To Blog or Not To Blog...

We have been having some internal discussion at the company I work for about blogging both internally and externally.

Now I am not very prolific or anything so my blog is probably not a big deal. In fact it seems like it is more of a novelty than anything else. Every now and then someone will come up to me and tell me that they stumbled across my blog and found a couple of interesting (i.e. funny) things. The issue "the company" has with blogging is twofold; first that I not reveal anything that would compromise the competitive secrets or that I not tarnish the image. Both of which I understand I have honored. I don't mention any specific vendors or names. I mean really - what programmer in the Enterprise has not had a problem with the infrastructure folks.

Internally, we want to start blogging as a way of documenting things in the same vein that MSFT seems to be going - that is that is more than just communicating what is going on at any given moment but also as a way of documenting things. I find it interesting how many blogs MSFT people have posted and the amount of information on them. In fact, many blogs seem to be a replacement for traditional documentation. Which as long as I have a strong search engine - works fine for me.

Which brings me to the one thing that is preventing me from rolling internal blogs out - how do I find anything. We plan on using MOSS and Office 2007 as our blogging platform, which actually works pretty well. The only concern is how strong the MOSS search engine is. I guess the only way to tell is to try, but I am just dragging my heals. I have so much other stuff on my plate that it's hard to get any momentum behind this.

As I write this I feel the energy building, I just hate a whiner.

Services (part 1 of many)

I not been blogging much lately because I have felt like what I have been working on is just not blog-worthy. We "outsource" most of our infrastructure services to an internal division; which was recently turned over to a large outsourcing firm. So I have been spending much of my time "training" the folks who I interact with on a near daily basis to do what I need them to do. As it turned out this was not a trivial task. And that's all I have to say about that. :-)

I am beginning to look at building out some data services. In the Investment Management business data is king; especially market data. What I am learning (or should I say re-learning or feeling pain around) is that without the data in place the service is nearly useless. So my project is really turning into data project where I am bringing in and reconciling market data vendor feeds. Oh yeah and by the way I am exposing them as a service.

Which has me questioning myself; why a service in the first place? I just want to make sure I am actually providing real value and not just overhead. I think the key reason for a service here is provide a single well define abstraction of the backend. We have so much market data and so many sources of market data; that providing a flexible abstraction makes sense. My expectation is that we will be consuming this data right from Excel (the universal financial application platform) as well as many of our custom applications.

I remember presentations back in the mid-90’s when I was a Microsoft and we were listening to the early internal presentations on Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) by Pat Helland and James Utzschneider. They were talking about MTS interception and how you can accomplish cool things when you can get in the middle. That is exactly what we are trying to do. Once we get the abstraction of the data, we can begin to do some cool things.

My biggest concern about building a service is performance. In past lives when I have built services I would always warn people that if you need fast performance then web services you should think long and hard about not using web services. Of course there are ways that you can “cache” data outside of the service, but now you start to run into the dirty cache problem. I want to go back and read Pat Helland’s fiefdoms articles from a bunch of years ago to get my head back into this problem space. I recall Roger Sessions also doing some similar work based on Pat’s original article.

Next decision is what Framework bits to use; WebMethod (.NET 2.0) or WCF (.NET 3.0)? I know .NET 2.0 pretty well; so I feel confident I can get something done fairly quickly on those bits. But why do something on the “legacy” asmx platform? Why not just bite the learning curve now? I assume the interop between the two just works; so if I wanted to the service to be in WCF and the client to be either that would be OK.

I was just noticed the bottom the page (I write this in Word first) coming up. And I didn’t think I had anything to write about...

When the Sh!t Hits the Fan

I am trying to get away for a two week vacation; which is in and of itself a challenge. You know the drill. In the weeks leading up to a longer vacation there is this tidal wave of work that needs to get done. Whether you are actually wrapping up work, handing it off or getting it to a state where it can wait until you get back. I am doing all three, as is usually the case. So by the time I leave on vacation I feel like I actually need one. Badly!

This week has been one of those ones where I have been doing all of the above and on top of it our source control system got hosed. I had a friend tell me that Mercury is in retrograde and therefore she was not surprised that this happened when it did. Not sure I understand, but I am sure feeling the pain. I think Murphy and Mercury are definitely related. So Tuesday I made the call to switch from our current SCC system to a new one - Team Foundation Server.

