Archives
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Thycotic presented in Rockville, MD at WinProTeam
This last Wednesday, myself and two other members of the Thycotic team presented at the WinProTeam Rockville meeting.
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Bait and switch leaves a sour taste
I am surprised at a new trend (ok, so only based on 2 experiences recently) but companies will make their product available for free (as in beer), get a lot of users and market share - then discontinue the free edition and start charging.
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Presentations at WinProTeam - ADO.NET interfaces, Gentle.NET, LINQ, Refactoring
Unfortunately my co-presenters were not able to make the WinProTeam presentation due to unforeseen circumstances so I went it alone. This meant that the topics had to change a little but the audience seemed agreeable. The schedule for the evening changed to:
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Thycotic is presenting at the WinProTeam Vienna meeting tonight (Wednesday 11/1 6-9pm)
Three sessions will be presented by Jonathan Cogley and John Morales of Thycotic Software at the WinProTeam User Group meeting in Vienna, Virginia tonight.
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MSSQLTips.com
While at the Verify 2006 Conference, I got to catch up with Jeremy Kadlec (one of our local NOVASQL User Group leaders) and found out about some of the new things that Edgewood Solutions are doing. The Edgewood team, who are experts in Microsoft SQL Server, are now publishing a daily Microsoft SQL Server tip on their website
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Upgrading memory in the Toshiba M400 Tablet PC
My new laptop is a Toshiba M400 Tablet PC – it only came with 1GB RAM which I planned to upgrade. I ordered two 1GB sticks of M400–compatible RAM from EZ-Computer (EDGE MEMORY - PERIPHERAL KTT667D2/1G-PE 1GB PC25300 NONECC UNBUFF 200PIN DDR2 SODIMM). When the sticks arrived, I started poking around the back of the tablet only to discover that there was no memory compartment!? After searching around the net, I came across this awesome detailed explanation of the procedure from Toshiba – it was a little more than I bargained for but only took about 10 minutes once I got started. You basically have to remove the keyboard to get access to the memory compartment. I had to do a similar thing a few years back to get access to the hard drive in a VPR Matrix laptop that Best Buy used to sell.
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Verify 2006 Conference : Review
There was a good turnout for the Verify 2006 Conference especially since it is the very first year of the conference. The attendees were typically software testers or software development managers. There weren’t many developers so the Thycotic crew was a little out of our comfort zone but they were a great bunch to pitch on our Secret Server product.
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Verify 2006 Conference: Day One (arrived)
Thycotic is sponsoring our first ever vendor booth at the Verify 2006 Conference in Crystal City, VA (Washington DC Metro Area). The conference is all about testing, testing frameworks and tools but from a quality assurance and developer perspective. Thycotic is well versed in testing since we practice Test Driven Development and use NUnit and NUnitAsp every day!
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Richmond Code Camp 2 : review
At 5:00am on Saturday morning, I headed in to downtown DC to get some prizes and a few books from the Thycotic office. Then off to collect Ryan Olshan at 5:30, and John Morales at 5:45. We hit 95 and headed south for Richmond. The drive was uneventful with most of us still in pre-coffee haze and Bob Marley playing. We got to the Code Camp at the ECPI center well before the kickoff time and claimed our hard earned coffee and bagels (outstanding cream cheese from Panera!).
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Speaking at Richmond Code Camp tomorrow
I will be presenting two sessions at the Richmond Code Camp tomorrow:
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Ryan Olshan (ASP.NET MVP) joins the Thycotic team
Ryan Olshan comes to us from California where his main line of work was focused on the non-profit sector. From redesigning the web presence of Pacific Wildlife Project to creating an application for tracking wayward pigeons for the 911 Pigeon Alert group, Ryan has extended his love for animals to a technological aspect. In 2006, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award in the area of ASP.NET for his ongoing commitment to the ASP.NET community. You can catch him online on many Yahoo! Groups and the ASP.NET Forums as well as StrongTypes.com and blogs.strongcoders.com.
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New office with Pair Programming team room
We have just moved our offices from the Vienna, Virginia area to downtown Washington DC. We now have more space for our team room and have tried new strategies to minimize wiring and optimize communication across the team. Here is a picture of 2 pairing stations in the new team room.
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Pair Programming presentation tonight at NOVASQL
I will be presenting on Pair Programming at the Northern Virginia SQL Server User Group tonight. I have done this presentation several times before but it is always fun to hear new perspectives – tonight should be interesting to hear DBA turned developer opinions (many people in this user group seem to fall into that category).
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Secret Server 1.2 is out! Release notes.
Our next release of Secret Server is out. This release includes lots of performance improvements and minor new features as per customer requests. We have also invested a lot of time in support for browser toolbars which we will be releasing soon. The browser toolbar will communicate with your Secret Server instance and automatically log you into web sites!
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Presenting without slides
I tried something the weekend before last at the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Code Camp ... I went slideless! I presented 3 sessions during the day and I did not have a single slide, not one, nada, nothing. The good news was the audience loved it. I took a few polls during the day and the response was definitely positive.
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Pair Programming at DC Extreme Programming User Group tonight!
I will be presenting on Pair Programming (something we practice daily at Thycotic) tonight at the Washington DC Extreme Programming User Group. The session involves an exercise (which I have blogged about before) but it is always interesting to hear peoples opinions and past experiences. Pair Programming is definitely something that can have great effect in the right setting but requires disciplined practices and the right people to work effectively.
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What motivates software developers?
