Ardent Dev

Now Playing: Episode 6 of Devcasting - Microformats

Derek Hatchard — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:02:56 GMT

Episode #6 of the developer podcast Devcasting is up. Derek Hatchard and Mike Mullen talk about a number of topics around web businesses before jumping into a discussion of microformats.

http://devcasting.com/index.php/2007/03/18/devcasting-6-microformats/

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Attention (C#, VB) .Net Bloggers

Sebastien Aube — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:09:50 GMT

Have you been spending some extra time when supplying code samples for your posts?

Here's a fantastic tool that formats your code in HTML and the output looks great.

http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Vista is Pretty but Also Pretty Frustrating

Derek Hatchard — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 17:55:23 GMT

Update: Samsung released a Vista driver for the ML-4500 printer on January 29, 2007

I have been running Vista on my tablet PC for a while but just this week I put Vista on my main desktop machine at work. I have to say that the Aero Glass experience is really nice on a decent machine (and not even something to write home about - just dual core 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel 945G Express chipset with integrated graphics). Seriously, Aero Glass really rocks. It raises the bar for OS X.

But I'm at my wit's end with all the driver troubles. Off the top of my head, here's what I've dealt with so far:

1. Display resolution option was maxing out at 1920 x 1080 even though my monitor is 1920 x 1200. And the little Intel applet was showing 1920 x 1200 as a supported monitor resolution. Nothing I tried worked and then in the middle of doing something else, the screen flickered and voila! it switched to the proper resolution autmoatically. (My monitor is a BenQ FP231W and I had to download a driver to get Vista to recognize it - never had that problem with XP.)

2. I can't install my Samsung ML-4500 printer because it is an NT 4.0 style kernel mode driver (if I understood the error message correctly). You can enable kernel mode printer drivers in the local computer policy but that didn't fix the problem (even after a reboot).

3. I can't install my TASCAM US-122 USB audio interface device. I've been using it to record the Devcasting podcast. I called TASCAM operational support and they told me Vista is still in beta so they don't have a driver yet! I tried to explain that it was released (i.e., business vs. general consumer release) but they said I was wrong. Uh, yeah, thanks fer nuthin', TASCAM. Grrr. I'm going to need to dual boot XP I guess to record Monday's show.

4. My motherboard is from ASUS and the ASUS web site has no Vista drivers available so I had to go find them from Intel, Realtek, etc.

I don't know why I do this to myself. I should just buy new machines with Vista pre-installed. Of course my TASCAM and Samsung printer still wouldn't work. Ah the joys of early adoption.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Now Playing: Episode 5 of Devcasting - Less is More

Derek Hatchard — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:33:16 GMT

Episode #5 of the developer podcast Devcasting is up. Derek Hatchard and Mike Mullen talk to Dan Martell about the notion of "less is more" in software development.

This show ran long so it is split into two parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Now Playing: Episode 4 of Devcasting: Firefox Extensions

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:26:47 GMT

Episode #4 of the Devcasting podcast has been posted:

http://devcasting.com/index.php/2006/12/28/devcasting-4-our-favorite-firefox-extensions-oh-and-derek-got-a-zune/

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Sebastien Aube — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 18:20:34 GMT

As you may already know, Visual Studio 2005 Sp1 is available for download at Microsoft.

I updated my copy with SP1 this morning and it took a little less than 2 hours to complete.
2 hours is far too long, especially when I need to keep an eye on it to click on ‘OK’ or ‘Accept’ periodically.

Hopefully it will address my Dev environment crashing because of its buggy Source Safe integration. Grrrr...

A little about SourceSafe
For your own sake, stop using SourceSafe – please!

Download Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Revised: 2006/12/21
See Things I wish I'd known before I installed VS 2005 Service Pack 1

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

POSTing to a webpage and using it's response (HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse)

Sebastien Aube — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:44:56 GMT

You might encounter a situation where you need to Post to a web page and read it's response.

Here's a function that uses System.Net.HttpWebRequest and System.Net.HttpWebResponse to do just that.

