Entries for September 2007

In case you have been living under a rock, Phil Haak and Scott Hanselman have both joined Microsoft.

Here's Scott's blog post: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/bluebadge.aspx 

Here's Phil's blog post: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/17/why-is-microsoft-removing-my-mvp-status.aspx

I actually did my stint with Microsoft as well, but I did not work in one of their product divisions. I worked for Avanade, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. I was hired to work for projects in the Salt Lake City area. Unfortunately, the projects dried up over here, and they wanted me to move to Seattle. I refused, as I have a large family, with teenagers. I refuse to move them, especially since I now have roots here.

The moral of the story is that you MUST work in the Products division, or you will not experience the best of Microsoft. This leads me to Hector's Tech Employment Corollary:

"The closer your chosen technology is to the money-making processes of the business, the better treatment you will get from the company."

I'm currently employed by The Generations Network. My current position directly generates money for the company. This company has the best working environments I've had the pleasure to be in. I will create another post, with more details about my employer.

My day job had a reorganization last week. A lot of developers were let go. Fortunately, I wasn't one of them. My group (was 4) lost 1 developer. We are scrambling to learn what the other developer did. Our group had already taken work from another developer that was let go earlier.

I was reporting directly to the Director of IS, but now I report to the group's tech lead. In a way this is good, because I can actually find my boss. My previous boss was pretty hard to pin down for questions. All of the running around has taken a toll mentally, so by the end of the day I'm bushed.

This is some very good motivation to get PainlessSVN going, and stop working for the man (WFTM).

I had a very enthusiastic beta tester that has been tracking down problems for me today. I really hate to break when we are having such a good communication going, so I kept FinalBuilder open and been doing release beta builds on the fly. This has allowed me to make very fast turn arounds on bug fixes, so that I can get them to the beta testers when I have them engaged.

I also noticed a very nice feature today as well. I was making a build just now, and had gone back to the forums to make a post when I noticed a MSN-like window popping up, letting me know that the build was successful.

S-W-E-E-T!

When debugging MMC snapins, you have to add them to the MMC console manually. I found something quite amusing that I haven't noticed before. I was actually thinking that I needed a nap, when I noticed this:

I thought that was pretty amusing, but that might be because I'm pretty tired.

I just squeezed in the hook script visualization feature to PainlessSVN. It currently only shows what hooks are in the repository, but I have plans for this in the future. This is one of those things that has always bugged me. Hook scripts are very powerful, but underused feature of Subversion.

This feature has made it into version 1.0. Anyways, here's a screenshot: