Glenn Bock over at Microsoft recently blogged that he was not a robot because he uses the following non-Microsoft technologies: A Mac Mini (which really doesn’t count, Microsoft doesn’t make computers and as far as I am aware they still write software for the Mac),  an iPod, Yahoo, Google, NUnit (MS tech related), Firefox, OpenSource, Resharper (MS tech related), Ruby on Rails, and Linux.  That’s all well and good, but would he still follow the Programming Promises? I bet he at least tries, though I’d also guess he’s a tad biased. :)  Regardless he’s also right in he wouldn’t be doing a good job if he wasn’t examining and using alternatives, especially when they were better then the items he could dogfood.  It’s a reminder that we all need to continually be exploring and expanding our exposure to technology from all fronts.

Attended the Microsoft ArcReady event yesterday. Got a chance to see Brian H. Prince and Josh Holmes again. I always look forward to try to absorb what I can from these two, very very bright guys.

Josh made a point to show me his new 2007 Road King, hinting that it was somehow relevant to his job. It seems that Josh is doing what looks like is going to be an awesome show, called CodeToLive. He is taking the bike across America with Steve Loethen and interviewing developers. Based on the trailer (which he showed during the presentation) and the first episode, it looks like this is going to be a blast to follow. CodeToLive is definitely a mantra I live by, developing isn’t what I do, it is who I am. I’m hoping to see many more episodes from those two.

Due to an administrative error (specifically an admin confusing Kansas City and Cleveland), there was a surprisingly small turnout. That did not prevent a few spirited exchanges though, it was interesting to hear how some could not fathom how Twitter and Twittervision applied to the concept of Platforms being better products then Applications. One of the real benefits of these events is getting a chance to interact with fellow professionals in different areas with different background. Getting those unique perspectives and having a chance to articulate your own positions really helps put things into focus. So regardless of the turn out it was a worth while and lively crowd in my opinion.

Josh’s presentation was enjoyable as always, interspersed with personal stories and anecdotes that help illustrate situations we may find in our day to day jobs. The first story he relayed was his treacherous experiencing trusting a single data provider, namely NavTeq. The second related to utilizing your users to drive design. His alum Franciscan University of Stubenville, had installed some new sidewalks and were dismayed to see none of the students using them. They had elected, rather, to cut through the grass along a shorter and more direct route. When the university expanded and added new buildings, the initially did not put any sidewalks in. Instead the planted grass. They then waited until the students had worn trails in the grass along their preferred routes and paved those. It’s really quite a good story about the importance of user-centric and user-driven design.

Brian talked next and demonstrated how some of the concepts are used at QuickSolutions. You’d think it’d be incredibly boring, but Brian’s skill as a presenter is such that you really don’t notice. He demoed a bit with the BizTalk Labs site, specifically the Connectivity Service and went over some of the procedures QS uses. A joy to listen to as always.

Josh also gave us a brief overview of Tafiti (which I had seen before, but it’s always good when the MS guys start doing new demos ;) ). And things wrapped up then with the usual giveaways. A few books, a copy of Expression and Office 2007. Though my chances were good I walked away empty handed, yet not empty headed :) I am definitely looking forward to the next ArcReady!

Don’t forget to checkout CodeToLive, and a reminder that CodeMash registration will be opening soon!

So, at work I’m having the fun experience of having to write a job scheduling app, using MSSQL as the back end. One of the things I had to figure out was how to determine of a day was, say, the first Monday of the month or the third Thursday or so forth. I couldn’t find any built in functions that did this, so I had to write one. Behold:

Create Function fn_ReturnOrdinalDay( @TestDate datetime) returns int
begin
declare @ordinal int, @loopdate datetime

set @loopdate = @TestDate
set @ordinal = 0

while datepart(m, @TestDate) = datepart(m, @loopdate)
begin

    set @ordinal = @ordinal + 1
    set @testdate = dateadd(d, -7, @testdate)
end

return @ordinal
end

When called like fn_ReturnOrdinalDay(getdate()) will return 1 – 5 depending on how many times that day has occured. For instance for today (Monday June 18th, 2007) it would return 3 since this is the Third Monday of the Month.

Back in the day I used CrimsonEditor alot, it was a good, free source code editor. Unfortunately it was a one man job and the developer stopped maintaining the application in late 2004. Enter the EmeraldEditor group! EmeraldEditor intends to be a new CrimsonEditor-like editor (ugh that’s an awkward scentence), written to be cross-platform and open source. But the news gets better, CrimsonEditor itself was open sourced by it’s author and the EE team has effectively taken over maintenance of it! So grab the code and get cracking! I’m glad to have CrimsonEditor back and look forward to EmeraldEditor.