''Usage
' Dim xmlDoc As Xml.XmlDocument
' xmlDoc.Load(MakeHttpRequest("request=listPersons&filter=last(a*)","
      /requestManager.php","application/x-www-form-urlencoded")) Protected Function MakeHttpRequest(ByVal
      data As String, ByVal url As String, ByVal contentType As String) As System.IO.Stream
      Dim retVal As System.IO.Stream Dim httpRequest As System.Net.HttpWebRequest Dim httpResponse
      As System.Net.HttpWebResponse Dim encoding As New System.Text.UTF8Encoding Dim uri
      As New System.Uri(url) Dim postBytes As Byte() postBytes = encoding.GetBytes(data)
      httpRequest = CType(System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(uri), System.Net.HttpWebRequest)
      httpRequest.ContentLength = postBytes.Length httpRequest.Method = "POST" httpRequest.ContentType
      = contentType Dim postStream As System.IO.Stream = httpRequest.GetRequestStream()
      postStream.Write(postBytes, 0, postBytes.Length) postStream.Close() httpResponse =
      CType(httpRequest.GetResponse(), System.Net.HttpWebResponse) retVal = httpResponse.GetResponseStream()
      Return retVal End Function

Variation: If the webpage you are calling expects xml you could easily replace and pass a valid xml string as data
replace
httpRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
with
httpRequest.ContentType = "text/xml"

You could even go further and return an xml document if the expected datatype is "text/xml".

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Developer Workshops in Moncton in January 2007

Derek Hatchard — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:19:10 GMT

I am planning two developer training events in Moncton, New Brunswick in early 2007 (tentatively the weeks of January 22 and 29). I'll be doing one week and it will be a .NET focus - probably Professional ASP.NET Development but if there's demand for something else I can switch it. The other week will be Mike Mullen and the focus will probably be either Professional PHP Development or Building Ajax Web Apps with Prototype and Dojo. Again, Mike is flexible based on demand.

Details are not finalized so there's time to influence the schedule or topics if you're interested. We hope to offer these workshops from time to time. To keep costs in check we are trying to avoid advertising so please help us spread the word by telling your colleagues in Atlantic Canada.

Classes will be a minimum of 3 people and a maximum of 5 people. The cost is $1200 for the week.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

It's Coming: PDC 07, October 2 - 5

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:35:40 GMT

You heard it here first: the next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference will be October 2 - 5, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.

Registration is NOT open at this point. The dates have simply been announced.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

It was PDC 03 that tipped me off to the coming web-desktop convergence. It was PDC 05 where I saw what a real Avalon (humph, WPF) designer could look like with timelines, transitions, reflection, etc.

Start saving your pennies or start dropping hints to your boss!

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Dev East 2006 Slides

Derek Hatchard — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:00:33 GMT

Here are slides for 5 of the 7 Dev East presentations. Some have code included. If you are looking for something that's not here, ping me at derek@ardentdev.com and I'll track it down for you.

Mike Mullen - Next Generation Web Applications

Frazer Smith - Dynamic App Config with VB.NET

Tyler Davey - Virtual Earth: Adding the 3rd Dimension

Sean Smith - Halifax on Rails: An Intro to Ruby on Rails

Derek Hatchard - The Ajax Revolution

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Developer Podcast #3 Posted - Now Called Devcasting

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 04:12:19 GMT

Finally got podcast episode #3 and show notes posted at http://devcasting.com/index.php/2006/12/06/devcasting-3-give-me-20-cents/.

The show has a name now: Devcasting. And we're in iTunes. Just search the iTunes store for devcasting or browse through the Technology category of the iTunes podcast directory.

We're looking for your favourite Firefox extensions for an upcoming show. Email them to me at derek@ardentdev.com.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Vista / WPF User Experience Showcase

Derek Hatchard — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 03:09:39 GMT

The Panel is the place to collect showcases of the new user experiences [in Vista and WPF] and provide insights on how they were implemented.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/

Definitely check out UniveRSS, a 3D Vista RSS reader. I can't really see myself using this but it's neat to see. (And it did run like crap on my tablet because the NVIDIA WDDM drivers aren't final and things crash when I try the pre-release. Of course the XP driver causes problems too - could be a hardware issue I suppose. Or just crappy drivers. Who knows.)

UniveRSS: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/featured/universs.aspx

(CBC Radio 3 is in the screenshot - woohoo).

