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• New Release Overview Part 1

  - by brian.harrison

  Ladies & Gentlemen, I have been getting a lot of questions over the last month or two about the next release of WCI codenamed "Neo". Unfortunately I cannot give you an exact release date which I know you all would be asking me for if we were talking face to face, but I can definitely provide you with information about some of the features that will be made available. So over the next few blog entries, I am going to provide you with details about two features and even provide you with screenshots for some of them. KD Browser Portlet This portlet will provide a windows explorer look and feel to the Knowledge Directory from with a Community Page or My Page. Not only will the portlet provide access to the folder structure and the documents within, but the user or community manager will also have the ability to modify what is being shown. From with a preferences page, the user or community manager can change what top-level folders are shown within the folder structure as well as what properties are available for each document that is shown. There are also a number of other portlet specific customizations available as well. Embedded Tagging Engine As some of you might be aware, there was a product made available just prior to the Oracle acquisition known as Pathways which gave users the ability to add tags to documents that were either in the Knowledge Directory or in the Collaboration Documents section. Although this product is no longer available separately for customers to purchase, we definitely did feel that the functionality was important and interesting enough that other customers should have access to it. The decision was made for this release to embed the original Pathways product as the Tagging Engine for WCI and Collaboration. This tagging engine will allow a user to add tags to a document as well as through the Collaboration Documents section. Once the tags are added to the Tagging Engine and associated with documents, then a user will have the ability to filter the documents when processing a search according to the Tags Cloud that will now be available on the Search Results page and this will be true no matter what kind of search is being processed. In addition to all of that, all of the Pathways portlets will also be available for users to add to their My Page.

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• Merging Waterfall and Agile – Getting the Worst of Both Worlds

  - by Nick Harrison

  Many people have seen and appreciate the elegance and practicality of agile methodologies.   Sadly there is still not widespread adoption.   There is still push back from many directions and from many different sources.   Some people don't understand how it is supposed to work. Some people don't believe that it could possibly work. Some people mistakenly believe that it is just code for a lazy project team trying to wiggle out of structure Some people mistakenly believe that it can work only with a very small highly trained team Some people are afraid of the control that they feel they will be losing. I have seen some people try to merge agile and water fall hoping to achieve the best of both worlds.   Unfortunately, the reality is that you end up with the worst of both worlds.   And they both can get pretty bad. Another Sad Reality Some people in an effort to get buy in for following an Agile Methodology have attempted to merge these two practices.   Sometimes this may stem from trying to assuage individual fears that they are not losing relevance.   Sometimes it may be to meet contractual obligations or to fulfill regulatory requirements.   Sometimes may not know better. These two approaches to software development cannot coexist on the same project. Let's review the main tenants of the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Meanwhile the main tenants of the Waterfall Approach could be summarized as: Processes and procedures over individuals Comprehensive documentation proves that the software works Well defined contracts and negotiations protects the customer relationship If the plan is made right, there should be no change  Merging these two approaches will always end badly.

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• More SQL Smells

  - by Nick Harrison

  Let's continue exploring some of the SQL Smells from Phil's list. He has been putting together. Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) This is a great example poking holes in the whole theory of "If it works it's not broken" Queries will this probably will generally work and give the correct response. In fact, without careful analysis, you probably may be completely oblivious that there is even a problem. This subtle little problem will needlessly complicate queries and slow them down regardless of the indexes applied. Consider this example: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Page](     [PageId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [Title] [varchar](75) NOT NULL,     [Sequence] [int] NOT NULL,     [ThemeId] [int] NOT NULL,     [CustomCss] [text] NOT NULL,     [CustomScript] [text] NOT NULL,     [PageGroupId] [int] NOT NULL;  CREATE PROCEDURE PageSelectBySequence ( @sequenceMin smallint , @sequenceMax smallint ) AS BEGIN SELECT [PageId] , [Title] , [Sequence] , [ThemeId] , [CustomCss] , [CustomScript] , [PageGroupId] FROM [CMS].[dbo].[Page] WHERE Sequence BETWEEN @sequenceMin AND @SequenceMax END  Note that the Sequence column is defined as int while the sequence parameter is defined as a small int. The problem is that the database may have to do a lot of type conversions to evaluate the query. In some cases, this may even negate the indexes that you have in place. Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) There are two main problems here. The first is a little subjective, since this is a non-standard way of expressing the query, it is harder to understand. The other problem is much more objective and potentially problematic. You are taking much of the control away from the optimizer. Written properly, such a query may well out perform a corresponding query written with traditional joins. More likely than not, performance will degrade. Whenever you assume that you know better than the optimizer, you will most likely be wrong. This is the fundmental problem with any hint. Consider a query like this:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , ( SELECT EffectName FROM dbo.Effect WHERE EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId ) AS EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId  This can and should be written as:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId INNER JOIN dbo.Effect ON dbo.Effects.EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId  The correlated query may just as easily show up in the where clause. It's not a good idea in the select clause or the where clause. Few or No comments. This one is a bit more complicated and controversial. All comments are not created equal. Some comments are helpful and need to be included. Other comments are not necessary and may indicate a problem. I tend to follow the rule of thumb that comments that explain why are good. Comments that explain how are bad. Many people may be shocked to hear the idea of a bad comment, but hear me out. If a comment is needed to explain what is going on or how it works, the logic is too complex and needs to be simplified. Comments that explain why are good. Comments may explain why the sql is needed are good. Comments that explain where the sql is used are good. Comments that explain how tables are related should not be needed if the sql is well written. If they are needed, you need to consider reworking the sql or simplify your data model. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Calling a function in the where clause will often negate the indexing strategy. The function will be called for every record considered. This will often a force a full table scan on the tables affected. Calling a function will not guarantee that there is a full table scan, but there is a good chance that it will. If you find that you often need to write queries using a particular function, you may need to add a column to the table that has the function already applied.

