A good friend of mine (as well as co-worker), Laura, has just went live with her new blog. If her other work is any indication, I'm sure we'll be seeing some real gems from her.

Advanced .NET Programming,
by Simon Robinson

This is a book I picked on clearance at the local Books-A-Million, being targeted at the 1.0 release of the Framework I was aware it was rather dated, though it was still a decent looking book (and it was cheap). The author doesn't jest when he uses the word advanced, this is an in-depth book.

While I tend to be forgiving of small typos in books, this book has an unforgivable number of errors. While much of the content is useful (and seems correct), there are enough editing issues to make me second-guess everything. With as many errors as I saw, I was almost wondering if was a test printing of the manuscript, though after some checking, that doesn't seem to be the case. This book had the potential to be one of my favorites due to the way the author explains topics, and the vast amount of hard to find information included. 

Yet, it leaves me disappointed.

I'd like to say that this is a book everyone should read, but due to countless editing errors, all this one is - is a 'could have' 

The price of storage has been steadily dropping over the last several years, and this is the latest example: A Complete Terabyte File Server For About $500 - Yep, you read that right, a custom 1TB file server, in the $500 range. While I'm not sure what I could do with that much storage (I remember saying that when I picked a 1.25GB drive over a 1.5GB, saying I'd never need it), but it'd be nice to have.

On the topic of cheap storage, I just purchased a 250GB SATA drive to replace my 80GB data drive that's almost full. With SATA drives under $100 for 250GB, I'm tempted to try my own version of his project.

I think I've set myself up for an interesting adventure, I've decided to shoot for the MCTS, also known as "Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist" - and I'll be taking the tests without a single guide book. Yep, you heard that right, no test study guide. Now, if I were you, I'd be asking "Why?!" - well, there are none. The tests required for the MCTS are so new, no books have been published on them.

I'll be working with one of my co-workers, Laura, on this, our plan is simple: Learn everything there is to know about VB.NET 2005. I think that should about cover anything on the test.

Seriously, we are going to start by studying "Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language," one of the recommend Microsoft references for the test. We may look at another book or two, but right now I think this is the only one we'll need. I'd like to get my hands on a copy of "MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit" - but that won't be available till July, and I'm hoping to have passed the tests by then (this is why).

Wish me luck, somehow I think I'll need it. 

This site now has a new home, on a Linux/Apache box where it should have been from the beginning. When I built this site, I put it on my Windows server with the idea I’m slowly move to an ASP.NET solution, away from WordPress. Well, after realizing what I was missing (i.e. .htaccess files) I decided to go ahead and move it to my Linux server. 

This will allow for some nice changes, here’s a couple:

• Better link structure. - The site now uses a cleaner, easier to understand link structure. Instead of seeing something like "p=25" - you’ll see  "2006/03/19/iso-17799/"
• Now using the non-www version of the domain exclusively. Normally I only use the www version of the domain, but Google has so for only indexed the non-www variant, so that’s what I’ll use.
• Easier to maintain & update. Due to some issues with FTP & the Windows server, tweaking things has been a pain. Now that I’m back on my trusty Linux box, it’ll be a lot easier to tweak things to get them just how they should be.

This change should also allow for more new features to be added as time goes on. I may start porting some of my old PHP tools to work with the WordPress structure and make those available again.

If you see anything wrong, please let me know. I think I covered everything in the move, but it’s possible I missed something, if so, please let me know.

I just completed doing something I said I never would, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook. While I’ll remain a big fan of The Bat! for it’s great features, using it at home, while using Outlook at work was just driving me up the wall. The two clients are about as opposite as two programs can be. The very concept behind how you use them, and how you organize you data is quite different.

Over the course of the last week, I’ve completed moving almost 20,000 emails into Outlook, then creating nearly 100 filters to organize it all again. This was a somewhat painful experience, but I can certainly appreciate some of the features (such as sorting) that Outlook 2003 offers. 

Certifications are good things, or so I’ve always thought. Though the more work I do to help achieve ISO 17799 compliance, I’m beginning to dislike them. This has been steadily adding work since I started this job in December, but now that we are only a couple weeks away from what should be our final audit, the work is coming a lot faster. We’re working to ensure everything we have in production meets the requirements of the standard, which has proved to be rather difficult.

