Microsoft’s marquee development tool is poised to make some great strides in making .NET developers even more productive than they are already today. Though it is still only Beta 1 and MS does not plan to release the tool until late 2010, there is a significant numbers of features that appeared to be production ready (along with a few that are currently promised for Beta 2).

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know your personal answers on FaceBook Quizes/Games/Applications can and are sold to advertisers? Including email address, name, address, relationship status, medical info, etc. Once you open a FB application the application’s developer has access to everything in your profile!!!

Read the rest of this entry »

As much as I’d like never to debug complicated classic ASP code again, the fact is it’s everywhere in the enterprise today. Here is one way that I have found to speed up the process of supporting classic ASP w/ VS 2008 SP1/3.5.

At the last User Group meeting, I presented the features in the VS08 SP1 and 3.5 Framework. One topic/feature was only lightly covered in the documentation, but really jumped out at me, was that with Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 and 3.5 Framework VS 2008 can debug classic ASP code (script). I tried to find more information online, but the details were hard to find.So after a bit of research and trial and error I am sharing what I learned with you!

Here’s How:

Read the rest of this entry »

Great guideline from Toastmasters Intl.

• Give more than you expect others to give.
• Combine optimism and perseverance.
• See everyone as a diamond in the rough.
• Express appreciation; accept responsibility.
• Keep your ego in check.
• Show respect for the people around you.
• Treat team members as family.
• Be a source of inspiration.
• Stress cooperation, not competition.
• Maintain a sense of humor.

http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/FreeResources/QuestionsaboutLeadership/PositiveLeadership/LawsofPositiveLeadership.aspx

Today I responded to an inquiry as how to judge whether an developer is a Senior/Mid/Junior level.

Here is my rule of thumb (with some commentary):

A senior requires little or no supervision, can work with the business teams independently, understands current technology and is looking ahead to new trends, and constantly creates personal growth opportunities, can lead and mentor other developers. (They make others more valuable as well as themselves)

A mid-level can do tasks independently but needs some guidance on architecture or direction. (Their value is the work they produce)

A junior requires task guidance and supervision. (Their value will begin 12-24 months down the road)

I think in our business we have too many seniors that do not the basic soft skills, are not current with technology, and get promoted because of time in the position and not necessarily what value they create for the organization. This is one reasons organizations are seeing their development maintenance cost continue to increase, but productivity flattening or even decreasing.

I think an ideal IT departments spread would be 20-70-10 (Senior/Mid/Junior) but most are top heavy with seniors that should be mid.

On Tuesday I presented, “Getting the Most Out of SharePoint” at the Web Technologies Conference in Spanish Fort, AL, which was co-sponsored by Microsoft, The Gulf Coast Technology Conference, and Bit-Wizards.

Despite a few technical glitches and last minutes emergencies, the entire day went very well. I received a ton of very positive feedback about how the presentation had a good balance between technical and ‘C’ business type level content, which is great because that was the tightrope I was trying to walk. If you’ve never given a technical presentation, you can’t appreciate how difficult it can be to find the right balance. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are having performance issue with IE 8, follow this authors advice and do the following:

From a Command Prompt window, run the following command:

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

That re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library, an obscure DLL that most people (even Microsoft experts) had never heard about. (Update: 27-Mar: Note that if you try this using Windows Vista, you must do this from an elevated Command Prompt window; type cmd in the Start menu Search box, right-click the Cmd.exe shortcut, and then choose Run As Administrator. For detailed instructions with screen shots, see this post.) …The results {ARE} stunning

Without any fanfare Microsoft’s IE 8 browser’s has already surpassed Google Chrome.

Maybe the following article should have been titled, “In One Day Internet Explorer 8 Eclipses Google Chrome”, rather than, “IE8 launch bumps browser’s market share by 30%”.

Here is the overall findings:

• “IE8’s market share averaged 1.63% for the day Thursday from noon Eastern time onward”
• “By comparison, Google Inc.’s Chrome, which debuted last September, had a 1.15% market share during February”

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9130128&intsrc=news_ts_head

If IBM does in fact buy Sun, which according to the WSJ they are in talks to do, I believe that will officially be the first nail in the coffin for JAVA and its legions of downstream vendors. The language itself has been a mature (if not slightly legacy) technology since Sun lost significant market value and stopped trying to compete directly with Microsoft’s .NET. Spring, struts, and all the other major improvements made to JAVA has been done by third parties for some time. Sun went so far as to public source the language awhile back hoping to keep their costs down while still fostering innovation in that product space. I’m no JAVA junkie, but I have not seen much come from that open source licensing effort that has significantly impacted the software development industry. To me, the idea of IBM throwing a ton of resources on JAVA technologies is optimistic at best.

Update: IBM decided against buying Sun Microsystems which is probably good for both Sun and IBM. Oracle then moved in and snatched up Sun less than a week later. This will be a much healthier relationship for both parties involved and may spur some badly needed innovation in the JAVA space. Still yet that might not translate to better business solutions unless you are running Oracle databases.

Over the last couple days we have had an issue with a development Virtual PC ( VPC ) image. After researching several issues/options, we made the following adjustments which resulted in vast improvements:

• Exclude .VHD and .VSV within our anti-virus program
• Install Virtual Machine Additions
• Stop unnecessary Win Services
  • WSearch
  • UXSms
• Enable Hardware Acceleration
• Fixed W3WP.exe
• Defrag
  • Host PC OS
  • VPC OS

• After making those changes we pre-compacted the virtual hard drive
• Compacted the virtual hard drive

If you have additional tips please send them along and I will include them in this list.