Personal
These posts deal with my personal life on some level.
As you might’ve gathered from my last post, the MVP Summit has energized me and helped me solidify my understanding of the impact I can have as an MVP. This wasn’t the only way that the event personally affected me. My freshman MVP Summit also brought a clear reality to how my hard work has a purpose as it fits into my career and my involvement in the community. Two years ago I was a complete .NET virgin and learning only as a result of personal motivation to be the best that I can. Today I take...
Today I ran into this problem when setting up the SQL Server Management Tools for SQL Server 2005. Like any good little code slinger, I googled (if you are particular to Microsoft, you can read that as “binged”) to see who’s had the problem, because it’s no news that when you aren’t on the crest of the tech wave that someone else has had the same issue. In particular, MSXML 6 would fail and the log would have a message similar to: MSI (s) (40:58) [22:16:00:859]: MainEngineThread is returning 1605...
Although not yet to the big project that I have coming up, I’ve had the opportunity to try out formal user stories for the first time for a project. Before this, I was using a method that mimicked Joel Spolsky’s painless functional specs. Most of this process I will maintain, except I’ve moved to the “As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit).” user story format proposed by Mike Cohn in User Stories Applied. I find that using this format really does help me 1) write from the user perspective,...
As a result of working for a business instead of a small software shop, I often have to play all roles in a project. I am one of two developers, and we hardly do work on the same projects simultaneously. As a result, I can be seated as the project manager, the architect, the developer, the tester, QA, DBA, or any other role that is required. Sometimes it’s an intimidating position. I’m an army of one and sometimes the stakeholders outnumber me greatly. It’s a battle to ensure quality and that the...
I’ll tell you, I never imagined it would happen this quickly, but I was nominated for the first time this quarter and also received the MVP Award for my contributions online and offline to the VB.NET community. I’m very honored and very thankful to everyone involved in getting me mobilized within the community, including Zain Naboulsi, J Sawyer and PJ Forgione (who nominated me). Also, I’d like to give some thanks for other great individuals I’ve met through becoming active in a great community:...
A while back I made a post about the Joel test and how badly my current employer is doing according to it. I've made it a personal goal to help improve my working conditions here as long as I am employed here, and as such I've started tackling weak areas, namely beginning with implementing source control management (SCM). As I've mentioned in my year wrap-up, we've made great progress in this department. I no longer write code unless I've first created a repository. For older jobs, as I use and update...
So, this post is probably more for my personal benefit than for anyone who may read, but I'm just going to highlight the good or bad of 2008 for my personal life and then visit my hopes for 2009. This year really marked the beginning of my involvement in the .NET community. I consider myself somewhere around a junior level developer, and by giving back to a community that has given so much to me, I know I have grown and learned more than had I just waited for knowledge to come to me. I got involved...
Tomorrow I'm taking the 070-536 exam. This will be my first Microsoft certification exam, and I'm hopeful to pass but I won't be terribly surprised if I do not. From what I've seen around the forums online and other blogs, this exam is not one that is a breeze. So, here's a look at how I've prepared, and maybe some helpful links for those of you looking to take this exam in the future. After I take the test tomorrow I will review how I could do better, and what might be better advice to those looking...
Yesterday morning I took the time to work on a personal project and I wrote some great code. I wrote a class whose purpose was to enumerate the search engines that are installed in Internet Explorer so that I could implement them into a Word Ribbon, allowing you to do searches straight from Word. I got the bulk of the work done, the class was finished, it just wasn't hooked up to the project to produce output yet. I committed my changes because the changes didn't break the build, and I was on my...
I haven’t had the chance to update lately (by lately I mean this week really) because my grandfather has passed away. He was a great guy and I loved him. I just hope that he’s happier now than he was for his last few days on earth. That was the bad news, but he was a great guy and I am better for knowing him. The good news is that I’m really motivated to get some new series under way. The underlying idea when I made WTFNext was that I’ve seen so many tutorials that I’ve felt were incomplete or could...
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