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• Friend of Red Gate

  - by Nick Harrison

  Friend of Red Gate I recently joined the friend of Red Gate program.   I am very honored to be included in this group.    This program is a big part of Red Gates community outreach.   If you are not familiar with Red Gate, I urge you to check them out.    They have some wonderful tools for the SQL Server community and the DotNet community.    They are also building up some tools for Exchange and Oracle. I was invited to join this program primarliy because of my work with Simple Talk and promoting one of their newest products, Reflector. Reflector is a wonderful tool.   I doubt that anyone who has ever used it would argue that point. Red Gate did a wonderful job taking over the support of Reflector.   I know many people had their doubts.    The initial release under Red Gate should set those fears to rest.   I was very impressed with how their developers interacted with their users during the preview phase! Red Gate is also a good partner for the community.    They activly support the community, sponsoring Code Camps, sponsoring User Groups, supporting the Forums, etc. And their tools are pretty amazing as well.

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• New Release Overview Part 2

  - by brian.harrison

  To continue our discussion of the next release of WCI, lets take a look at a few other new features that have been developed and tested. Password Management With customer implementations starting to go more external, we were finding that these customers wanted to use the native users within the portal because the customer did not want to provide an LDAP server that is externally facing. However, the portal does not provide anything close to the same level of password policy that a standard LDAP environment would provide. With that being the case, we made the decision to provide the same kind of password policies directly within WCI that a standard LDAP environment would have. Password Expiration - In how many days will a password expire which will force the user to change their password? Also, in how many days prior to expiration with the user be notified that their password is about the expire? Password Rotation - How many of your previous passwords will you not be able to use when changing your password? Password Policies - What are the requirements for the password that is being created by the user? Number of Characters Numbers Required Symbols Required Capitalization Required Easily Configurable - Configuration is handled through the Portal Settings utility within Administration. All options are available on the main page of the utility. In addition to the configuration options that were mention above, there has also been a complete rewrite of the Change Password screen to provide better information to the user when they are changing their password. The Change Password will now provide a red light/green light listing of all the policies the user must meet for the changed password to be successful. As the user is typing the password, the red lights will change to green lights as the policies as met. In addition, text will show next to the password text box stating what policy has not been met yet. NOTE: The password policy functionality is not held within the User Editor page within Administration. We did not want to remove the option for Administrators to change a user's password on the fly in the case of a password reset situation. Miscellaneous Features In addition to the Password Management feature, there are a few other features that are related to WCI that should be mentioned. Consolidated Installer - Instead of having up to 12 or 13 different installers, one for each of the main products and separate services, we are going to only provide two installers. One that will be used for Collaboration and its respective images. The second will contain WCI and all of the relevant services required for a WCI architecture as well as the IDK, .NET App Accelerator, SharePoint Console as well as all Content Web Services and Identity Services. Updated Documentation - Most of us are aware that the documentation hasn't been properly kept up to date with the last couple of releases. We are doing everything that we can to remedy this with the next release by consolidating and reviewing everything that is available. We are making sure to fill in the gaps that are already there, add in all documentation for the functionality as well as clearing anything that is no longer valid based on the newly released version. I hope that you enjoyed reading through this new release information. Next time we will start to talk about the new functionality that will be available within the next release of Collaboration. If there is anything in particular that you would like to get more detail about, then please don't hesitate to send me a comment.

