April 2006 Entries

Jeffrey Palmero recently had a great post where defends his belief that software development is not too hard, but instead it's far to easy. While the post is great, covers a wide variety of opposing views and successfully defends it's premise, I think that he left one section uncompleted. Jeffrey begins to build a new paradigm of software developer levels that should replace the Mort, Elvis, Einstien theory that has successfully been trashed recently by Scott Bellware. Unfortunately, Jeffrey doesn't expound on the idea to the depths that I think it could, and should, be explored.The interesting...

Tonight we had our first meeting of the Edmonton .NET User Group and were proud to play host to Jean-Paul Boodhoo. For a first meeting, we sure packed them in (approximately 45 people) and surprisingly very few left when the Oilers' game started. I was very happy with the fact that so many of the attendees were people that I had not seen before. New face, new ideas and some great questions that really pushed Jean-Paul and even put him on the spot to justify the cost of writing 10 lines of test code for one line...

Tomorrow marks the day that the Edmonton .NET User Group will truly come to life. For the six of you that read this blog, drop by the Milner Library in downtown Edmonton. Come for the swag and stay for the speaker if you must.

Scott Bellware's recent post Mort or Elvis? A Question for a Bygone Era is more than a rant on the inadequacies of pigeon holing developers into roles created and propagated by a group of uninspired thinkers. This post captures the raw emotional frustration that many developers have with the current state of the industry. Heck Sam Gentile even called it the best post of the year.For me, Scott's message touched on ideas that are almost taboo to talk about. For instance, waterfall. I ran into it today at work. PM Boy wanted to enforce his...

I've had the chance to work at a few different companies, small and large, and see both the differences in marketing and it's effectiveness. No matter what anyone tells you, marketing is what makes software companies successful or failures. It has nothing to do with the product (software) that is being sold. All a person had to do is look at the last dot com bubble and dot com bubble 2.0. It's all about marketing. Half of these sites have business models that could stand up in a first year business course at Hill Billy...

Economics....like I know shite about this. I hardly passed my first year micro and macro courses, but I think I've gained a greater appreciation of these subject as I've become more aged. Mostly I have my late night, wine and food induced, conversations with friends that live out in the sticks to thank for this. More recently though, I've started to see some of the effects of economics as it exists in the real world. Okay, Alberta's economy isn't really the real world, but hell, it's my world.So why would an isolationist like me care to...

It's been confirmed. I am going to DevTeach in Montreal in a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to this for a number of reasons.I'm really geeked up about the knowledge I'm going to absorb. This is the first time that I've been to a conference and I'm looking forward to seeing how effective the knowledge transfer will be.The second reason I'm stoked is that I'm going to be sitting in on the User Group leaders sessions. I'm all geeked up about the Edmonton .NET User Group, and these sessions will give me a wealth...

David Weiss blogs here about an impressive stack of hardware that he supports for use in a test lab at Microsoft. Yep they're all Macs...and yes you did read that right. They're all at Microsoft.The configurations are amazing. The one that caught my eye was the IOGear KVMs putting 64 Mac minis into one monitor, keyboard and mouse. I also really like the idea of having a "hallway" between the desks. Nothing is more difficult than climbing under and over a set of desks to fix the connection of a rogue mouse cable.I'm the Igloo...

One of the big reasons that Steven R, Steve Y, Brad, Mike M and I originally picked up the idea of starting the Edmonton .NET User Group was because we wanted better meeting content quality. Steven R has been doing a bang up job, but one of the things that I've noticed is that, because we have to get our big ticket speakers from out of town, we need to have some coin lying around to bring them in. To counter act this we've got three choices. Raise the money, get more local speakers and/or do webcasts.Until...

So I upgraded to Community Server 2.0 RTM back about a month ago and since then I've been fighting to get my favourite skin (Foggy Valley) to run on my site. Every time I'd switch the skin from one that shipped with CS 2.0, I'd reopen my blog to be greeted with a "Skin Not Found" error. I've searched high and low for the cause of this to no avail. Finally tonight I was sitting around with nothing to do so I took another shot at fixing this.My search on Google actually lead me to something useful...

It seems that everyone has their own methodology now. It may be TDD, XP, Agile, RUP or some other flavour of the month. Last night, while I was less than sober, I had a conversation with Mike about two things that are usually last minute thoughts during the software development lifecycle: Reporting and Installation scripts.I've built reporting solutions for years and in that time I've used a number of products including Crystal Reports, Active Reports and more recently SQL Report Services. During all that time I've also worked in companies where I've had to spec new...

I started listening to John Bristowe's new baby Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) today. I'm really stoked about the idea that this podcast represents. One of the main reasons for starting the newly formed Edmonton .NET User Group was to try to build a stronger community here in Edmonton. Here's hoping that we can get John to feature someone from up here in Edmonton.I'm the Igloo Coder and I'm no longer talking about hockey.

I was out at a local establishment indulging in a few sinful liquids when the conversation turned to the fact that neither myself or my companion could identify with the new wave of methodologies. We just aren't able to see how Agile or TDD or XP are the answer to all of our development woes. None of this things, in our minds, are silver bullets for the software devleopment process. Yes there are features from each that we like, we adore or we try to implement in our development environments. We also see things that we...

I went to www.geekswithblogs.com tonight and found that they'd been spammed hard. Someone had setup a blog and was posting to the main feed abot cialis and other such "inflamitory" drugs. Pretty funny that a semi closed community like geekswithblogs can get suckered and have this happen.

Today I have been fighting with a problem on our new IIS6 testing environments. I've installed all the software onto the servers and then opened IIS and browsed to one of the .aspx pages in the newly installed website. Every time that I did this I received a Page Not Found HTTP 404 error. When I browsed to a .htm or .html file, that file was appropriately displayed in the browser. The next thing I tried was opening Internet Explorer and manually entering the URL to the .aspx page. Still no luck, and yes the...

You can say you heard it here first. The new Edmonton .NET User Group has formed. The user group was created with the primary goal of providing powerful speaker content, learning opportunities and technical networking to the developer community in Edmonton.Like I said, we are launching the group. We are striving to make the meetings and events as professional as possible. Initial meetings are going to concentrate on content, but in the not to distant future we will be adding niceties (catering, freebies, etc.) as well.I know, I know. Get to the important stuff, like...

Jean-Paul Boodhoo is posting a great series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on using nAnt to perform the builds for you applications. Since starting my last project I've become a huge proponent of nAnt, but Jean-Paul opened my eyes to an idea I had not considered.My experience has been that nAnt is used to perform builds on a build machine either on demand or through continuous integration. Jean-Paul suggests that nAnt should be used by all developers to test their builds at their desktops. In my current environment we have nothing integrated with nAnt. No...

I found a page on MSDN that has a listing of VS 2005 Security articles and webcasts. The selection inclueds everything from Design and Deploying Secure Web Apps to VSTS: Building Robust and Reliable Software. I'm the Igloo Coder and the igloo is currently at a threat advisory of walrus brown (a.k.a. holy crap).

I saw this post about MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition just now on Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day blog. Contrary to what Greg says, it is free as in beer (beer at a free beer event of course). MS really must do something about that product name though....it's just too damn long. I'm the Igloo Coder and my host ice flow is now surrounded by a whole bunch of guest flows.

I was poking around on the internet today and I ran across this post, about some free tutorials, by Darren Gosbell. I went over to the MSDN UK site link for the .Net Framework Nuggets and watched a few. Definitely worth spending some time looking through the long list of webcasts that are available.