Only problem is that the new one has way more features than the old one. So not only do we have a technical switch over we need to do some quick and minimal process modeling to get the system up and running. We took the small company approach to this and just locked a small group of the more senior developers in a room and told them to bang this out together. Things are looking pretty good except that we are waiting for a license to unlock the crippled version of the software. So close.

Ahh, I can almost feel the sand between my toes...

TechEd: Something new, Something old

I am in Orlando, FL at TechEd. I have not attended that many TechEd conferences in my career; I was mostly a PDC bigot. I think this is my third or forth TechEd conference. There is another guy from my division here who is all of about 25 years old and I can’t help but notice the difference in how we approach the conference. The first thing of note is where each of us is at this moment – about 10pm on Monday night.

I am in my hotel room typing this entry and getting ready for bed. He is out partaking of the different events being sponsored by Microsoft and/or the different vendors here at the conference. I think I heard that there are things going until 1am tonight. There was a time when I would be out until the wee hours, stumble back into my hotel room for a couple hours of sleep and a shower and make the first session of the morning. On more than one occasion I was still a little (OK allot) intoxicated in that first session I have this image that my colleague is doing just that – but I don’t want to incriminate him .

Ahhh, youth.

I tend to go to sessions that fall into one of two categories; either ones on topics that I know very little about or where I want network with the presenter and/or other attendees. My expectation is that any detail I see here I will have forgotten by the time I leave. So I am just trying to get the gist of something. My colleague, on the other hand, seems to be focusing on WPF in hopes that he learns enough to start using it when he returns to the office. Part of the rationale I think is that I have to bring big concepts together and understand paradigm changes; whereas he needs to just bang out code.

Lastly, the food. I just can’t eat that conference food anymore. I am convinced that it’s the reason I ended up sleeping through a couple post lunch presentations. I realize that may be hard to believe after reading that I was still blitzed at breakfast. I have experimented enough with the permutations of this enough to know that the food was certainly the nail in the coffin. I think at 25 I could eat just about anything. Now 15 years later, it’s another story altogether. I think there should be a special dietary line for guys like me – I don’t know what to call it but I know what it would look like. Hey I know what you’re thinking – not it’s not a can of Ensure. It is much lighter; less pasta and meat more vegi’s and sustaining foods; you get the picture.

Anyway, times have certainly changed – at least for me. Maybe I can find the retirement room.

Annoyed with MSDN Magazine

My reading habits around MSDN magazine changed recently and now I am back to getting the print version of the magazine - I have a complaint about the cover. For the past couple of years I have been trying to exclusively read MSDN magazine online and so I let the print subscription expire. Well that was just not working for me since I rarely read an MSDN article in one sitting. So I turned my print subscription on and I have a small bone to pick. But first a little more back-story.

As the number of products and technologies available to build applications has grown I have found that I can no longer be an expert in everything. Rather I have had to focus my depth on a few technologies and be at the 100/200 level on the remaining ones. You might be scratching your head going “then why is the depth of MSDN magazine a problem?” Simply because the intersection of what I am going deep on and articles in MSDN is smaller [which, by the way, is exactly what it feels like the editors are striving for and is a good thing]. So my typical MSDN experience is reading 1, maybe 2 articles in depth and skimming the rest.

Well that is not exactly my typical MSDN experience; which brings me to why I feel like venting a little today. In actuality, the first thing I do when I get any magazine is to rip out all the marking stuff. You know the stuff I am talking about all those things from vendors and subscription blow-ins. I hate them because I can't flip through the pages without stopping on one of these. They are like bookmarks someone else put in a book - they are never what I am looking for. Only after removing all these obstructions do I feel that I can actually absorb the content.


Well, this is the second month I have noticed a new cover style for MSDN – the cover that folds back over the outside. It has been my experience that on most magazine covers when the fold-out that the fold out actually tucks into the magazine. Given my routine of cleaning up my magazines before I read them I would open the front cover, flip open the fold-out and see if it was anything interesting. Why a fold-out? Sometimes I have been rewarded with some nice panoramic nature scene and I don’t mind so much. But I digress…regardless my next step is to rip off the fold-out part.

In comes MSDN with the fold-out cover that folds outward; back across the front of the magazine. So in this case if I rip off the fold-out part then I am removing the cover of the magazine. For MSDN, more than other magazines I get this is unacceptable since I use the cover to find articles I want. So I left the cover the way it was.

