Jonathan Cogley's Blog : .NET User Groups

SRP with the DC ALT.NET User Group in Alexandria, VA

thycotic — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:39:20 GMT

Last Wednesday (3/25/2009), I presented at the DC ALT.NET User Group in Alexandria. Thank you to the groups organizer, Matt Podwysocki for inviting me.

Writing Code with the Thycotic Team

The presentation was TDD with C# and Mocks - which is a hands-on coding session with the audience working on a real application (our online store codebase) - the new code is designed to track website visitors for marketing purposes and it has lots of external dependencies (cookies, database persistence). The goal of the session is to demonstrate how the Thycotic team would write code using C#, RhinoMocks and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).

Single Responsibility Principle

SRP involves writing mostly new classes since everything is almost always a new responsibility and therefore gets its own class (see also the Open Closed Principle since SRP works well with the concept of open for extension, closed for modification). This makes it easy to work in legacy code if you adopt SRP as you seldom modify the existing code but rather spend most of your time developing the tests and behavior in new classes and then wire them in where necessary. There are many other benefits to SRP including testability and reduced coupling.

The audience at the event was engaged and asked lots of interesting questions. There were questions regarding the wire up of dependencies which led to some tangents on Inversion of Control containers and so on.

Fishbowl Conversation

Matt also held a fishbowl conversation in the beginning of the meeting which seemed like a fun way to get attendees engaged and sharing opinions. I hadn't seen this used before but I was impressed with the concept.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC. Don't forget - we will be holding our two-day Test Driven Development course next month - reserve your spot now.

Refactoring in C# at RockNUG this week

thycotic — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:35:21 GMT

I will be giving a presentation on Refactoring in C# at RockNUG on Wednesday March 12th 2008 at 6:30pm. Directions here.

What could be more fun on a Wednesday evening than critiquing some bad code and making it better? :) Come along to learn how to clean code like the Thycotic team. What do we look for? How do we take small steps to keep it working? What tips and tricks make it easier? This session will be code, code and more code (and a few unit tests of course!).

Picking over some code and discussing it is so much fun. Come along and join us ...

We are hiring! Do you want to write beautiful code in a Test Driven, Refactored, Agile .NET software company in the heart of Washington DC and work on cool products?
Take the code test and send your resume along with why you want to join Thycotic to tddjobs@thycotic.com.

Speaking on Refactoring at RockNUG in March

thycotic — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:37:47 GMT

I will be presenting on Refactoring in C# at the Rockville .NET User Group (RockNUG) on March 12th 2008 at 6:30pm.

Refactoring in C# - Bad code to better code
What could be more fun on a Wednesday evening than critiquing some bad code and making it better? :) Come along to learn how to clean code like the Thycotic team. What do we look for? How do we take small steps to keep it working? What tips and tricks make it easier? This session will be code, code and more code (and a few unit tests of course!).

I always like Refactoring sessions because they give great opportunities for discussion about coding practices and also get lots of different opinions on how to improve the code. I will be using Visual Studio 2005 and Resharper 3.0.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Our product, Secret Server is a enterprise password manager system for teams to secure their passwords. Is your team still storing passwords in Excel?

RockNUG tonight - Geoff Snowman showed off BizTalk Server

thycotic — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 05:24:30 GMT

I attended my first event at the new Rockville .NET User Group (RockNUG) in Maryland tonight. Geoff Snowman, our local Microsoft integration specialist showed off the latest BizTalk Server (BTS) technology and talked about the future of BTS and its related products. As Geoff pointed out, BTS is a niche product that works well for large customers that have unique or complex integration requirements. The power of BTS was clearly in its mapping/transformation abilities, flexibility in talking to various endpoints (on various platforms) and the scalability of dynamically handling large amounts of orchestrations. My take was that it was especially well suited to integrate different applications especially when they are on different platforms and speak different languages (text vs XML vs EDI etc.). If you are interested in BTS and more on integration, don't miss Geoff's MICSUG group which has upcoming presentations on WWF and ESB.

Don't forget the NoVa Code Camp this Saturday in Reston, VA!