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

VPC From Microsoft with IE6 and IE7

Derek Hatchard — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 05:34:45 GMT

This is pretty cool:

a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Debugging SMTP Filters

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:10:37 GMT

If this looks familiar to you:

public class Catchall : ISMTPOnArrival
{

void ISMTPOnArrival.OnArrival(CDO.Message msg, ref CDO.CdoEventStatus EventStatus)

then you know that debugging SMTP filters sucks.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Dev East Was Great

Derek Hatchard — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 15:43:18 GMT

http://www.derekhat.com/index.php/2006/11/28/dev-east-was-great/

The room was packed and the content was great. Definitely a success.

Thanks to everyone who helped with Dev East. Special thanks to Mike Hatfield and Darryl Skeard who showed up early to help with registrations and setup. Thanks to Chris Maxwell at the Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science for much needed tech support. And thanks to Dr. Morven Gentleman for the great venue.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Dev East 2006 is Nov 24 in Halifax

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:46:10 GMT

Attention software developers in eastern Canada

Dev East 2006 is just one week away! Come join your fellow developers for a day of insightful presentations, thousands of dollars in prizes, and a chance to interact with your peers. It all happens in Halifax on Friday, November 24, 2006 from 8:30am to 5:00pm.

Go to www.DevEast.com to register and get all the details including a student special just announced last night! Registration is only $10 thanks to the generous support of our sponsors:

Release Sponsor

Beta Sponsors

Want to be a sponsor? Email derek@ardentdev.com

Alpha Sponsors	In-Kind Sponsors

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Dev Podcast Show #2 Posted

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 05:43:50 GMT

Episode #2 of the still nameless developer podcast has been posted. Show notes and MP3 can be found here:

http://netcasts.ardentdev.com/index.php/2006/11/13/developer-podcast-2-show-me-the-smack/

The RSS feed with enclosures is http://netcasts.ardentdev.com/index.php/feed/.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Running DBCC CHECKDB Tonight

Derek Hatchard — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 23:42:27 GMT

Sigh... I'm at the office this evening trying this:

DBCC CHECKDB ('sgvault', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)

Fingers crossed.

First the mail server went down on the weekend while out of town. Got it back up yesterday afternoon over remote desktop with only a few problems. Then today discovered that there was a problem with the Vault database (source code control). Looks like the corruption happened prior to last night's backup so the nightly backup is of a corrupted database. So trying a repair before restoring the previous backup.

Update: Ugh, not a good sign: There are 28948 rows in 129 pages for object 'tblfolderentrypins'.

Update 2: I/O error (bad page ID) detected during read at offset 0x0000004d526000 in file 'E:\Databases\sgvault.mdf'. Connection Broken. Grrrrrr.

Update 3: Ran repair a few more times. Now says: CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 0 consistency errors in database 'sgvault'. And I can now select from tblfolderentrypins, which I couldn't do before. Fingers still crossed.

Update 4: Can now access repository properties with Vault Admin tool. That's an improvement.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Slashdot Ran Out of Comments

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:00:57 GMT

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Announcing Dev East 2006

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:23:32 GMT

The Dev East 2006 one day developer conference will happen November 24, 2006 in Halifax, NS. Cost is only $10 thanks to the generous support of sponsors.

Visit www.DevEast.com for details and to register.

Hope to see you there!

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Run IE7 Side-by-Side with IE6

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 21:25:52 GMT

These instructions are for running IE7 side-by-side on Windows XP SP2. No warranty! The machine I tried this on became a bit unstable after doing this. I had weird issues with Oulook and very slow page loads in IE7.

Download IE7 (file I downloaded was IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe)
At the command line, run IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /x to run only the self-extraction
Enter the path you want for the extracted files
In the new folder, create an empty text file called iexplore.exe.local
Go into the update folder
Run idndl.exe
Run nlsdl.exe
Run xmllitesetup.exe
Reboot
Go back to the extracted folder and run iexplore.exe. It should work...

