April 2008 Entries

DevTeach is just around the corner again.  I'm sitting here tonight putting the final touches on my presentations and I'm thinking about all the things that I enjoy about my trips to DevTeach.  I might as well give you the top 5. 5.  The presenters that you get to see in sessions are phenomenal.  DevTeach has managed to draw the best of the best in the industry to speak at it.  As a result you can choose any session on the schedule and be guaranteed to see a top name presenter speaking on something they're passionate...

I've been working in this industry for a number of years and through that time of progressed from being somewhat competent at showing up for work to now being somewhat competent at showing up for work sober.  In reality, we all progress in our skills as we gain experience and move through a number of jobs.  Since getting involved in the local Edmonton community with Edmug, one of the things that I've tried to work on is providing something to the growth of newer developers.  There are a number of ways that I try to do this.  In some cases...

Or so Dave thought. Tonight at the MVP Summit a few of us Canucks decided that we should embrace the international flair of the event.  Instead of just hanging with the Canadians and the people that we knew, we set out on a journey.  During the mix and mingle event prior to dinner Tom, Dave and I managed to get some time with the Koreans, Ukrainians (interesting as they didn't speak English, but fun all the same), some of the French, Germans, Italians and the Aussies. At dinner they tables were segmented off so that there were...

I figured I should put up a bit of info about my plans for this spring's conference season.  So here they are. April 14 - 17, MVP Summit...and of course Party with Palermo.  I'm only an attendee at this one, but I'm sure it'll be an interesting experience going to the mothership for the first time. April 18 - 20, Alt.Net Seattle.  Again, only an attendee...or is anyone 'only' an attendee at an Open Spaces conference. May 12 -16, DevTeach Toronto.  Speaking at this one.  As always I'm sure it'll be a great conference which will allow...

I don't know if I finally won the battle at my current contract or if the stars just all aligned for me this week.  I'm helping the company to takes its first steps away from Visual SourceSafe and into the Subversion realm.  Our project has been using SourceSafe for about 5 months now and, as a result, we have a significant codebase stored in it.  Part of the migration away from VSS is to ensure that we get all the files, structure and commit history into the new repository. This being the first time that I've done a migration...

The Principal of Least Privilege is the concept of running with the lowest permission set possible.  Historically we developers tend to run on accounts that have Administrator level privileges.  It's been talked about over and over that we shouldn't so I'm not going to get into that here.  We know that we should, but we're either to lazy or not able to accomplish this feat. I just got a new laptop and I was setting it up last week when I ran into some interesting things.  I'm running Vista with least privileges and I didn't even notice or care. ...

Some of you may have been wondering why my blog posting has trailed off.  Others will have been thanking the Gods that it has.  Still more of you couldn't care less and....ooo...look....shiny. Over the past few months I've been working on the first parts of a book with Kyle Baley (baaaa-lay.....yes...for those of you who don't know that translates from Manitoban to English as "sheep screw").  We're pushing a book that talks about the code and environmental issues that you may encounter when working on a brownfield application.  Today we reached a milestone.  We (well, the publisher) has...

Hey Bellware, sorry you had to take the beating for my statements and comments on the pursefight, that was not the intent.  And to make it official to everyone, Scott Bellware is NOT the author of the Alt.Net purse fight, I am. Wow, that was a action packed few months.  I have not felt that alive in a long time.  There was always so much content, so much to bitch about, so much to make fun of.  The only part that saddened me was that the fun had to come to end.  I have to say that on March...