I'm Moving! my new blog can be found at blogs.derekbeyer.com/technical  ¶ 11:34 AM

  I'm Moving! well, at least my blog is ;-)

my new technical blog can be found at

http://blogs.derekbeyer.com/technical

Hope to see you there!  ¶ 11:34 AM

  God If you've wondered where i've been lately, check this out:


djbgodblog.blogspot.com  ¶ 1:11 PM

  Serving Your Customer I've been lacking on this issue lately so I'd thought I would blog about it in order to remind my self of important principles .. so here goes ...

Here are the things that I thinjk are important in order to properly serve your customer (in no particular order):

1. Answer emails and voicemails promptly. Nothing stirs up frustration with an application you've written more than post-deployment bugs. And nothing frustrates a customer more than not being able to get ahold of you when problems arise and their boss is breathing down their necks.
2. Notify customers and other interested parties immediately when you discover a problem on your own. The business of software development rides on integrity. You get bonus points when you notify customers of problems and keep them informed as the issue progresses. I've found that by doing this, you can screw almost anything up and not get fired .. just as long as you keep the lines of communication open ... and as much as possible initiated by YOU.
3.  Listen to what your customer wants and give them everything except the total absurd. As software developers our first instinct is to deny our customers in the hopes that by doing so we will limit the amount of work to be performed and thus limit our risk by reducing our exposure in the project.  What we don't admit - even to ourselves sometimes - is that most of what the customer ever asks for is trivial to implement and support. After all, what harm is it in providing another sorting field in a report, or adding another field on a form. Sure you may have to go through your code starting from the UI and going right through to the database, but these sorts of things really don't require much time or effort.
4. Attempt to provide more than what the customer is asking. Let's face it, most customers in the corporate world don't have much faith in us. Rightly so. Our applications are ugly, uninspired, and just plain buggy. Because of this, we are often asked to implement only the very, very basic set of business functionality (at least that's usually my experience). If you want to grow as a developer, be willing to dig into the issues that a customer is faced with, then use your creativity to come up with a solution that EXCEEDS expectations! And while your at it, put some effort into making the UI look decent.
5. Don't give into time preasure. I know this one is tough since we live in an instant gratification world, but stay with me. Software developement - like it or not - is an iterive process, meaning you are going to keep doing the same thing over and over again until you get it right. Don't believe me? Ever fix the same bug twice? Ever missed a deadline? I have - on both counts. Believe me you customers will keep hammering on you until you get it right. By giving into unrealistic deadlines you are simply pacifying them - temporarily. I say don't give in by a month, a day or and hour.  And don't feel bad if you miss a deadline that was forced on you. And don't feel as if you have to appologize for such a failure .. because the failure won't be yours. However in order to keep the failure from being yours you must 1.) state the reasons for an unrealistic deadline and provide proof, 2.) raise issue immediately when they might impact the timeline, and 3.) give the project an honest effort in terms of your time.

And in the immortal words of Forest Gump:
"That's all I have to say about that"
  ¶ 3:24 PM

  Blogs and Junk food for the last couple of months, i've been trying to improve my diet by eating less carbs, more high quality protein, less junk food, and more vegies. so far its gone pretty well. i've lost some weight, my blood sugar levels have stablized, and i'm saving money by not going out to lunch everyday.

however, my techinical diet is starting to suffer from junk food blogs, seductive videos on channel 9 and the like. i think microsoft has utilized blogs and channel9 VERY intelligently. the videos on channel9 are so cool because the people are so interesting and they are so excited about what they are talking about. i'm a sucker for those videos. i get all pumped up thinking how cool microsoft and its people are. however, its like eating a big bowl of pasta: you feel great afterwards, but all you've really consumed is empty calories. Same thing goes for most blogs. Its a bummer that most of the blogs i really like have gone dormant. No doubt those bloggers have decided to engage in more rewarding activities.

I think its ironic that while the low-carb craze is sweeping the nation, high-carb madness has hit the .NET technical community.

and no, the irony that i am complaining about blogs ON my blog is not lost on me ;-)  ¶ 7:31 PM

  Localization .. the easier way Great news for those of us who run web sites that should localize but don't. MS is releasing something called the Microsoft Application Translator that should help you localize your web sites and applications easier than ever before.   ¶ 6:45 PM

  My, My, My If you haven't read the article on MSDN entitled Navigate the .NET Framework and Your Projects with "My" I suggest you do. Perhaps one day soon, VB developers won't have to write any code at all ;-)  ¶ 6:42 PM

  My, My, My If you haven't read the article on MSDN entitled I suggest you do. Perhaps one day soon, VB developers won't have to write any code at all ;-)  ¶ 6:42 PM

  HttpRequestValidationException I stumbled across something interesting tonight as I set out to write an HTTP module in ASP.NET that parses Request input and either raises an error or redirects the user to another page if it see's any "suspicious" activity. Suspicious activity (at least in my mind) includes those little tricks that hackers employ such as embedding script code in form input for the purposes of changing the behavior of the application or web site. As it turns out, ASP.NET already performs such validation and raises a HttpRequestValidationException if it see's any form input that starts with "<" followed by another not whitespace character.

Just had to share that.  ¶ 6:16 PM

  What a Project! Celemens Vaster comes up for air in this blog post from what sounds like a really cool (if not exhausting) project. He's using about every service of COM+ imaginable, even the hardly EVER mentioned Compensanting Resource Manager! WOW!! too cool!  ¶ 5:45 PM