Use this at your own peril. I've noticed a few problems with IE7 running this way but it is functional.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

New Developer Podcast / Netcast

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 21:22:11 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that Mike Mullen and I have launched a new developer-oriented podcast / netcast. The first show just went up a few hours ago:

Show notes for the nameless developer podcast

Download the MP3

Until we come up with a catchy name, the shows are being posted at http://netcasts.ardentdev.com/. The RSS feed with enclosures is http://netcasts.ardentdev.com/index.php/feed/.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Next Gen Web Applications Workshop in Moncton

Derek Hatchard — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:37:55 GMT

Next Gen Web Applications Workshop

Wednesday October 11, 1:00pm - 4:00pm
http://upcoming.org/event/111833/

Scientific Park
55 Crowley Farm Road
Moncton, New Brunswick
E1A 7R1

(Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)

The Next Gen Web Applications Workshop will be the first conference of its kind in the Moncton area. Topics include: web 2.0 practices and implementations, enterprise wiki software, AGILE development and product management in Web 2.0 as well as others.

This event is free for anyone, however, you must register here in order to attend: http://upcoming.org/event/111833/. See you there!.

Scheduled to Speak:

Dan Martell, CEO
Spheric
"Enterprise 2.0: Enter the Wiki"

Derek Hatchard, Founder, CEO
Ardent Development Solutions
"The AJAX Revolution"

Mike Mullen, CTO
Kamelio

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Itch-scratchware coming October 2003!

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:23:45 GMT

I think open source and free software is important but I'm also pragmatic about it. A lot is just itch-scratchware that will never get maintained and that is OK. A good hint that a project is not very active is when the web site says this:

The site is under construction. The site is scheduled to be up by 31st October 2003.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

OT: Office space for rent

Derek Hatchard — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:07:22 GMT

This is a bit off topic but for our subscribers in New Brunswick:

Offices for rent in Moncton in a beautiful 100-yr old building at 118 Mountain Rd. With hardwood floors on first and second floors plus lots of wood trim, this space has retained its charm through the years.

Includes wireless Internet (wi-fi), fax/print/copy service, and a shared kitchen. Offices can optionally be furnished. $525/office, heat/lights/Internet/parking included. Email derek@ardentdev.com (or call 851-1838).

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

IronPython 1.0 Released

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 16:25:07 GMT

IronPython is an implementation of Python that runs against the CLR, which is so cool.

Here's Jim Hugunin's announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2006/09/05/741605.aspx

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

For your own sake, stop using SourceSafe - please!

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 03:00:51 GMT

I believe strongly that you need great tools to support a great development process. There are a few core tools every team should have: work item / defect tracking system, automated build system, developer testing tools (including unit testing tools), and source code control. A lot of places I go it seems that source code control is the only tool that most teams have in place. And I find it baffling that in 2006 most people are reporting that Visual SourceSafe is their SCC tool. Look at these stats: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000660.html.

Jeff Atwood makes some good points in that post about why you should avoid SourceSafe. The biggies are the illusion of safety and the bad habits that SourceSafe encourages. SourceSafe is still hanging around because Microsoft had to do something with it. The SCC with Team System ain't free and people have gotten used to having a free source code control system from Microsoft. I fully expect that we'll see a lite version of Team System SCC come out to replace SourceSafe (with a wizard to suck in your VSS data). But of course it will come after the first few big pushes to get folks to buy the full Team System line (including Team Foundation Server). If a VSTS SCC Lite came out now, I think too many people would just opt for that instead of going for the full deal with work item tracking, automated builds, reporting, and all that great integration.

I recommend one of three products if you are ready to move away from SourceSafe or you are not using a SCC system at all (and I've seen places using informal processes like network shares and verbally "checking in" and "checking out" code - seriously!):

Visual Studio Team System - if you have the budget for it, the integration with the other parts of VSTS is awesome. The only thing I've found missing is edit-merge-commit functionality. I had heard that it was coming - I haven't checked to see if it's there now. Bear in mind that the cost of Team System includes so much more than just source code control.
SourceGear Vault - this is what I use now and I absolutely LOVE IT. It costs a bit per developer but it is pretty much hassle-free. It works perfectly over HTTP / HTTPS so it's awesome for a distributed development team.
Subversion - I have the least experience with Subversion but I have been very pleased with it when I've used it. I have used the TortoiseSVN client with it and it's nice. If you don't have the budget for Team System or Vault, you'll need to have a "time budget" for Subversion. I haven't set it up myself but I've been told it's not quite as painless as Vault.

If you've got some money and want a full suite of development process tools, get Team System. If you've got some money and only need source code control, look at Vault. If you don't have $$$, look at Subversion.