Also Thycotic is still hiring - so come take a look if you live for Test Driven Development, Pair Programming and C# in the Washington DC Metro Area.

Richmond Code Camp 3 reviewed

thycotic — Wed, 02 May 2007 05:05:30 GMT

This last Saturday morning, the Thycotic team headed to Richmond at a bright and early 6am. This alone wouldn't have been too bad but some on the team had been busy until 2am on a client project! For the first Richmond Code Camp ever, it actually didn't rain (it rained all day for the last two).

John started out with his presentation on NHibernate which drew a large audience. I watched Hal Hayes (of Acritech) present on XQuery which is an interesting session that I have somehow missed at the various local usergroups over the last year. Then I caught up with Frank at his Tablet PC session - he confirmed my suspicions that the handwriting recognition has been greatly improved in Vista. He also pointed me towards these great tablet applications which I just had to try - Ink Art allows you to paint in oil on your tablet! Frank was showing it on Vista but it doesn't seem to be included in the Experience Pack for Vista ... Frank?

I did find ArtRage2 in my quest which seems to do a similar job. There is something incredibly cool about painting on a tablet.

Unfortunately I didn't get to attend any further sessions since I was presenting for the last two slots of the day. Which also meant that I missed John's second session (Lucene.NET) and Kevin's first presentation at a Code Camp where he covered Cryptography and Hashing which is something he knows a great deal about - Kevin did the second round of Cryptography work in our Secret Server product. I also heard wonderful stories about our other presenting team member, Bryce, whose laptop wouldn't cooperate and he had to wing his entire session on Code Access Security with no code or slides (this was also only his second Code Camp presentation ever - nice job Bryce!).

My two sessions were Refactoring (a hands on session using Bob Martin's Prime Generator example) and Unit Testing with RhinoMocks. Session slides should be posted on the Richmond Code Camp website soon. The Refactoring session worked out really well with the sizeOfArray and primeCandidates variables naturally emerging as the instance field candidates - the audience also got very involved and yelled out lots of ideas. Working with code line by line and generating discussion is always fascinating.

Thanks to the folks at the Richmond Code Camp for organizing another fine event.

Code Camps, Code Camps, Code Camps.

thycotic — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 04:49:26 GMT

I presented on Pair Programming at the Maryland ColdFusion User's Group on Tuesday and was very pleased to tell everyone about all the upcoming Code Camps in our area. I also promised to post the links to the group, so here they are:

4/14/2007 NoVa Code Camp (Reston, Virginia)
4/21/2007 CMAP Code Camp (Baltimore, MD)
4/28/2007 Richmond Code Camp (Richmond, Virginia)

Thycotic is buzzing with Code Camp excitement and everyone has been submitting session proposals and coordinating topics. We should have a good showing from our team at the Code Camps with presentation topics ranging from Cryptography, Secure .NET Programming, NHibernate, DotLucene to RhinoMocks and Agile .NET.

Code Camps are a great way to learn about new technology and connect with your local developer community.

(If you are looking to join a developer team that encourages learning on a daily basis, pair programming and test driven development ... we are hiring.)

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Our product, Secret Server, is a secure web-based solution for teams to secure their passwords. Where do you keep your passwords or do you use the same one everywhere (snicker)?

Yet Another Mid-Atlantic Code Camp - but AGILE!!! (April 14, 2007 8am-6pm)

thycotic — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:31:38 GMT

Do you breathe agile? Do your progress bars always turn green? Do you refactor in your sleep? Then I need you for the agile track … We are looking for attendees, speakers and volunteers! This is the first Mid-Atlantic Code Camp to have an official Agile track (and I am the track chair – woohoo!)

Attendees
Register here, now, just do it.

Speakers
What are you waiting for? Fill in this form and upload it here.

Volunteers
Send an email to volunteers at novacodecamp dot org

The official website for the Code Camp is here.

I have attended all of the previous Code Camps at Reston and they have been very worthwhile and have drawn crowds of people and lots of cool prizes.

