughly – two orchestration super-types: The ones that are publishing business data from external sources to the enterprise data warehouse, and The ones that are subscribing to (wait for) events on the bus and provide data to other enterprise systems for day to day operations. One of the responsibilities of publisher super-type orchestrations is to notify subscriber super-type orchestrations when data is available in the warehouse. Publishers and subscribers do not know each others (no call/send shape or partner ports are allowed). This loosely-coupling behavior is supported with event messages that travel through the message box. Publishers creates the event messages for subscribes in this disconnected mode. Event messages have the same message type and only its inner element values would reveal which concept of data is available. Subscribers may h

ESB Guidance is finally out. I have downloaded the bits and cannot wait to try out the new and flashy ESB Management portal. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb931189.aspx

I've just finished a very interesting book lately - The Toyota Way - on lean manufacturing developed at Toyota Motor company and written by Jeffrey K. Liker. It is the first that I read on this kind of subject, management and industrial engineering. And I'm glad I did. The Toyota way is all about how well you keep a healthy and growing business through 14 principles, which brings your organization in the lean production sphere. The principles are organized on the idea expressed in Maslow hierarchy of needs . So basic principles have to be accomplished and lived before climbing to the next level. The principles are : Base level: 1. Develop a long term vision. Seems obvious but in fact only few companies really follows a long term strategy when short-term profits are reacheable. And many times, layoffs are solely due to satisfy shareholders and show great columns in the annual report final pages. Second level: 2. Create a continuous process flow . Stop moving around pieces and

Serialization with XmlAttribute is quite useful. However, when serializing a sequence (IList for instance) you have to be careful. If you use a public property to expose the IList member to serialize, don't waste time on the Set{} method, it will not be called by the deserializer, at least for the XmlSerializer. The Set{} is simply not use by the XmlSerializer.Deserialise method. private IList recipients = new System.Collections.ArrayList(); public IList Recipients { get{return this.recipients;} set { throw new ApplicationException("Use the get method instead and work with IList.Add method. This is what XmlSerializer.Deserialise does!"); } }