Oh, and if you "only need source code control", it better be because you already have adequate work item tracking, automated build, and developer testing tools. With so many great tools available, why would you cripple your dev process?

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Looking for feedback on people@work from ADP

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:00:20 GMT

Do you have any experience with people@work from ADP? If so, I know someone looking for some feedback on it. Leave a comment or send me a private note (derek@ardentdev.com). Thanks!

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Hanging out the shingle (consulting availability)

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:19:17 GMT

We have some consulting time available! We are primarily a consulting / training / mentoring / content development group. We took a bit of a hiatus to build Church Radius (church management software) but it has launched so we're available again. Our primary focus is Microsoft technologies including .NET, SQL Server, and related technologies. The past 2+ years we have done a lot of ASP.NET-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) work but our experience and skill set is certainly broader than that.

We have a few services available:

Consulting and Contract Development

Software development is not quite as easy as falling off a bike. We can help get it done right and on time. We can provide various levels of service from high-level guidance on architecture and design right down to pumping out the code.

Mentoring and Training

If you are more of a we-do-it-all-in-house type of development shop, that's great. We can help keep your development utility belt up-to-date with customized training and mentoring. We have a great mentoring program called On Tap - read more at http://www.ardentdev.com/OnTap/.

New Offering: Process Improvement / Project Governance / Crisis Intervention

Ron Smith, a PMI-certified project manager with experience in crisis project intervention, is now offering help to companies with struggling projects or looking to optimize their process. Here's a breakdown of what Ron's doing:

Why is it that a horror story project gets so out of control before management knows about it? Projects gone bad are expensive to fix and they destroy morale, causing high staff turnover and re-training costs. And then there's the damage to your company's reputation in the eyes of the customer. Well-run projects have clear escalation paths and good communication up and down the ladder. If that doesn't sound like your company or project, keep reading.

Ron has helped dozens of troubled projects for companies of all sizes. He can help your team make simplified plans to tackle complex situations and start dealing with issues one at a time. A finely tuned team can overcome drastic changes in scope or direction and overcome hurdles without breaking stride. And team members will be happier because the project no longer appears unmanageable.

Ron has run Root Cause Analysis and Problem Resolution for Fortune 500 companies. He has helped turn around projects with demoralized teams facing million dollar penalties.

If you find yourself constantly in firefighting mode and going from one tornado project to the next, call Ron.

We'd love to help out with your projects. Give me a shout at 1-877-672-3487 (ext. 111) or email me at derek@ardentdev.com to discuss.

Technorati : .net consulting, asp.net consulting, asp.net developer

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

New laptop battery

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 04:19:43 GMT

On Friday I did something new: I ordered a new battery for my laptop (it arrived today). I've never had a primary laptop long enough to get really bothered by reduced battery life. It's been more than 1.5 years since I got my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC and I still love it. In that time the battery life has gone from 3.5 to 4.5 hours to about 1 hour or so. I'm flying to LA next week and that trip is just too long to only have an hour of battery life.

TOSHIBA Portege M200 series Main battery

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

.NET 2.0 + WinFX is now .NET 3.0

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 03:57:18 GMT

In case you've missed all the noise about this, Microsoft is rebranding WinFX as .NET 3.0. More accurately, .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 plus WinFX, which includes WPF, WCF, WF (Workflow), and WCS (CardSpace, formerly InfoCard). Overall I think this is a great idea. There is bound to be some confusion given that .NET Framework 3.0 includes the same compilers and runtime from .NET Framework 2.0. But hopefully it will clear up the confusion that was building about the relationship between .NET 2.0 and WinFX.

The announcement came a few days ago (just before TechEd) from the corporate VP of the Developer Division of Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx.

At first glance I didn't think it was a great idea but I warmed to it quickly. Rumblings I've seen have been that this is not a big enough change to warrant a full version number jump but that's nonsense. WinFX encompasses a lot of new stuff in the form of managed APIs. .NET Framework 3.0 is really just the branded name of the distribution for marketing anyway - nothing changes technically.

Of course there will still be things to complain about. For example, if you ask me to build an ASP.NET 2.0 application, we have to then talk about whether we are targeting .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0 so I know if I can use Indigo and Workflow.

Ultimately what is great about this change is that it positions the .NET Framework as the replacement brand for Win32 rather than WinFX. We all love .NET but WinFX is new and strange.