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• WCI Analytics Installation / Configuration Support Webinar

  - by brian.harrison

  Based on the success of the OAM / WCI integration webinar, the second in our series of Technical Support "brown bag" webinars will be delivered on Tuesday, March 30 at 8AM Pacific Daylight Time. Please review the details below, if you would like to attend the webinar, please take a moment to send an email to the address provided for registration and you will be enrolled in the meeting. What are the best practices for installing and configuring Analytics for the WebCenter Interaction (formerly "ALUI") Portal Application? What are some of the most common failures that occur in this implementation and what can be done to correct these common issues? What are the most common reasons for the tables to be "empty" when I try to produce utilization reports? These are just some of the main areas that will be covered in this one hour webinar which will demonstrate the WCI Analytics installation and configuration in action. Our demonstration will focus on areas where Technical Support sees the largest numbers of customer questions become support incidents in an effort to help avoid the need to create an incident to get the implementation working properly in the customer environment. We will demonstrate the most recent version of WCI Analytics (10.3.0.1) for this presentation, but naturally specific issues known to specific versions will be covered as well. Please join us for what we know will be a valuable and relevant learning session. If you would like to attend this session please send an email to [email protected] indicating your interest, and we will respond to you with a meeting invitation including all of the required access information.

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• Gawker Passwords

  - by Nick Harrison

  There has been much news about the hack of the Gawker web sites. There has even been an analysis of the common passwords found. This list is embarrassing in many ways. The most common password was "123456". The second most common password was "password". Much has also been written providing advice on how to create good passwords. This article provides some interesting advice, none of which should be taken. Anyone reading my blog, probably already knows the importance of strong passwords, so I am not going to reiterate the reasons here. My target audience is more the folks defining password complexity requirements. A user cannot come up with a strong password, if we have complexity requirements that don't make sense. With that in mind, here are a few guidelines:  Long Passwords Insist on long passwords. In some cases, you may need to change to allow a long password. I have seen many places that cap passwords at 8 characters. Passwords need to be at least 8 characters minimal. Consider how much stronger the passwords would be if you double the length. Passwords that are 15-20 characters will be that much harder to crack. There is no need to have limit passwords to 8 characters. Don't Require Special Characters Many complexity rules will require that your password include a capital letter, a lower case letter, a number, and one of the "special" characters, the shits above the number keys. The problem with such rules is that the resulting passwords are harder to remember. It also means that you will have a smaller set of characters in the resulting passwords. If you must include one of the 9 digits and one of the 9 "special" characters, then you have dramatically reduced the character set that will make up the final password. Two characters will be one of 10 possible values instead of one of 70. Two additional characters will be one of 26 possible characters instead of a 70 character potential character set. If you limit passwords to 8 characters, you are left with only 7 characters having the full set of 70 potential values. With these character restrictions in place, there are 1.6 x1012 possible passwords. Without these special character restrictions, but allowing numbers and special characters, you get a total of 5.76x1014 possible passwords. Even if you only allowed upper and lower case characters, you will still have 2.18X1014 passwords. You can do the math any number of ways, requiring special characters will always weaken passwords. Now imagine the number of passwords when you require more than 8 characters.  If you are responsible for defining complexity rules, I urge you to take these guidelines into account. What other guidelines do you follow?

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• Having fun with Reflection

