Jonathan Cogley's Blog

Steve Eichert points to "Consulting vs. Contracting" which has a nice discussion on the difference between the two.  Having been on both sides of the fence, I agree that consulting is the favorable option.  At Thycotic, we have the support of our team, the reputation of the company and the strength of our accomplishments in the form of successful projects, products, training and speaking engagements.

TechEd is a great conference with loads of buzz, technology and people that make such events the place to be.  Last year, I was able to give a presentation in the Development Cabanas on Test Driven Development with ASP.NET and helped out fielding technical questions in the same cabanas which gave me complimentary access to the conference!

David Patton gave a presentation at the Washington DC XP User Group on Monday night.  It was different to the typical XP/TDD presentation due to the audience (who needed no introduction to TDD!) and also David's experiences.  It was interesting to hear the audience's surprise at the maturity of the tools for Agile development on the Microsoft platform and also to hear the comparisons to tools on other development platforms.

Jeff Schoolcraft, a Senior Consultant with Thycotic Software Ltd, will be speaking on "Regular Expressions - Theory and Practice" at the WinProTeam Rockville .NET User Group meeting tonight.

I received an email on Saturday reawarding my MVP status for another year which is just wonderful!

Joel Spolsky has written an interesting piece about the idea of "eating your own dogfood" which simply means using your own software - people who buy dogfood don't eat it.  Over the years, I have seldom been in the position to use the software that Thycotic Software Ltd has developed.  The software has usually been out of my realm of usefulness - how many of us even know the slightest thing about chromatography, sewer planning or asbestos claims for that matter?

This weekend we purchased a condo in the Washington DC area and I passed the Microsoft 70-320 exam ("Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework").  The natural question for any techie then would be: which was harder?

Eric Sink discusses his views on why Team System is priced at its current level and also may set you straight on what you do and don't get with MSDN Universal.  MSDN Universal is a wonderful product and probably a great way to get pricey (more than $2000) server products into the hands of those who otherwise might not try them.  Unfortunately you will still need a client who can afford the licensing to purchase those server products for your applications.  This can often be a barrier to consulting shops who would otherwise like to gain real-world experience in technologies such as BizTalk, Microsoft Content Management Server and Microsoft Commerce Server.