The primary issue has been in data access, eliminating all direct SQL queries, and replacing them with stored procedures. While this isn’t that difficult, when there are dozens of systems that need updates, it adds up surprisingly quick.

Security is always a good thing, and when dealing with sensitive personal information of thousands of people, it’s very important. So I’m not complaining about the security required, but when you are trying to cleanup from years of more relaxed practices, it takes a surprising amount of work. 

I like free stuff, I really like free stuff from Microsoft, as they normally have good free stuff, and this time, it’s a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, and a couple other goodies. Here’s the list:

• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Standard Edition (Not for Resale)
• Five chapters of Programming ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference, by Dino Esposito
• A 30-day hosting account to try out your custom Web applications
• Microsoft Developer Security DVD with how-tos, white papers, tools, webcasts, and code samples that demonstrate how to write more secure code
• A 50% discount on a Microsoft Certified Professional Exam so you can add your new skills to your resume
• A voucher that allows you to buy Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with an MSDN® Professional Subscription at renewal pricing (a $400 savings)

Not a bad grab bag if I say so myself. Want the details?

• You have to be in the US or Canada
• You have till April 17th
• You have to watch 3 ASP.NET related webcasts

Sounds like a deal to me, I’m in. Here’s the link .

Magazines are great, I really like just being able to pick one up, lay back and do some reading. Development magazines, not so great. They tend to have an higher price, far less content, and more ad pages than content pages. Eric Sink think they are dying, and based on the announcement that "Software Development" is being dissolved, looks like he’s right.

It’s too bad really, I almost hate to see them go, but I have to ask, do they really have any relevance in the modern development world? 

When I buy something, I expect support. When I buy something expensive, I expect really good support. That may be asking too much, but that’s just how I think. Now, when I contact the vendor for support, I expect to talk to somebody that understands the product. When I bring up an issue that gets me on a conference call with a Vice President and a Project Manager, I expect them to give me accurate data.

Seems not everybody thinks that way.

We recently installed a new communications system at work, this is basically two servers (one was an old database server we already had), and a bunch of wires. This $40,000 gadget manages our phone systems, one of it’s components is a $14,000 reporting system (that’s what the old DB server was used for). This reporting system is a rather complex bit of software, one that I’ve spent the last 5 weeks trying to figure out.

When I first heard we were installing this system, I was rather excited as it uses MS SQL Server as a back-end, so writing custom reports should be easy. So I dug into the (limited) documentation and set to work. After a couple days I had everything in place for my most important reporting project (it’s used to report details for part of a major banks customer service department). After a few bumps, it was done and was a bit of a hero for getting it running so quickly.

There were several more bumps on the road, most due to odd, conflicting, or confusing data, but it looked like we were slowly getting there. About a week ago, an issue was brought to my attention, one of the numbers looked wrong, so I dug into the data deeper than ever. I almost had a heart attack. Two of the most important items on the report were wrong, wrong by almost 50%. Not good.

So several phone calls later, we hit a dead end, we just can’t get any answers. So one of our executives asked if we had cut the check for the system, turns out we hadn’t. So the word went out to not pay until we could get some answers. Not too surprisingly, when the vendor found out we hand no intention of paying until it was working properly, they finally agreed to give us what we were asking for: answers.

Those answers came in the form of a conference call with a Vice President and Project Manager from the company that created the software, if anybody understood this software, it would be them. I guess luck wasn’t on our side. Of all the information we gathered from them (and confirmed more today), here’s the parts that matter:  

• The documentation is completely wrong
• They don’t understand the settings for their own product
• They don’t truly understand how their own product works
• They can’t answer a question without first blaming it on something else

Somehow, I was hoping for real answers, not  more clueless people.

After spending $14,000 on the system, as of yesterday, they wanted another $27,000 to create reports and add-ons to do what was promised when we bought it. That’s doesn’t include any user training, or the thousands we lost due to under billing because of the bad data.

I expect good support, seems not everybody thinks that way.