  - by Nick Harrison

  I was once asked in a technical interview what I could tell them about Reflection.   My response, while a little tongue in cheek was that "I can tell you it is one of my favorite topics to talk about" I did get a laugh out of that and it was a great ice breaker.    Reflection may not be the answer for everything, but it often can be, or maybe even should be.     I have posted in the past about my favorite CopyTo method.   It can come in several forms and is often very useful.   I explain it further and expand on the basic idea here  The basic idea is to allow reflection to loop through the properties of two objects and synchronize the ones that are in common.   I love this approach for data binding and passing data across the layers in an application. Recently I have been working on a project leveraging Data Transfer Objects to pass data through WCF calls.   We won't go into how the architecture got this way, but in essence there is a partial duplicate inheritance hierarchy where there is a related Domain Object for each Data Transfer Object.     The matching objects do not share a common ancestor or common interface but they will have the same properties in common.    By passing the problems with this approach, let's talk about how Reflection and our friendly CopyTo could make the most of this bad situation without having to change too much. One of the problems is keeping the two sets of objects in synch.   For this particular project, the DO has all of the functionality and the DTO is used to simply transfer data back and forth.    Both sets of object have parallel hierarchies with the same properties being defined at the corresponding levels.   So we end with BaseDO,  BaseDTO, GenericDO, GenericDTO, ProcessAreaDO,  ProcessAreaDTO, SpecializedProcessAreaDO, SpecializedProcessAreaDTO, TableDo, TableDto. and so on. Without using Reflection and a CopyTo function, tremendous care and effort must be made to keep the corresponding objects in synch.    New properties can be added at any level in the inheritance and must be kept in synch at all subsequent layers.    For this project we have come up with a clever approach of calling a base GetDo or UpdateDto making sure that the same method at each level of inheritance is called.    Each level is responsible for updating the properties at that level. This is a lot of work and not keeping it in synch can create all manner of problems some of which are very difficult to track down.    The other problem is the type of code that this methods tend to wind up with. You end up with code like this: Transferable dto = new Transferable(); base.GetDto(dto); dto.OfficeCode = GetDtoNullSafe(officeCode); dto.AccessIndicator = GetDtoNullSafe(accessIndicator); dto.CaseStatus = GetDtoNullSafe(caseStatus); dto.CaseStatusReason = GetDtoNullSafe(caseStatusReason); dto.LevelOfService = GetDtoNullSafe(levelOfService); dto.ReferralComments = referralComments; dto.Designation = GetDtoNullSafe(designation); dto.IsGoodCauseClaimed = GetDtoNullSafe(isGoodCauseClaimed); dto.GoodCauseClaimDate = goodCauseClaimDate;       One obvious problem is that this is tedious code.   It is error prone code.    Adding helper functions like GetDtoNullSafe help out immensely, but there is still an easier way. We can bypass the tedious code, by pass the complex inheritance tricks, and reduce all of this to a single method in the base class. TransferObject dto = new TransferObject(); CopyTo (this, dto); return dto; In the case of this one project, such a change eliminated the need for 20% of the total code base and a whole class of unit test cases that made sure that all of the properties were in synch. The impact of such a change also needs to include the on going time savings and the improvements in quality that can arise from them.    Developers who are not worried about keeping the properties in synch across mirrored object hierarchies are freed to worry about more important things like implementing business requirements.

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• Pricing options at O’Reilly

  - by Nick Harrison

  I was browsing through the new options for books on O'Reilly and Associates and noticed something kind of cool    If you buy the print edition of a book, you can get the ebook for just a couple dollars more.  This is pure genius marketing. I may question whether or not I want the ebook at 20 or the print copy at 25, but to get them both for 28, well that's a no brainer.  This is actually a strategy examined at great depth in Predictably Rational In all honesty, $20 is probably over priced for the ebook, but $3 if you are already buying the print edition is actually a pretty good deal  .

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• Announcing the MOS WCI "Community"

  - by brian.harrison

  The WCI Technical Support team are please to announce the launch of the long awaited WCI Support Community on My Oracle Support (MOS) "Community". Users can navigate to this "first stop" for WebCenter Interaction information by logging on to following this link: WCI Community (Note that this requires a valid login credential to the My Oracle Support tool). In this community you'll find a product related discussion forum moderated by Oracle WebCenter Interaction support engineers, recommended tips and tricks, links to knowledge base articles and best practices for setting up and administering up your environment. We hope you'll take a minute to have a look through the community. If you have a question about WebCenter Interaction, a comment or a suggestion regarding the content, please feel free to post it to the forum and someone will respond to your request. Think of the forum here as another method to communicate directly with the WCI Technical Support team for questions and answers to simple WCI support topics. The forum is moderated by WCI Technical Support engineers directly and we hope it will help you avoid the need to log support incidents for less complex support related questions. We encourage all of our customers, both internal and external, to participate in the forums discussions, sharing information, knowledge, best practices and in the effort to help us build a vital and vibrant "home base" for WCI users on the My Oracle Support tool. Thank you for visiting! The WebCenter Interaction Support Community Moderator Team

