I'm a big believer in letting the specialist do what they do best.  I think that a lot of problems in the IT world are caused by people who want to be all things to everyone.  It is important that we realize that although we may have a broad skillset and understanding (basic understanding of all pieces of an application is vital!), it...

I've spent the morning considering this, given the recent statements by Bill Gates about H1-B limitations (currently 65,000) and how this is damaging to technology companies. There are a few differing points of view on this: Buy USA View- There are US citizen IT workers that are currently out of work.  We should make sure we've...

Interesting find at work today.  One of my developers had two asp:image controls positioned to the right and left of a button.  The developer wanted on the click of an image to call the button postback.  I had no idea that the GetPostBackEventReference(control) even existed until Brendan pointed me to it (thanks buddy)...

Well, the time is getting close now.  Soon will be the official unveiling of the Easy Assets : Standard and Easy Assets : Enterprise packages.  What this means for me is that I'm tightening the bolts on the application, finishing off user documentation, testing installs on any pc I can get my hands on, and redesigning my website with...

I had a post a while back that discussed my personal interviewing techniques, and how to identify "dead wood" developers in your organization.  I received a lot of positive feedback on this topic and it seems many young developers were particularily interested in the application of the topic to better position themselves to impress an...

There has always been a mini religious war between programmers about code layout/style and when to optimize.  My personal take on this has been put more weight on readability and maintainability over highly condensed, optimized code.  Here's a few thoughts on this subject: Don't optimize first In almost all cases I have ever seen,...

I know I haven't been overly active lately but I'm in "Crunch Mode" for Easy Assets .NET.  My ISV is taking full form now.  The application itself is stable, solid, and overall I'm just putting in a few last minute tweaks based on feedback. The install package works flawlessly for existing sql server / msde installs.  The script...

I'd like to have VS 2005 from the MSDN account I paid good money for. However my provider, My-eSuite just isn't going to let me. 4.9 kb/s, 288 hours.  So I'll be blogging about VS 2005 sometime in May.  That's my "broadband" cable modem service.  No other providers available here. I love this apartment complex, but I'm afraid I'm...

I keep seeing a lot of examples in ASP .NET where sql server priviliges are given to the ASP.NET worker process.  A few thoughts about this: By doing this you are expanding the damage that could be done if the ASPNET worker process was compromised.  This is particularily so for those of you who give dbo rights to the worker process in...

Well, for anything in this article to make sense, you're going to have to read Eric Sink's latest MSDN Article.  Finished?  Ok then. It was interesting to hear about the logic involved behind moving sourcegear to a platform other than Microsoft's.  Where I really tuned into this article though was the discussion on MBAs and their...

Jay had a little mini rant this morning about passwords and security.  It's Friday, should be a happy day, so I'm just going to list out some rather absurd security practices I've encountered in my years of consulting and development. A major (fortune 500) company has an ordering system that in the order table stores the entire credit card...

What's the difference? Here's a console application that shows one:         Dim myObject As Object = Nothing        Dim toStringTest As String        Dim convertTest As String        Try   ...

I forgot to disable the change password/account creation for the demo build this morning.  So naturally someone changed the admin password. The database has been restored and the proper controls are disabled, so it's all good now!  On a side note, if this is the least embarassing thing that happens to me this year I'll consider myself...

For those of you curious bloggers who have been asking to see a demo of Easy Assets .NET you can now! http://www.easyassets.net username: admin password: admin This is a sample database, it gets restored frequently so feel free to play with the data all you like!  Feedback is always appreciated too.  ;)

I was cruising the Joel On Software forum recently and came across this post and I felt compelled to blog my thoughts. I often find it quite perplexing, the term superprogrammer.  It seems that people are looking for this one size fits all definition of what is super.  This doesn't tie well to the definition of a super hero though...