Some more info on naming versus versioning of .NET: http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2006/06/13/630066.aspx.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Church Radius Featured at ITBusiness.ca

Derek Hatchard — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 14:24:55 GMT

churchradius was featured in an article at ITBusiness.ca:

Parishioner converts his church to software as a service model

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Team System for Database Professionals

Derek Hatchard — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 03:26:20 GMT

I have been waiting anxiously for this: Microsoft has announced Team System for Database Professionals. Among the coming features are:

rename refactoring,
a new T-SQL editor,
a schema compare tool that will generate scripts to sync the schemas of two databases,
a data compare tool that will generate scripts to sync the data in two databases, and
a database unit testing infrastructure.

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

What I learned from Mission Impossible 3

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 19 May 2006 21:47:14 GMT

I went to see Mission Impossible 3 last night with my (very) pregnant wife. I don't want to give away too much of the rather thin plot but rest assured that something really important hinged on a tech guy back at the office. A couple of security-related things really struck me:

The tech guy always has too much power. The tech guy says, "You know they're going to be recording this call." Ethan Hunt replies, "And you know that you can erase it."
The tech guy was willing to break the rules because of his history with Ethan Hunt. If Ethan Hunt was a hacker, it would be classic social engineering. And don't think social engineering within an organization is unlikely. Reports indicate that the majority of attacks come from within the organization.

Lessons to be learned from MI:3 are 1) only give tech guys the power/access they need and 2) have checks and balances to prevent abuse of power.

Reminds me of a story I heard recently from [name withheld to protect the innocent] about an organization where the developers were Domain Admins for the entire organization.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

The Mad Mexican at DevTeach 2006

Derek Hatchard — Mon, 15 May 2006 20:27:32 GMT

The Mad Mexican appeared at DevTeach last week to hook up with his old tag team partner Johnny "The Pimp" Bristowe - aka, John Bristowe of Microsoft Canada. The Mad Mexican mistook John's WPF talk for a WWF talk... Check out the videos and pics: http://www.madmexican.net/.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Church Radius is Live!

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 03 May 2006 19:28:10 GMT

Our church software project, Church Radius, has gone live! We're pretty excited about it here. It is a web-based solution that we are offering with a software-as-a-service model. We are taking the SaaS approach to an area that can really reap the benefits of low upfront costs, pay for what you use, on-demand, access from anywhere, etc.

We're just getting off the ground so if you think this is interesting, we'd really appreciate links, reviews, comments, etc.

Just to give a bit of history, I have been connected to a church software product since 2000. I have been patiently waiting for the opportunity to really overhaul it. Originally I was thinking of a .NET-based P2P smart client but the P2P framework I envisioned was a bit too ambitious. And frankly the church software market for Mac and Linux is really underserved so a web-based solution seemed like a really good idea. The software-as-a-service approach lets us help churches avoid spending money on servers, new workstations, etc. in order to run Church Radius.

Since this is a tech-oriented blog, here are some implementation details: The site runs on ASP.NET 2.0. We built everything using Visual Studio 2005. We use ASP.NET Membership, which was a real boon because it was almost plug-and-play. We did a little bit to integrate our account management with the membership database but otherwise it was just so simple. And of course we are using master pages. You have to love master pages!

The backend is SQL Server 2005. The login account from the web site to database only has permission to execute stored procedures to remove the risk of SQL injection vulnerability slips. Because our church software is a hosted SaaS solution, we have multiple customers on the same servers. Every stored proc has to accept an OrgId and use it for every query (we monitor that part manually). Of course that lets you create a clustered index on OrgId for all tables to allow for efficient queries since each church represents only a small subset of the data in a table (so the execution plan is likely to use the clustered index).

We use NUnit for developer testing and NAnt for nightly builds on a dedicated build server. I also created a little web page that any developer can hit anytime to initiate a new build. I really should publish that to this blog one of these days. The NAnt script was a port from another project and is almost completely redundant now since basically all the build work is shelled out to MSBuild.

Right now I am working with Watir to do automated UI testing. Watir is a Ruby testing framework that automates IE. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, that's what we've been working on at Ardent lately: church software-as-a-service. Check it out and please spread the word!