Microsoft has announced the private alpha of PopFly (love the .ms domain BTW!), their Yahoo Pipes! competitor. Looks like there’s a bit of social networking involved as well with the ability to vote on user’s projects and track their progress. One of the big things going in Microsoft’s favor is the Visual Studio integration. See some details here. I asked for an invite so we’ll see….

The latest issue of Redmond Developer News has a column by William F. Zachmann (got to have the middle initial), BTW he doesn’t appear to have a blog…I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. Somehow blogless commentators feel less “authorative” to me…or something. Anyway, he talks about a phenomenon that he terms GWHHMs or Gwhyms, otherwise known as “Geeks WHo Hate Microsoft”. His main point is a good one: “Remain open to alternatives that make sense when they do in fact make sense.” However, I think he comes down a bit to harshly on the “alternatives” in my opinion.

He does a good job of condemning some of the zealotry that’s out there, but unfortunately he really only talks about half the problem. There is another side. GWOLMs (pronounced Qualms) or Geeks Who Only Like Microsoft. Much like Gwhyms, Gwolms are found in every IT department across the Industry. They will turn a blind eye to any and all solutions that are not stamped with the Redmond Seal of Approval. They can cost your company thousands of dollars in licensing fees for potentially inferior products. They are the ones who dismiss AJAX until Microsoft releases their AJAX Library or dismiss Ruby until Microsoft releases IronRuby and then fawn over how wonderful it all is.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Microsoft in a number of ways, I make a living coding in C# using the .NET framework. However I also run Firefox as my main browser and use a GTK based IM Client (Pidgin). I use these not because they are open source or because they are not Microsoft. I use them because they are (in my opinion) the best solutions out there. I recently utilized PDFBox in a solution for the same reasons.

Also, I can not agree with his recommendation to make Microsoft solutions your “default choice”, my advice is to look at all possibilities in a problem area and choose the best one that fits in with your style, budget, and resources. One shouldn’t have a “default choice” in my opinion.

Personally, that’s why I can’t wait for the next CodeMash, a conference like that epitomizes how software development should work (incidentally Microsoft was a sponsor of CodeMash, so even they realize the importance of learning from one another).

Ah the first real blog post in a while, and even this is late, hoping to get back in the groove here with this one!

After leaving Cleveland at 6am I ended up arriving at Day Of DotNet a little late. Not too bad for a three hundred mile drive, I ended up walking into Josh Holmes’ talk on “Architecting the User Experience” (part of the ArcReady series, this was like a sneak-peek) about 10 minutes late. What I saw was awesome though , definitely some things to think about. Jason Follas, who I met at CodeMash and an organizer for DoDN, was kind enough to grab my name tag for me in exchange for me doing a head count of the session (76 people if you’re curious).

After having a few minutes to mull over what I had heard, it was time for the next session. “Hardcore Reflection” by Dustin Campbell. This was by far the most valuable session of the the day, for me. Dustin was a great speaker and really knew his stuff. I learned alot there that I’m looking forward to using in my day to day work.

I then had a chance to attend red-gate Software’s vendor session, mostly a bore-fest infomercial. Then Lunch, Domino’s pizza (if you could get it), I had a couple pizza’s and called the wife.

Off to “Next Generation UI” session by Mark Miller. Poor guy, his speaking skills are awesome, but the technology did not want to cooperate! I heard his second session went well, but I had opted to go to “Multithreading in Windows Forms Applications”. Patrick Steele gave a good talk on the basics of multi-threading a form application, I was hoping for something more in depth, but all in all a good refresher.

Then we had the Microsoft Vendor Session, which was also hosted by Josh Holmes, he didn’t have anything prepared so I threw out the DLR and IronRuby. Well, he didn’t have IronRuby, but we got to see some of the DLR in Silverlight 1.1 with IronPython, cool stuff! Someone asked about Silverlight on Linux (which Mono is working on). Josh said that if it made business sense Microsoft would do it (being that they’re a business and all), but he didn’t think that the Linux made much business sense right now. He’s probably right (though I did rib him a bit about Dell putting Ubuntu on consumer systems now), but sometimes developer and community good will pays more then a strict bean counter could see. Could you imagine if Microsoft announced Linux support for Silverlight? I think it would be a brilliant PR move myself. You keep saying your open and look at these cool standards and we’re cross platform, and blah blah blah. Just do it already! :)

Anyway, wrapped up the day with Brian Prince’s talk on “Agile Processes”, I didn’t get a chance to hear Brian speak at CodeMash, and I must say I came away impressed. He’s quite an awesome presenter! I hope to incorporate some of his company’s ideas into my own practices, and at least I’ll be more prepared if I ever get a job at an agile shop.

I was glad I went, I learned alot and had a great amount of fun and will be attending the next one! We need more events like this in the Northeast Ohio area!