Developers who simply work for a paycheck have different priorities so I am going to ask you to forget about them for a minute. If you joined software development out of pure passion for the industry then you have a different agenda. Building software is a very creative and constructive process but the intangible nature of software makes the parallels to traditional engineering difficult. The job titles in our industry typically reflect some form of engineering but it seems to have lost its impact (Do most people think of a software engineer and a civil engineer having the same qualities?). Yet we do still share many of the same feelings and priorities as conventional craftsmen.
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How agile is your country?
Google's new Trends service (which appears to be the old Zeitgeist but now on demand) allows you to find out what people are searching on.
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.NET TDD Developer opening at Thycotic!
In our last round of hiring, I had a great response from my blog post so I am trying it again. We are looking for another top calibre developer to join our team - this is a great opportunity to practice agile techniques on the Microsoft .NET platform from an experienced team while working on great products and with interesting clients.
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Reston Code Camp - Register now.
The Reston Code Camp has been announced for June 10th 2006. This will be the 3rd Reston Code Camp - they are a great way to get your skills and knowledge up to date in a single day (and they are free!). You can register here.
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Pair Programming Presented
Over the last few months, I have presented a session on Pair Programming to two User Groups (WinProTeam Rockville and PA FoxPro) and one Code Camp (Richmond this last weekend). I especially enjoy presenting this topic for a number of reasons:
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MVP Reawarded!
I am very pleased to blog that I have been reawarded as a MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional).
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Speaking at the Richmond Code Camp on Saturday, 4/22/2006
I will be presenting on two topics at the Richmond Code Camp on 4/22/2006. The event starts at 8:30AM and runs all day. If you have never been to a Code Camp before, you are missing out. They are a great place to ask questions and find out about technology from your local community.
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Duplicate column name weirdness in ADO.NET
I came across the following issue the other day with a very large stored procedure that had *lots* of columns. Unfortunately I had introduced a duplicate column name by using "as" in my SQL but things definitely work as I expected. Take a look for yourself ...
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Secret Server 1.1 makes the Daily Grind
Mike Gunderloy, one of our early adopters, has added our Secret Server 1.1 release to the Daily Grind today! This is a huge compliment from a guru in tools, development and the developer community. Thanks Mike!
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Feeling your users pain (and release notes for Secret Server 1.1)
It is a wonderful feeling to ship software - it has been a long hard slog to get this round of features complete. Especially while juggling our developers across various projects and client work. This is also a welcome release as we get to use all the new features in our own company Secret Server instance.
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Secret Server 1.1 is out ... go and get it!
I haven't blogged in a few weeks but I have a few good reasons. Client projects with tight deadlines, the final push for our second big release of Thycotic Secret Server and also holding back on the irresistable urge to talk about features that aren't released yet (not much of a marketing person, huh?). We have listened to feedback and added several features as requested by users. One of the biggest new features - new support for Microsoft Access - which means that you DO NOT have to use Microsoft SQL Server to use Thycotic Secret Server anymore! We also have a new built-in import tool that accepts CSV format so you can easily import your AnyPassword or Keepass secrets to try it out with no risk.
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Last minute presentation: Pair Programming in Fairfax with the Potomac Area FoxPro Users Group
Unfortunately the speaker for March is unable to make it so I have been asked if I would present this month instead of later this year. I will be presented on Pair Programming at the Potomax Area FoxPro Users Group on Thursday 2nd March 2006 in Fairfax, VA (I have presented this topic in the past). Directions here.
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Conversion to subversion
Thycotic Software has always used the software preferred by our clients and has made recommendations in some cases, mostly away from Visual SourceSafe and its exclusive checkout or generally connected nature. We had been using SourceGear's Vault for our own projects and even had it setup in our online hosted environment for access from our offices and client locations (asides from our own products, we also have open source and internal APIs that our developer consultants would often need to access). We had been hearing great things in the community about Subversion and were eager to try it out but not having an expert in the company meant we would have a learning curve. Enter John Morales - our new hire in November of 2005 - John joined our team biting his lip at having to use our existing source control tools but firmly believed he could turn the tide towards his favorite source control tool, Subversion.
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Building and deploying applications with NAnt and MSBuild in Vienna, Virginia
I will be presenting at the WinProTeam Vienna .NET Users Group on 3/1/2006 at 6pm.
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Pair Programming in Rockville MD on Weds 2/1/2006
"Imagine working the code while constantly rethinking the grand scheme of the design in your head. Imagine catching your typos first time, every time. Imagine finding bugs twice as fast and having a good conversation about how to approach finding them. Imagine learning new techniques, ideas and strategies while working on your code everyday. If you already achieve all of these things on your own then skip the usergroup and go straight to a psychologist! If not, then come along to learn why Pair Programming is fun, productive and a tremendous improvement to the otherwise black art of lone gun programming."
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Simple pluggable forum software
We had a requirement to provide a support forum in our online store for Secret Server which led to the classic "Buy vs. Build" decision.
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Programmers don't buy support
After thinking more on my previous post, the basic flaw in our plan was expecting a programmer to buy support.
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Open Source doesn't work (for your typical ISV)
Can you feel the flamethrowers warming up? :-) Larry O'Brien pointed me to this great SDTimes article "The Changing Face of Open Source". In the article, Andrew Binstock discusses the challenges in coming up to speed with a complex codebase and contributing real value as a 'volunteer'. He discusses how large projects tend to be primarily driven by commercial developers and concludes that the economics ultimately comes back to the same model as traditional closed source software.
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Secret Server now supports ASP.NET 2.0!
Our product, Secret Server, now supports ASP.NET 2.0. Testing on ASP.NET 2.0 started with a horrible crash on the secret view page resulting in the typical "but it worked fine in 1.1?!".