Technorati : Christian, Christianity, Faith, Religion, SaaS, Software as a Service, Theology, church, church software

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Are you coming to DevTeach in Montreal?

Derek Hatchard — Mon, 01 May 2006 20:11:44 GMT

DevTeach is just a week away...

Are you going to be there? Leave a comment. Still on the fence? My advice: just do it! DevTeach is a great conference, which is why I signed up to present there (a mere 2.5 weeks before my wife's due date - yikes!). It really is a great value and Montreal is such a great city. You won't regret it at all.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Another Bad Error Message

Derek Hatchard — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 22:22:36 GMT

Well, I'm a roll with bad error messages this month. This week we finally received a merchant number and API token from Moneris to accept Mastercard and Visa for Church Radius. So I plugged the numbers into our configuration file and went to process a live credit card transaction. It failed with an error message saying "API Token Mismatch". What might this error message make you think is wrong? That you had an invalid API token? Good guess... But, nope. We got that error message because the sales team at Moneris had screwed up and not enabled recurring billing (subscriptions) to our merchant account. Even the tech guy at Moneris was confused. We figured it out by guessing at things that could be wrong.

The good news is that Church Radius is now completely and officially LIVE! Wahoo.

Technorati : church, church management software, church software

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Bad Error Message == Bad Usability

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:40:01 GMT

Error messages should be helpful. Bad error messages disrespect the user by saying, "something is wrong but I'm not going to tell you". I've made that point before.

Today I was treated to a paragraph-long error message explaining password complexity rules. The password that failed was this:

3"[cU8jlBe4vG}Zx{3^6@3

Look at this password with me. It's plenty long (22 char). It has numbers, uppercase characters, lowercase characters, and non-alphanumeric characters. It's a good random password. It was, in fact, randomly generated by Keith Browns's PasswordMinder.

I dissected the paragraph of error message to find buried in the middle this rule: must not have been changed within the last 1 day. Oh. The problem was not complexity but that my password had been reset yesterday. Here I was trying to be responsible by immediately changing my password after having it reset...

What really irks me is that the error condition is known specifically but the error message is generic. If the regular expression for password validation fails, tell me that the password is not complex enough. If I used the same password in the past, tell me that. If I cannot change my password today because it was changed yesterday, tell me THAT.

When the specific error condition is known, tell the user exactly what is wrong and whether or not it is his/her fault. That way he/she can act appropriately without resorting to detective work.

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Paste Special and Macros in Word 2007

Derek Hatchard — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 01:37:03 GMT

I've been trying out Office 2007 for a few weeks to give the ribbon UI a chance. I'm a shortcut key fanatic and frig, frig, FRIG!!! I frequently use Paste Special to paste unformatted text. In shipping versions of Word I press Alt+E, S, Ctrl+End, Enter (I'm pretty fast at that combo). Eventually I get around to recording a macro and assigning it Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V. With the new ribbon interface I have to press Alt+E, C, V, S, Ctrl+End, Enter. Not too short for a "shortcut".

"Oh, Derek," you say. "Stop whining and go create a macro." Sure, OK. Wait a minute... How do I create a macro? There is no longer a Tools menu. No mention of macros on any of the tabs. Grrrr...

The solution? Go to File | Word Options. Select Views. Check Developer Tools. A new Developer tab now shows up providing access to macros and some other stuff (like XML schemas). Yeah, I know - exceedingly intuitive compared to Tools | Macro | Record New Macro.

Now, I'm not exactly a Word power user but I can hold my own, and I suspect I am not the only person who is not going to appreciate feeling like a novice in my word processor. I am convinced that ribbon-enabled Office 2007 products will ultimately ship with a compatibility mode (standard menus, toolbars, etc.). I personally won't use it, I'll fumble my way through figuring out the new UI. But lack of a compat mode will hinder adoption. Or maybe everyone has forgotten how essential it was to have a WordPerfect compatibility mode.

Update: Turns out the Developer tab is also how you edit document properties like Author and Title. I was wondering where that functionality went since it's not accessible under the File menu. Personally I think this feature should have been made more accessible, not less. Document properties can really matter when you start putting things into SharePoint or some other document management system.

Technorati : microsoft, office 12, office 2007

Read a great book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

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Another Bad Error Message

Bad Error Message == Bad Usability

Paste Special and Macros in Word 2007