Here is the problem; once I open the darn thing now the cover becomes an absolute annoyance. It keeps getting caught on things. Torn. Battered and otherwise abused. Which leaves me no other solution then to rip off the fold-out (and be left with this faceless magazine) or to just toss the magazine [hey I used to be the kind of guy who would buy a new car when the windshield wipers needed to be changed].

This leads me to one of two conclusions; either the folks at Microsoft have been spying on me in my favorite reading location (very gross). Or I am not the only one that has this cleanup ritual (almost as scary).

Or it could be I just needed something to write about. I don't have much time before my next meeting so this is best I could do on short notice. Don't worry I am not loosing any sleep over this one.

A Win is a Win

A win is a win is a close cousin to the win–win outcome. Recently at my place of work (which I cannot publicly identify here – suffice it to say its corporate America / Fortune 100) I had to compromise in order to achieve the high level goal and objectives; but not via the implementation originally planned. Just thought I would share this experience since it served as a profound reminder to me on the importance of meeting the goal/objective and not being too close to the implementation details. This is something I am personally struggling with lately as I find myself envisioning more and implementing less.

In this particular case it was around a code generator we have written to generate all the store procedures and data access code for .NET applications. For a number of reasons we ended up with two implementations that from a high level did the same thing. Each had features the other did not have. Since I am on the Architectural team I was really driving my implementation since it address more of the shared scenarios needed by the developers. The problem was that who was going to maintain this implementation? I could not, I have other fish to fry and need this initiative to be owned more by those who will be using it. It became apparent to me that this was just not going to happen; the reasons range from the “not grown here” mentality of developers to the general lack of understanding of what the tool did.

So in order to evolve the tool and to enable it to evolve; I had to make the hard decision to use the other code base. This was more of an ego thing than anything else. So once I was able to get over that the move was absolutely perfect. We are now going to have one of our top developers working on this key part of our development tools and I will be providing some high level guidance.

The reason this is not a win-win; even though it may seem so up until this point…We spent a bunch of money working on both of these tools. Most of the work on each tool was done by consultants; one who is very expensive and the other who is moderately expensive. Now I struggle with the age old problem of what happens when the consultant leaves or we decide we can't afford him anymore; which has already happened to one of the consultants.

What are you doing, right now?

I am having one of those ornery moments and I am taking it out on Outlook. It locked my machine up hard today and I don’t know why; which really burns my toast.

I was just scanning through the boatload of emails in Outlook 2007 and noticed an orange status bar continuously scanning on the To-Do Bar. Here is what starts running through my mind...

"I appreciate you showing me that something is happening; but can you throw me a bone...What the are you doing? Did you ever consider that maybe I want you to stop?"

So I set out to try and figure out what Outlook was doing; the way a non-developer may...

I tried hovering over the area – nothing.
I tried clicking – nothing.
I tried right clicking – nothing.
I asked the help system – nothing (don’t get me started).
I asked Google – nothing (could not form narrow enough query).

So what else can I do but to just rant on my blog about it. Wouldn’t you know it; I soon as I went to grab a screen shot – it stopped. So I took the screen shot anyway and circled the place where this happening. On the off chance that someone actually reads this AND they know what the heck that bar means; please let me know.

I think Microsoft has done a better job at reducing the number of pauses that happen in the software; where things just stop and have you wait for some “background” process to complete. It is my opinion (and we all know how many of these there are and what they’re worth) that it would be better to just tell the user what is going on; it’s the not knowing that makes it hard.

For instance, when I delete a file in Windows why does it take so long? What would be nice is if Windows told me in the status box…

"Please wait while I put this file in the recycle bin for you"
"Oh, this is taking longer than I expected because someone else is hogging up the disk channel"

[Note: Of course I hope that for the sake of my Mom that they would clean up the message a little; I can just imagine trying to explain that message to her (unlike Don Box's mom, my Mom does not know assembler).] Now that I know why I have to wait maybe there is something I can do about it – “Oh yeah, I started that Disk Cleanup utility a couple of minutes ago, maybe I should pause it”. Users will start to draw correlations between things and just become smarter.

Conceptually what I am describing sound nice; but as a software guy this pretty challenging. It seems like it requires design/architecture that supports the exchange of this type of information. Of course security would have to be honored. Not to mention that you may end up telling people more about the internals of what you are doing (or not doing) than you would like to. This would make a good thing to report on when capturing data around user experience, which Microsoft (and others) seem to be doing more of.

Sometimes I wish I was working on something this cool.