Jim Holmes and James Avery‘s book “Windows Developer Power Tools” now has a companion website. WinDevPowerTools is a simple, yet interesting website. Once you register you can create your own toolbox letting you share with others those utilities you find useful. You can then browse via the tag cloud and “love” those tools you think worthy.

Right now it appears that only Jim and James can add tools (they’re working on getting the ones from their book up). I think a tool submission page would really be useful. Letting users submit tools would add to the overhead of the site of course, and I’m not sure if the authors are willing or able to take the responsibility. Even though currently the only method of getting a tool added is to email James. So maybe it would actually free him up more. However, I think a user based submission method could really add to the usefulness of the site. There’s a definite feeling of community trying to be built (after all one of the authors helped organize CodeMash), freeing up the tool submission process would really increase that. Maybe that’s coming down the road.

The site opens up the possibility for some interesting statistical profiling. Adding the ability to add some user specific profile information (i.e. industry, location, etc) could lead to some interesting information beyond the current “Most Loved Tools”. I’d be interested to see what tools were in how many toolboxes broken down by industry, location, or even age group. Right now you just submit desired nick, email, and desired password. Which may be a big plus to some people, but limits any of the interesting reporting that would be possible. Of course any demographic information should be totally optional.

One of the hallmarks of the developer community is the sharing of information, a site like this could definitely help with disseminating information on tools. I could see sites created for Mac and Linux very easily (maybe with companion books?), with a unified toolbox between the sites. Especially with the number of open source cross platform tools.

WDPT is a site just starting out, but with the possibility of being very useful to the Windows developer community, sort of a FreshMeat for the rest of us with a bit of social networking for spice. Be sure to check it out!

I went ahead and bit at one of the101 FeedFlare ideas on the FeedBurner site. I went ahead an wrote #25: Display categories/tags. See how to set up the flare here. Oh and if you don’t use FeedBurner, I highly recommend it. Let me know what you all think!

I found out that the Sysinternals Suite has been published by Mark Russinovich via MSDN Blogs, ironically there’s no mention on his blog about this release. Anyway, Sysinternals stuff has always been good, but the Suite page doesn’t list the contents of the download. It only contains this vague description:

This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

So in the interest of community involvement, for your reading pleasure, here are the contents of the Suite:

1. accesschk: return access rights by user or group
2. accessenum: shows you who has access to what
3. adrestore: undelete active directory objects
4. autologon: autologon utility
5. autoruns: view system startup info in a gui
6. autorunsc: command line version of the above
7. bginfo: create backgrounds with system info
8. cacheset: control the Cache Managers working set size
9. clockres: find timer resolution
10. contig: by file defragmenter
11. ctrl2cap: makes the capslock a control key
12. dbgview: display DbgPrint calls
13. diskext: Display volume disk-mappings
14. diskmnt: diskmonitor for NT
15. diskmon: monitor disk access
16. diskview: disk sector utility with GUI
17. du: disk usage
18. efsdump: encrypted file information
19. filemon: monitor file access
20. handle: show open file handles
21. hex2dec: convert hex to decimal
22. junction: Create NTFS symlinks
23. ldmdump: dump the logical disk managers database
24. listdlls: show loaded dlls
25. livekd: realtime kernel debug
26. loadord: display device load order
27. logonsessions: lists active logins
28. movefile: move inuse files on next reboot
29. newsid: change a computer SID
30. ntfsinfo: file system info
31. pagedfrg: defrag page file and registry.
32. pendmoves: show file moves scheduled for next reboot
33. physmem: physical memory viewer
34. pipelist: view current pipes
35. portmon: Monitor port activity
36. procexp: Process Explorer, monitor running proccess
37. ProcFeatures: process information
38. Procmon: monitor file system, registry, and processes
39. psexec: execute processes remotely
40. psfile: show remotely opened files
41. psgetsid: display SID of computer or user
42. psinfo: get system info
43. pslist: process info
44. pskill: kill processes
45. psloggedon: whose logged on?
46. psloglist: dump event logs
47. pspasswd: change passwords
48. psservice: control services
49. psshutdown: shutdown/reboot a computer
50. pssuspend: suspend a process
51. regdelnull: deletes nondeletedable registry keys
52. reghide: creates hidden registry keys
53. regjump: go straight to a registry key
54. regmon: monitor registry activity
55. rootkitrevealer: scan for rootkits
56. sdelete: DoD compliant secure delete
57. shareenum: scan file shares for security holes
58. sigcheck: File version and signature checker
59. streams: view alternate NTFS streams
60. strings: strings utility
61. sync: flush data to disk
62. tcpvcon: console version of tcpview
63. tcpview: view open sockets
64. volumeid: set labels on FAT or NTFS drives
65. whois: whois service
66. winobj: object manager viewer
67. zoomit: zoom and draw on the screen

These are all great utilities, now that you know what’s in it, grab the Suite from Microsoft!