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• Red Gate in the Community

  - by Nick Harrison

  Much has been said recently about Red Gate's community involvement and commitment to the DotNet community. Much of this has been unduly negative. Before you start throwing stones and spewing obscenities, consider some additional facts: Red Gate's software is actually very good. I have worked on many projects where Red Gate's software was instrumental in finishing successfully. Red Gate is VERY good to the community. I have spoken at many user groups and code camps where Red Gate has been a sponsor. Red Gate consistently offers up money to pay for the venue or food, and they will often give away licenses as door prizes. There are many such community events that would not take place without Red Gate's support. All I have ever seen them ask for is to have their products mentioned or be listed as a sponsor. They don't insist on anyone following a specific script. They don't monitor how their products are showcased. They let their products speak for themselves. Red Gate sponsors the Simple Talk web site. I publish there regularly. Red Gate has never exerted editorial pressure on me. No one has ever told me we can't publish this unless you mention Red Gate products. No one has ever said, you need to say nice things about Red Gate products in order to be published. They have told me, "you need to make this less academic, so you don't alienate too many readers. "You need to actually write an introduction so people will know what you are talking about". "You need to write this so that someone who isn't a reflection nut will follow what you are trying to say." In short, they have been good editors worried about the quality of the content and what the readers are likely to be interested in. For me personally, Red Gate and Simple Talk have both been excellent to work with. As for the developer outrage… I am a little embarrassed by so much of the response that I am seeing. So much of the complaints remind me of little children whining "but you promised" Semantics aside. A promise is just a promise. It's not like they "pinky sweared". Sadly no amount name calling or "double dog daring" will change the economics of the situation. Red Gate is not a multibillion dollar corporation. They are a mid size company doing the best they can. Without a doubt, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft's. I honestly believe that they did try to make the "freemium" model work. Sadly it did not. I have no doubt that they intended for it to work and that they tried to make it work. I also have no doubt that they labored over making this decision. This could not have been an easy decision to make. Many people are gleefully proclaiming a massive backlash against Red Gate swearing off their wonderful products and promising to bash them at every opportunity from now on. This is childish behavior that does not represent professionals. This type of behavior is more in line with bullies in the school yard than professionals in a professional community. Now for my own prediction… This back lash against Red Gate is not likely to last very long. We will all realize that we still need their products. We may look around for alternatives, but realize that they really do have the best in class for every product that they produce, and that they really are not exorbitantly priced. We will see them sponsoring Code Camps and User Groups and be reminded, "hey this isn't such a bad company". On the other hand, software shops like Red Gate, will remember this back lash and give a second thought to supporting open source projects. They will worry about getting involved when an individual wants to turn over control for a product that they developed but can no longer support alone. Who wants to run the risk of not being able to follow through on their best intentions. In the end we may all suffer, even the toddlers among us throwing the temper tantrum, "BUT YOU PROMISED!" Disclaimer Before anyone asks or jumps to conclusions, I do not get paid by Red Gate to say any of this. I have often written about their products, and I have long thought that they are a wonderful company with amazing products. If they ever open an office in the SE United States, I will be one of the first to apply.

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• It's intellisense for SQL Server

  - by Nick Harrison

  It's intellisense for SQL Server Anyone who has ever worked with me, heard me speak, or read any of writings knows that I am a HUGE fan of Reflector.    By extension,  I am a big fan of Red - Gate   I have recently begun exploring some of their other offerings and came across this jewel. SQL Prompt is a plug in for Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio.    It provides several tools to make dealing with SQL a little easier for your friendly neighborhood developer. When you a query window in a database, the plugin kicks in and gathers the metadata for the database that you are in.    As you type a query, you get handy feedback like a list of tables after you type select.    You can select one of the tables, specify * and then tab to expand the select clause to include all of the columns from the selected table.    As you are building up the where clause, you are prompted by the names of columns in the selected tables. If you spend any time writing ad hoc queries or building stored procedures by hand, this can save you substantial time. If you are learning a new data model, this can greatly cut down on your frustration level. The other really cool thing here is Format SQL.   I have searched all over the place for a really good SQL formatter.    Badly formatted  SQL is so much harder to read than well formatted SQL.   Unfortunately, management studio offers no support for keeping your SQL well formatted.    There are many tools available to format your SQL.   Some work better than others.    Some don't work that well at all.   Most will give you some measure of control over how the formatted SQL looks.    SQL Prompt produces good results and is easy to configure. Sadly no tool is perfect, and what would we be without a wish list.    There are some features that I would like to see: Make it easier to paste SQL in and out of code.    Strip off string builder, etc Automate replacing hard coded values with bind variables or parameters In addition to reformatting SQL, which is a huge refactor, support for other SQL refactors would be nice.    Convert join to sub query and vice versa come to mind Wish list a side, this is a wonderful tool that easily saves me an hour or more on most weeks.