Speaking on TDD at the CMAP Architect Group in Maryland tonight (2/20/2007)

thycotic — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:07:04 GMT

I will be presenting on Test Driven Development at the CMAP Architect Group in Maryland. Session details and directions here.

Abstract: TDD is hard. It is hard because we have to unlearn the way many of us have always coded. Instead we have to start writing unit tests and what is more; we have to write the test BEFORE the code. Come along to learn the history, theory and then participate in an onscreen coding session TDD-style. There will be lots of opportunity to ask questions and see if TDD is for you.

If you are looking for a position with a company that believes in and practices TDD and Pair Programming, then don’t forget that we are hiring.

See you tonight!

We will also be giving away two free 10 user licenses to Secret Server ($389 each!) at the meeting.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is the password for this router?" and "Who has the password for our domain hosting?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.

Thycotic presented in Rockville, MD at WinProTeam

thycotic — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 04:17:32 GMT

This last Wednesday, myself and two other members of the Thycotic team presented at the WinProTeam Rockville meeting.

Topic: Data Access Strategies for your .NET Development

Three sessions presented by members of our Thycotic team – John Morales, Ryan Olshan and me.

1. ADO.NET Interfaces and how to be database agnostic
Ever wanted to support Oracle and SQL Server for your software product? We will look at the ADO.NET interfaces and how you can write more generic code by using them. The free open source API Thycotic.Data also makes working with multiple databases easy.

2. ORMapping with NHibernate
ORMapping is the process of creating objects that correlate to your database model. In other words class representations of your tables. There are many products/frameworks currently available to help/automate ORMapping tasks in .NET, in this session will examine NHibernate, a port of the Java Hibernate which has a very strong following in the Java community. I'll show you why.

3. Introduction to LINQ
Explore the upcoming set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.

We gave away a 10 user license to our Secret Server product for managing team passwords (worth $389)! Congrats Sam!

Presentations at WinProTeam - ADO.NET interfaces, Gentle.NET, LINQ, Refactoring

thycotic — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:49:17 GMT

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:

ADO.NET Interfaces

This is a favorite topic of mine since many people still seem to miss the boat with ADO.NET and use the boilerplate SQLConnection/SQLDataAdapter code everywhere. This presentation explores IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDataReader and the trusty DataSet/DataTable. Using these interfaces makes your code much easier to support multiple database platforms (something that can be critical for an ISV / product vendor). The presentation also encourages adoption of a centralized Data Access Layer (DAL). We have a free, open source DAL called Thycotic.Data which is hosted on SourceForge.

Gentle.NET (adhoc)

This session was meant to be John Morales giving us the gory details on NHibernate – something that John is very excited about. Unfortunately my experience with NHibernate is limited to some simple samples that I toyed with. We have used Gentle.NET extensively and have figured out most of the gotchas. The two seem very similar to me so the audience was happy to hear about Gentle.NET instead. We walked through the concepts of mapping business objects to tables using attributes and then various calls through broker and ObjectFactory to retrieve and persist data. For the most part, we have been happy with Gentle.NET – we have written our own little helper class called GentleHelper which makes more complex queries a little easier. One of the downsides we have found with Gentle.NET is the cryptic error messages and the poor error handling at times (for example, retrieving a record by id when it doesn’t exist throws an exception).

Intro to LINQ

Ryan Olshan was meant to give this session and provided the slides in his absence. I was drawing on my memories of various sessions at the last PDC which discussed LINQ and DLINQ. Altogether very cool stuff which is set to change the way we think about accessing data in C#. After walking through Gentle.NET, LINQ definitely seems like a next generation technology – taking it to the next level. Unfortunately I didn’t have any demo code since Ryan warned that it can make Visual Studio unstable to install the 3.0 bits - something I didn’t want to learn the hard way.

