Lesson learned during my business trip

I spent 5 weeks at customers site recently which also means that I was away from my team for 5 weeks.

The first thing I have learnt is that it is so easy to have miscommunications. I have been working closely with my team for 3 to 4 years. For some people, I have been working with them for around 5 years in the company. But when I was at my customer site and communicated with them what customer wanted and when the deadline was going to be, sometimes it was just difficult to make them understand the situation. At some moment I was a bit frustrated by it and then realized it is natural to have miscommunication. My solution to this is to be honest with the other party and respect them. As normal miscommunication problems, the technical solution is to listen and understand the other party first. And then try to let them understand your needs.The authority does not help in this case.

  

Resume the post now

I have not updated here for a long time. It does not mean I forgot about it. No. Work is part of my life. I would like to write them down.

Last year I have the second daughter come to my life. Amazing. Although it is the second time, but I am still surprised by the miracle of life. Now I almost forgot how painful the delivery was. She is almost 1 year now. So I think I am ready to pick up my 'old' life style a bit more, a bit more, and more..

After reading a post from Martin Fowler - Retreaded: Rigorous Agile

After reading a post from Martin Fowler - Retreaded: Rigorous Agile
I am a big fan of this Martin Fowler. Another reason for less of rigorous definition from what I understand is that people now still do not have a full concept regarding how to make software development with quality under constraint of schedule, people, and deliverable contents. Agile is still not a complete methodology. To me it is more like mixed guidelines from scrum, extreme programming, pair programming. You just tailor it when you want to use it in your team. People in your team, Process constraint in your company, release pressure from customer and so on decide how to tailor it.   

Why Sizeof object with empty class is not zero in C++?

My understanding would be creating an object means occupying some memory. No size, no memory, no way to tell it is a object or it is an array of objects in C++. So size of object with empty class should one byte. The value could be 1 or 4 depending on the machine.
I am not sure about C#. It is not difficult to know. I will test tomorrow.

Iterative vs. Recursive Approaches

I always do not like recursion. I will definitely use iteration if there is a way to use it instead of recursion. No theory. I just do not like recursion naturally.
Today the article I read tells that the performance of iteration is much better than recursion. Performance here includes both speed and memory usage. Here is the link http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/Iterative_vs_Recursive.aspx so I will confidently continue to use iteration instead of recursion in my daily work.

Name of marshalling

Marshalling is so named because it was first studied in 1962 by Edward Waite Marshall, then with the General Electric corporation

Ridiculous Microsoft - Visual Studio Extensions does not support 64-bit platform

SharePoint 2007 is decided to be used as content management server for our application. It gives us lots of troubles when customized web services are needed. For me I think customized web services are necessary for SharePoint 2007 unless you only use web browser as client. SharePoint exposes its interfaces by web services but it only exposes very limited interfaces in this way. No file check in or check out is supported!

Something also ridiculous to me is that a tool from MS, Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0, does not support 64-bit platforms. This tool has to work with SharePoint server and all MSDN documents tell you that SharePoint server is better installed on 64-bit platform and it only supports 64-bit machine from SharePoint 2010.

Stupid MS.