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• Can't decide between Java or Python for college [on hold]

  - by Will Harrison

  I'm returning to college in about a month for Computer Science. My problem is, I have been programming on the web since I left (4 years ago), using PHP, ASP.NET, and JavaScript. I want to bone up on a more general purpose language that is cross platform before I begin. I would also like to be using a language that is common at my school and I know that they teach the students C++, Java, and Python. I would like to choose between Java or Python but I'm not sure which one. What do you think would be better based on job prospects in the next 2 years and community?

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• Death March

  - by Nick Harrison

  It is a horrible sight to watch a project fail. There are few things as bad. Watching a project fail regardless of the reason is almost like sitting in a room with a "Dementor" from Harry Potter. It will literally suck all of the life and joy out of the room. Nearly every project that I have seen fail has failed because of political challenges or management challenges. Sometimes there are technical challenges that bring a project to its knees, but usually projects fail for less technical reasons. Here a few observations about projects failing for political reasons. Both the client and the consultants have to be committed to seeing the project succeed. Put simply, you cannot solve a problem when the primary stake holders do not truly want it solved. This could come from a consultant being more interested in extended the engagement. It could come from a client being afraid of what will happen to them once the problem is solved. It could come from disenfranchised stake holders. Sometimes a project is beset on all sides. When you find yourself working on a project that has this kind of threat, do all that you can to constrain the disruptive influences of the bad apples. If their influence cannot be constrained, you truly have no choice but to move on to a new project. Tough choices have to be made to make a project successful. These choices will affect everyone involved in the project. These choices may involve users not getting a change request through that they want. Developers may not get to use the tools that they want. Everyone may have to put in more hours that they originally planned. Steps may be skipped. Compromises will be made, but if everyone stays committed to the end goal, you can still be successful. If individuals start feeling disgruntled or resentful of the compromises reached, the project can easily be derailed. When everyone is not working towards a common goal, it is like driving with one foot on the break and one foot on the accelerator. Not only will you not get to where you are planning, you will also damage the car and possibly the passengers as well.   It is important to always keep the end result in mind. Regardless of the development methodology being followed, the end goal is not comprehensive documentation. In all cases, it is working software. Comprehensive documentation is nice but useless if the software doesn't work.   You can never get so distracted by the next goal that you fail to meet the current goal. Most projects are ultimately marathons. This means that the pace must be sustainable. Regardless of the temptations, you cannot burn the team alive. Processes will fail. Technology will get outdated. Requirements will change, but your people will adapt and learn and grow. If everyone on the team from the most senior analyst to the most junior recruit trusts and respects each other, there is no challenge that they cannot overcome. When everyone involved faces challenges with the attitude "This is my project and I will not let it fail" "You are my teammate and I will not let you fail", you will in fact not fail. When you find a team that embraces this attitude, protect it at all cost. Edward Yourdon wrote a book called Death March. In it, he included a graph for categorizing Death March project types based on the Happiness of the Team and the Chances of Success.   Chances are we have all worked on Death March projects. We will all most likely work on more Death March projects in the future. To a certain extent, they seem to be inevitable, but they should never be suicide or ugly. Ideally, they can all be "Mission Impossible" where everyone works hard, has fun, and knows that there is good chance that they will succeed. If you are ever lucky enough to work on such a project, you will know that sense of pride that comes from the eventual success. You will recognize a profound bond with the team that you worked with. Chances are it will change your life or at least your outlook on life. If you have not already read this book, get a copy and study it closely. It will help you survive and make the most out of your next Death March project.

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• Is there a more intelligent way to do this besides a long chain of if statements or switch?

  - by Harrison Nguyen

  I'm implementing an IRC bot that receives a message and I'm checking that message to determine which functions to call. Is there a more clever way of doing this? It seems like it'd quickly get out of hand after I got up to like 20 commands. Perhaps there's a better way to abstract this? public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login, String hostname, String message){ if (message.equalsIgnoreCase(".np")){ // TODO: Use Last.fm API to find the now playing } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith(".register")) { cmd.registerLastNick(channel, sender, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("give us a countdown")) { cmd.countdown(channel, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("remember am routine")) { cmd.updateAmRoutine(channel, message, sender); } }

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• Have you used nDepend?