Refactoring

This session was a big departure from the Data Access theme but it has been a very popular topic with many groups. It is all hands on with no slides – just coding. I use a version of Martin Fowler’s refactoring example which was ported to C# by our very own Bryant Smith. It involves refactoring a Statement method on a Customer class to add HTML capability – the idea is to refactor the code to gain:

understanding
ensure it communicates its purpose
make it more maintainable so that it can be extended for the new HTML capability

Thycotic is presenting at the WinProTeam Vienna meeting tonight (Wednesday 11/1 6-9pm)

thycotic — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:05:01 GMT

Three sessions will be presented by Jonathan Cogley and John Morales of Thycotic Software at the WinProTeam User Group meeting in Vienna, Virginia tonight.

Theme: Data Access Strategies for your .NET Development

1. ADO.NET Interfaces and how to be database agnostic
Ever wanted to support Oracle and SQL Server for your software product? We will look at the ADO.NET interfaces and how you can write more generic code by using them. The free open source API Thycotic.Data also makes working with multiple databases easy.

2. ORMapping with NHibernate
ORMapping is the process of creating objects that correlate to your database model. In other words class representations of your tables. There are many products/frameworks currently available to help/automate ORMapping tasks in .NET, in this session will examine NHibernate, a port of the Java Hibernate which has a very strong following in the Java community. I'll show you why.

3. Introduction to LINQ
Explore the upcoming set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.

** We will also be giving a FREE 10 user license for Secret Server (worth $229) to a lucky attendee!!! **

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.

MSSQLTips.com

thycotic — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 18:25:40 GMT

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

http://www.mssqltips.com

Some recent tips that grabbed my attention:

Our team (Thycotic) has strong SQL Server expertise but mostly on the development side – consuming these tips is an exciting opportunity to get inside the minds of the gurus who can administer, tweak and tune SQL Server to do amazing things. Add these tips to your daily tech diet – we plan to!

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.

Pair Programming presentation tonight at NOVASQL

thycotic — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 22:05:29 GMT

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).

Please stop by and share your experiences.

** There will be several door prizes including two free 5 user license packs for our product, Secret Server. **

We (Thycotic) are also sponsoring the event to supply pizza and soda.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.

Pair Programming at DC Extreme Programming User Group tonight!

thycotic — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 12:11:00 GMT

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.

Please stop by to join the group which meets from 6:45-8:45 pm at the SE branch of the
Washington DC Library.

We will also be giving away a 10 user license to our product Secret Server (worth $229) to some lucky attendee. If you haven't tried Secret Server yet - you can download it here - it is the password repository that every development team should be using!

What motivates software developers?

thycotic — Mon, 15 May 2006 07:00:00 GMT

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.

Things like:

A tendency towards perfectionism (ever caught yourself tweaking the UI or code a little to get it aligned just right?)
Pride for the end product
Strong sense of ownership
Criticism of other work
Responsibility for flaws
Strong affection for our tools of the trade (editors, IDEs, utilities, home grown tools)
Strong need to use new tools and processes

Some agile practices (collective code ownership, pair programming, good enough) seem to reduce some of these basic craftsman tendencies but they still exist in some form.

Unfortunately these traits don't always align with the business interests of the project so we have to balance the different priorities to achieve the optimal environment. How can we understand these tendencies to enjoy our work more and motivate others on our team?

Introduce new technologies and techniques in a controlled manner so that the team is able to try new things without taking large risks. Be sure to include developers in this decision making process - after all they should be the ones 'in the know' on new technologies, right?
Practice pair programming to encourage communication, sharing of skills and team building - this can bring a lot of satisfaction to a developer team without changing the tasks or the priorities of the project.
Encourage participation in community developer events (user groups, code camps), blogs (share links across the team), books (monthly bookshelf anyone?) and conferences.
Avoid generalized training - in my opinion this tends to serve the paycheck programmer more than the dedicated ones. Instead prefer specialized training which focuses on particular new techniques that have already been piloted and now use that training time to get a jumpstart and avoid early pitfalls.
Interesting projects - this is tough to control since business priorities and budgets usually dictate the schedule however there are often ways to make projects more interesting without risking timeline or budget.
Satisfy your customer - there is nothing better than the feeling of a job well done to motivate a developer team!

Some of these ideas have been very successful on our projects. What motivates you and your developer team?

BTW - We are looking for another TDD .NET Developer to join our developer team.