Once in a while you may end up having orphan Nintex Workflow tasks in your environment. Normally you wont end up in this situation in you production environment as this is normally as result of playing with the workflow or the list.

But anyway we don’t live in the perfect world and things like this happen and when it happens it can be really annoying. Specially if you are using Nintex Mobile to respond to your tasks. One symptom is that you keep getting the tasks even though you delete local storage. So here I show you how to delete the orphan tasks for good

1. Navigate to your SharePoint site.
2. Choose to edit the page.
3. Select insert => Web Part. From the Categories column select Nintex Workflow 2013(or 2010) and from Parts column select My Workflow Tasks
4. Press Add button to add the web part to your page.
5. Once the web part is added press Save button.
6. You know must be able to see a list of tasks assigned to you in the web part
7. The ones which have Remove task link button are orphan tasks and you can delete them by clicking on the link.
8. if you don’t see them in the first page, make sure you navigate to all pages and delete them all. Unfortunately the this moment there is no way to delete them all in one go and you need to do this one by one by one.
9. Go back to your Nintex Mobile, Delete Local Storage and you should not see the tasks anymore.

Hope this post saves you some headache.

So first things first. You are asking if this is a marketing email? answer is yes. I am expanding my team and I am writing this post to convince smart developers like yourself to come and work with us at Nintex. It’s me writing this and these are my own view points. No one from the company has asked me to write this (in fact no one knows that I am writing this. not even HR).

If you are reading this post I am assuming you are already familiar with work culture in good IT companies and their benefits like flexible hours, hack days, free drinks, great work place etc. So I won't bore you with them.

What I really want to talk about is what we do and why I believe Nintex is developer’s heaven  

1- What do we do?

So my team and I work on mobile applications. We create enterprise mobile apps in real sense which helps companies be much more productive. Now creating mobile apps is cool itself, but boy tell me about creating high quality enterprise mobile apps. Not many of us are fortunate enough to get to work on enterprise mobile apps which pushes mobile applications to their boundaries. It’s cool. It’s like the hottest thing now.

2- How do we work?

We are open to any practical development technologies be it native, xamarin or hybrid. You get to work with the latest and hottest technologies. At the moment we create our apps using native languages Objectve-C, Java and C#. All of us code in all three languages on all three platforms. It’s as sweet as it gets for developers. You get a taste of everything xcode, eclipse, visual studio you name it. But the coolest thing is how we design our apps architecture across the platforms. we have literally managed to adapt all patterns we use in backend technologies to all platforms and keep them alike. Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, Repository pattern you name them and we have them on all platforms. Heck, we have even managed to replicate C#’s Async-Await in Objective-C how cool is that?

3- What about the team?

So pretty much everyone in the team comes from enterprise development background and that has helped us a ton. They are all passionate, intelligent developers like yourself who are absolutely fun to work with. We constantly communicate in the team about technical and non-technical stuff. and we learn a lot from each other. It’s absolutely a flat team in which everyone owns the products. All of us keep mentoring each other and teaching each other new stuff. In short you know you are working in a team when someone else fixes your broken unit tests without you knowing

4- Is it challenging?

Absolutely. Challenge is what keeps on going and not getting board. Everyday we have some nice technical challenge to attend. It keeps the blood flow constantly.

5- How is the company?

I will tell you this from developer to developer, I believe that it says it all; There is absolutely no bureaucracy.

6- What is the most important thing you achieve?

OK, for all of us it’s the fact that what we do makes some people’s life easier and make them more productive. If you want to see an example check out this two minutes video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXYyvXz6_eI&feature=youtu.be

7- How is life in Australia? (if you are not in Australia already)

Well there is a reason Melbourne has been the most livable city in the world in the last few years Great people, great life style great city. I am an expat here but I wouldn’t leave this place and neither will my wife both of us love it here.

I tried to keep it as short as possible and hopefully this will give you some good reasons to come and work with us. So if you fancy working with us in the down under, drop me a line and we’ll setup some interviews. My twitter address is: https://twitter.com/vahidtaslimi and my email address is: [email protected].

unfortunately we cannot delete a team project from visual studio or online control panel. to delete a team project you need to use the command line utility.

run visual studio tools command prompt tools. make sure you open the x86 version as x64 version wouldnt work.

and then run this command:

tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://YOUR-ACCOUNT-URL.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection "Your project name"

if required this will prompt you to login with a Microsoft Account.

after you log in it will prompt you with a yes/no question. enter y press enter and it will delete your site collection.

if you are trying to connect to team foundation server online through visual studio and you get unauthorized excetion.

first make sure you have got access to that account and if you do then it most probably must be because of a cached microsoft account which does not have access to the collection. to fix this:

1. Open visual studio
2. using a visual studio built in browser, navigate to http://tfs.visualstudio.com
3. Sign out of the exisiting logged in account
4. Log in using the microsoft account which has got access to the collection
5. and you are good to go.

How to host website in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine

Well as you know Microsoft is now offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) services through the new Virtual Machine role.

It’s quite good and easy to get up and running with it but. In matter of minutes you can have your windows or linux virtual machine ready to be used. You can shut them off or backup their VHDs.

When I gave it a go to try it, the very first thing I wanted to do was to host a website on my VM. So once the VM was ready I remote deskoped in and added IIS and the other stuff. But when I tried to browse the site I got a 404 (page not found) error in the browser.

I spent some time figuring out what has gone wrong and finally came to know that by default there is

just one endpoint enabled for the VM and that’s used for remote desktop.