  - by Nick Harrison

  Have you Used NDepend? I have often wanted to use it, but never spent the money on it.   I have developed many tools that try to do pieces of what NDepend does, but never with as much success as they reach. Put simply, it is a tool that will allow you to udnerstand and monitor the architecture of your software, and it does it in some pretty amazing ways. One of the most impressive features is something that they call Code Query Language.   It allows you to write queries very similar to SQL to track the performance of various software metrics and use this to identify areas that are out of compliance with your standards and architecture. For instance, once you have analyzed your project, you can write queries such as : SELECT METHODS WHERE IsPublic AND CouldBePrivate  You can also set up such queries to provide warnings if there are records returned.    You can incorporae this into your daily build and compare build against build. There are over 82 metrics included to allow you to view your code in a variety of angles. I have often advocated for a "Code Inventory" database to track the state of software and the ROI on software investments.    This tool alone will take you about 90% of the way there. If you are not using it yet,  I strongly recommend that you do!

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• MVP Nomination

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have debated posting this or not. My initial thought was not to post about it. My thought was not to blog about it thinking that I would spare myself the embarrassment if I wasn't awarded. A little paranoid, I know, but these are paranoid times. After more reflection, I realize that there is no embarrassment in not winning. There is great honor in being nominated. Instead of worrying about not winning in the end, I need to enjoy the moment and enjoy being nominated. This is an extreme honor. I would to hear your stories of being nominated? What was the process like? What was your reaction? Hopefully, I will have some good news to share here soon. If not, being nominated truly is an honor.

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by Nick Harrison

  What if you could work on anything you wanted? Redgate is doing an experiment of sorts this week.  Called Down Tools Week.    The idea is that they stopped working on their regular projects for a week and strike out on something that catches their attention and drives their passion. Evidently in many cases, these projects have turned out to be new features in their existing products that individual were interested in, some were internal iniatives and some where evidently off the wall new ideas.   Today is show and tell where they will share with each other what they have been working on. There may well be some interesting announcements coming out of this.    The prospects are exciting. I understand that Google does something similar allowing their employees a specified amount of time to work on projects of their own choosing.    This has been the breeding ground for some of my favorite services. It is a shame that more companies do not follow such practices.   Now I know that most companies cannot afford to shut down everything for a week and sometimes you can't really explore an interesting idea in 8 hours a week or however much time Google allocates, but still it may be worth while. What would happen if your company gave you as an individual 1 week each quarter to work on a project of your own design and see what happens?   I would be happen if you still had to get approval for before your week long adventure. Personally, I think that this could be a very effective use of training budgets.   Give me a week to research something on my own and you would be amazed at what I can find out.    Maybe this should be the prerequisite before starting a new project.   Stagger the team onboarding but have everyone spend a week long sabbatical studying BizTalk before starting a project that will hinge on BizTalk. The show and tell afterwards is a great way to keep everyone honest or at least reassure management that everyone is honest.    If your goal was to spend a week researching and exploring a new technology and you had to do a show and tell afterwards to show off what you had learned, then everyone can learn a bit of what you just learned.     Sounds like a promising win win for me. Maybe it is a pipe dream, but what if .... What would you work on if given the opportunity to work on anything you wanted?

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• On Reflector Pricing

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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• Detecting collision between ball (circle) and brick(rectangle)?

  - by James Harrison

  Ok so this is for a small uni project. My lecturer provided me with a framework for a simple brickbreaker game. I am currently trying to overcome to problem of detecting a collision between the two game objects. One object is always the ball and the other objects can either be the bricks or the bat. public Collision hitBy( GameObject obj ) { //obj is the bat or the bricks //the current object is the ball // if ball hits top of object if(topX + width >= obj.topX && topX <= obj.topX + obj.width && topY + height >= obj.topY - 2 && topY + height <= obj.topY){ return Collision.HITY; } //if ball hits left hand side else if(topY + height >= obj.topY && topY <= obj.topY + obj.height && topX + width >= obj.topX -2 && topX + width <= obj.topX){ return Collision.HITX; } else return Collision.NO_HIT; } So far I have a method that is used to detect this collision. The the current obj is a ball and the obj passed into the method is the the bricks. At the moment I have only added statement to check for left and top collisions but do not want to continue as I have a few problems. The ball reacts perfectly if it hits the top of the bricks or bat but when it hits the ball often does not change directing. It seems that it is happening toward the top of the left hand edge but I cannot figure out why. I would like to know if there is another way of approaching this or if people know where I'm going wrong. Lastly the collision.HITX calls another method later on the changes the x direction likewise with y.

