While exploring Long Zheng's great blog (istartedsomething.com), I stumbled across a really amazing wallpaper called Dark Aurora. Here is a screenshot:

(click on the image to download - 1500×1125 resolution)

Yesterday, Joel Semeniuk asked if I could dig up a list of resources showing the business momentum of Agile methodologies. I was able to pull three core resources off the web, most notably on SlideShare.com (note: if you ever need to deliver a presentation in front of a group of people, check out the website. It has two great features in my opinion - a search bar to find presentations based on the text contained within, and an option to download .ppt files). Here they are:

http://www.slideshare.net/melnik/empirical-evidence-of-agile-methods-190997/
http://www.slideshare.net/sgreene/salesforcecom-agile-transformation-agile-2007-conference
http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-alliance-survey-2006;jsessionid=7F263F7EC87B20F4F440448A732B6FC0
http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/proof.htm

The best one out of the pack was delivered by Grigori Melnik (from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group) - he spoke recently at the Patterns and Practices Summit in Quebec. Here are some of the facts that stood out:

• Growth of Agile in Banking (Lloyds), Transportation (CP Rail) and Communication (Telus) sectors (from a 2005 study) 
• From a Melnik/Maurer study in 2005, Agile as a methodology provides a job satisfaction rate of 29.4% (as opposed to 9.9% non-Agile)
• From a 2007 study, of 1700 people polled, 37% adopted Scrum (followed closely by 23% - Scrum/XP hybrid)

Rather than repeat what's on the slides - here is an interactive version of the deck to check out:

| View | Upload your own

 To set up the blogging infrastructure for this website, I installed DasBlog v.1.8.6025.3. The process was pretty painless - unzip the files, upload them into a folder onto the web server, make that folder a Web Application in IIS and set a few permissions on "writable" folders. No database connections to fuss with - it just worked out of the box. A lot of prominent bloggers use DasBlog including Scott Hanselman and Canada's very own Kate Gregory.

Note that I'm hosting this blog on an IIS 7.0 server and I initially got an error that the application had to run in Classic Pipeline Mode instead of Intregrated mode. As soon as I flipped the bit - the site worked fine. Mike Volodarsky has an excellent article on how to create an ASP.NET site that is compatible in both Integrated and Classic Mode. Once I get a few cycles, I'll make the changes and create a post about it.

Next step in the process was customizing the UI. I chose the "business" theme. Here is what the directory structure looks like:

homeTemplate defines the "look and feel" of the page as a whole. This is where your Classic ASP skills come into play - John Forsythe posted a very useful set of DasBlog macros you can plug into the template. itemTemplate defines exactly what will be shown in every post - I've added support for a number of social networking sites including Digg and Technorati. Of course, theme.css can be used to customize colors in the theme and positioning. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the makeover.

If you are interested in achieving the same results, I've posted my templates on my SkyDrive. Also found what appears to be two minor bugs with DasBlog:

• If I try to enter a very long URL into the text editor, it gets shortened which results in malformed HTML. I've been using shrinkster to mitigate this problem.
• My SkyDrive won't embed on the blog. Works perfectly on my homepage however.