So bingo I had to log into my windows azure control panel and added a new endpoint for port 80 (http) and 443 (https).

And that fixed the problem.

there is no doubt that agile practices specially scrum is pretty popular these days. This is not because scrum is something funky to have but rather because it really works and works very well. i know what you are saying now… you would be saying but hold on i have seen some companies/projects which started to switch to scrum but they all ended up in tears and had to leave it half way.

well i don't deny that. during my career i have been lucky to see some of those projects and i agree with you. but you know for me they all failed because they simply didn't know themself neither did they know scrum. i mean they didn't know their team culture –strengths and weaknesses-. They did not know how to bend the scrum practices to fit into their team culture either.

i believe shifting to scrum is like getting married. you think you already know how you are going to deal with it but don't consider the fact that it’s total mind shift. specially in software industry up until few years ago everybody was pushing for ultra extra process/documented oriented methodologies like waterfall. and we spent a lot of time learning about all sort of documentation. You have to understand that adopting scrum is not one way adoption and is rather a two way one. meaning you need to bend scrum a bit to adopt it your team culture and you also  to bend the team culture to adopt the scrum.

The team which fail to adopt scrum are the ones which go by book and start enforcing everything written in a scrum book the way they were imposing CMMI level 3 processes. the point they were missing was that those books were not holistic and they were just a set of guidelines. the people in charge missed the point that it cannot be done over a night. and they have got to shift gradually.

if you are planning to shift to scrum i would suggest that you first start by teaching the team about scrum. tell them about the values it add and tell them that it’s a total mind shift from what they are doing. i am sure you will be getting comments like “For me agile/scrum is just like waterfall with shorter iterations” make sure you clarify with the team that IT IS NOT.

Then you need to start picking up the scrum practices which are easier to adopt and less challenging like daily stand ups, shorter iterations. give it a go for a while and once the team feels comfortable with these. start adapting the other things like organized backlog review, proper planning meeting.

The next step would be pushing the sprint commitment to the team members. make them understand that if the team commit to something for a sprint they don't have any choice but finishing it as a team.

i would say this is the trickiest of all. because you would have to deal with cultural, technical and process related issues in this regards. Some developer simply don't get it that they have got to honour their sprint commitments and they keep coming up with excuses. you’ve got to fix this.

Then you have to decide how you are going to deal with the Acceptance testing. do you want to do it in the same sprint? do want you want to let the QC team to stay one sprint behind the dev team? or do you want to treat them as two different teams? unfortunately there is no recipe for this and you’ve got to see what works well for you.

The technical challenge you are going to have here is about writing a testable code and writing automated unit tests for the code. you have to note that having automated unit test IS A MUST in a successful scrum project. for me there is no excuse not to write unit tests. well i am not saying to start with TDD but whatever development methodologies you use, you need to write testable code and write unit tests for your code.

writing testable code and unit tests is something that %99 of the developers think they know it but may be half of the actually know how do it.

To write a testable code there are couple of patterns/concepts which are absolutely vital. for example separation of concern, dependency injection, MVC, MVVM etc. make sure you get enough training materials for your developers to understand these patterns/concepts.

a Few years ago i used a technique which worked well for my team. basically i told my team to code without user interface and leave the user interface as the last task in each user story. so they had no other way of testing their code other than writing unit tests. that worked well.  for another team of mine i tried to show them that unit testing not only improves the code quality but also saves the developers a lot of time. like when they wanted to test a booking system they had to fire up the whole application fill out a few forms to reach to the booking page and then test what they wanted to test in that page. Ok if something was wrong they had to do it again. i showed them how they could automate the whole thing in unit test once and run the quickly whenever they want. this trick also worked pretty well.

Now i encourage most of the companies to start adopting agile practices. and i am sure everybody will benefit from it. A very good example of adopting scrum is my current employer. The PMO office has done a very good job on bringing the scrum into the company with no dramas.

i have been using Power Commands for Visual Studio for a long time. but i had never noticed that it’s a got very good feature for automatically formatting the document on save. not only it can format the document, but also it can remove and sort using statements in the files when you save them.

it this really good for me because we use stylecop to enforce coding standard within our dev team.

it’s also good when you refactor your code and end up changing namespaces and class names.

to install the extension. click on the extension manager in the option menu.

then search for PowerCommands and select and install it from the list.

once the installation is done, click on tools then click on option menu.

 

from the options dialog box select PowerCommands and in the left hand side check the options you desire.

 

and you are good to go.

When you are after some statistics in SharePoint, say number of user activities, you want to exclude activities on certain file types. For example we normally are not interested on activities on the webpart or xml file but we are rather interested in activities on docx or xlsx files.

Nintex Analytics 2010 enables to mark the files that you normally want to exclude from your reports as either System file or Image file. it then gives you parameters in some reports to exclude activities on the file types which are flagged as system or image files from the result.

this is a very powerful feature of  NA2010 which gives an extra flexibility to design and use your reports.

in this video I show you how to flag various file types as either system or image file type.

Time to time we need to be able to connect couple of report to make an end to end usage story of reports.

Fortunately Nintex Analytics 2010 fully support drill down functionality and most of the out of the box report are configured to drill down to a related report.

but if you need to configure your own custom report to drill down to a report, don’t worry it’s quite easy in NA2010.

In this video I show you how you can configure drill down reports in few minutes.

in this video I show you how to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010. I’ll show you:

• how to select a dataset for your report
• how to configure report parameters
• How set the report name, description, icon and other properties
• How to customize chart visualization
• How to customize table visualization