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• Automatic Generalization

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have been interested in functional programming since college. I played around a little with LISP back then, but I have not had an opportunity since then. Now that F# ships standard with VS 2010, I figured now is my chance. So, I was reading up on it a little over the weekend when I came across a very interesting topic. F# includes a concept called "Automatic Generalization". As I understand it, the compiler will look at your method and analyze how you are using parameters. It will automatically switch to a generic parameter if it is possible based on your usage. Wow! I am looking forward to playing with this. I have long been an advocate of using the most generic types possible especially when developing library classes. Use the highest level base class that you can get away with. Use an interface instead of a specific implementation. I don't advocate passing object around, but you get the idea. Tools like resharper, fxCop, and most static code analysis tools provide guidance to help you identify when a more generalized type is possible, but this is the first time I have heard about the compiler taking matters into its own hands. I like the sound of this. We'll see if it is a good idea or not. What are your thoughts? Am I missing the mark on what Automatic Generalization does in F#? How would this work in C#? Do you see any problems with this?

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• Agile Documentation

  - by Nick Harrison

  We all know that one of the premises of the agile manifesto is to value Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation. This is a wonderful idea and it takes a tremendous burden off of project implementations. I have seen as many projects fail because of the maintenance weight of the project documentations as I have for any reason. But this goal as important as it is may not always be practical. Sometimes the client will simply insist on tedious documentation despite the arguments against it. This may be to calm a nervous client. This may be to satisfy an audit / compliance requirement. This may be a non-too subtle attempt at sabotaging the project. Ok, it is probably not an all out attempt to sabotage the project, but it will probably feel that way. So what can we do to keep to the spirit of the Agile Manifesto but still meet the needs of the client wanting the documentation? This is a good question that I have been puzzling over lately! I hope to explore some possible answers more fully here. A common theme that my solutions are likely to follow is the same theme that I often follow with simplifying complex business logic. Make it table driven! My thought is that the sought after documentation could be a report or reports out of a metadata repository. Reports are much easier to maintain than hand written documentation. Here are a few additional advantages that we can explore over time: Reports will take advantage of the fact that different people have different needs and different format requirements Reports and the supporting metadata are more easily validated and the validation can be automated. If the application itself uses this metadata than there never has to be a question as to whether or not the metadata is up to date. It is up to date or the application would not work. In many cases we should be able to automatically gather most of the Meta data that we need using reflection, system tables, etc. I think that this will lower the total cost of ownership for the documentation and may provide something useful beyond having a pretty document to look at.  What are your thoughts?

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• What are the options for retraining formally as a software engineer?

  - by Matt Harrison

  I'm a self-taught programmer. I have a good undergraduate degree in Architecture (building, not software). I was always a science/maths kid and got consistency good grades in these subjects. However I became indecisive at undergraduate level and switched between Physics, Chemistry, Art and finally stuck with Architecture mainly out of the desperate need to finish any degree. As soon as I graduated, I ditched architecture and started writing code again professionally. I've been a programmer now for 3 years and I've progressed very quickly. I'm ambitious and I want to work for the top companies in this field at some point and I've realised I need a Computer Science education to be taken seriously (based on job ads for the big tech firms). I've applied for a few MSc programs in Computer Science but they've all rejected me because of my BA. It's just not an option for me to quit my job and go back and do another 3 year undergraduate degree in CS. I know I can study at this level because I've read most of the books on the reading lists for CS courses in the UK that I can find and I have this knowledge now, it's just I can't prove it on an application form. What options are available to me?

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• Understanding Asynchronous Programming with .NET Reflector

  - by Nick Harrison

  When trying to understand and learn the .NET framework, there is no substitute for being able to see what is going on behind at the scenes inside even the most confusing assemblies, and .NET Reflector makes this possible. Personally, I never fully understood connection pooling until I was able to poke around in key classes in the System.Data assembly. All of a sudden, integrating with third party components was much simpler, even without vendor documentation!With a team devoted to developing and extending Reflector, Red Gate have made it possible for us to step into and actually debug assemblies such as System.Data as though the source code was part of our solution. This maybe doesn’t sound like much, but it dramatically improves the way you can relate to and understand code that isn’t your own.Now that Microsoft has officially launched Visual Studio 2012, Reflector is also fully integrated with the new IDE, and supports the most complex language feature currently at our command: Asynchronous processing.Without understanding what is going on behind the scenes in the .NET Framework, it is difficult to appreciate what asynchronocity actually bring to the table and, without Reflector, we would never know the Arthur C. Clarke Magicthat the compiler does on our behalf.Join me as we explore the new asynchronous processing model, as well as review the often misunderstood and underappreciated yield keyword (you’ll see the connection when we dive into how the CLR handles async).Read more here

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