What do I do

My day to day work involves a lot of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), TSQL, DBA, and some VB.NET and C#.  My actual title is Senior Software Engineer - IS, but my duties are more in the SQL Developer/DBA realm. I haven't done any heavy duty coding since I started working here, but I'm fine with that. I always wanted to migrate into a more DBA-centric role anyways.

I am responsible for a good size integration with a third party marketing application called DREAMmail. My current setup has about 120 tables, and 47 DTS packages. I use SSIS to debug the package logic, then recreate it on the production server. SSIS lets me do a lot of debugging. The production server is a SQL Server 2000 installation, and that's why I'm stuck with DTS.

I designed and implemented the integration with the help of the Business Intelligence team. This was my first foray into data warehousing (dw). I was constantly bringing the dw when I started. I've gotten a lot better since. It's been a nice learning experience. I'm in the process of re-designing the ETL jobs to be more scalable.

I really enjoy what I do, and find myself sufficiently stimulated mentally. I do get bored sometimes, but that is normal for any job.

My environment

I have a u-shaped desk in a large cubicle. I have a nice view out of my cubicle, and plenty of windows all around. The views include a large meadow on the window close to my cubicle, and several mountains on the other windows. The mountains are starting to be snow-capped. I love looking at those!

I have a 2 monitor setup. They are 21" CRTs, but that doesn't bother me. My machine is a dual core Pentium with 2 gigs of RAM. My chair is one of those office specials, but it's not too bad. I've been thinking of buying a better chair. I personally don't like Aerons, since I haven't been able to get comfortable on them, or any kind of mesh-type chairs.  I like the heavily padded chairs that hug the body.

Why do I like it here

This is the first truly family-friendly, where they mean what they say, company that I have worked for. Everybody else has given lip service to this philosophy, but TGN lives and breathes it. I truly thought these sort of companies were a myth, and was shocked when I found they were for real.

I have been able to leave work to take care of family matters without my employer having a hissy fit. Their vacation policy is very good as well as their health insurance. I've already used almost 2 weeks vacation, and I still have several days left. I accrue almost 5 Paid Time Off (PTO) hours per paycheck. I think that increases after a year. I haven't checked.

The second thing that is a very big issue is having to have your butt on a chair by a certain time. I'm not subjected to this here. I'm treated in a very professional manner. This has been my biggest pet peeve through my career. I haven't been lucky enough to find somebody that would let me work remotely. This is the second best compromise. My commute is around 20 minutes each way.

The third thing that inspires confidence in this company are the managers that I work for. Both of them are very good at what they do, and they shield their underlings from most of the corporate politics. Management is one of those things that are hit or miss is most companies.

I was originally reporting directly to the IS Manager. He got promoted to Director of IS, so now I report to the Team Lead. TGN had a recent reorg, which broke teams into groups of 5 or less. My team is called "TMS - IS." We lost one team member to the reorg. His position was cut, but fortunately for him, he found another position in a team on the same floor. So now we have 3 people in my team.

I just passed my one year here. I've been at a company no longer than 18 months, but I can easily see myself here for 5 years. This is part of the reason I'm not going at breakneck speed or putting massive hours on PainlessSVN or SystemWidgets. I have a strong need for balance in my life, and I have finally achieved it.

I've just heard the funniest retort to a forum troll yet! This is based on the Frenchman dialog in The Holy Grail:

"I blow my nose at you, so-called 'best practises', you and all your silly programmer kaniggets. I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed maintable-code writers! I Brice in your general direction! You mother was a function and your father smelt of CS degrees."

You can read the full thread here: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.559492.41

Made me laugh pretty hard when I read it. Good thing I wasn't drinking anything at the time. 

After some more testing I found that the URIBuilder class does not work correctly with UNC path. Here's the updated code: 

public static string PathToFileUrl( string pathToConvert )

{

    string fileURL = "";

    bool isUNC;

    UriBuilder fileURI = null;

    // This is to capture whether the incoming path is

    // an UNC path or not.

    if ( pathToConvert.StartsWith( @"\\" ) )

    {

        isUNC = true;

    }

    else

    {

        isUNC = false;

    }

    try

    {

        fileURI = new UriBuilder( pathToConvert );

    }

    catch( UriFormatException ex )

    {

        // This is for debugging

        string msg = ex.Message;

    }

    if ( isUNC )

    {

        if ( fileURI != null ) fileURL = fileURI.ToString();

    }

    else

    {

   if ( fileURI != null ) fileURL = fileURI.ToString().Replace( "file://", "file:///" );

    }

    return fileURL;

}

I finally got beta 2 out the door. I got to deal with some really interesting bugs. I'm very happy with my build deployment time. It went down from about 2 hours to just 10 minutes.  FinalBuilder helped me get a handle on builds. I now have a consistent repeatable process. Unfortunately, testing time has gone up, especially now that I test in several versions of Windows.

Without further delay, click on the image below to get to the download for Beta 2:

I got most of beta 2 done already. I'm finishing a feature that should help a lot of people that are having problems configuring their servers in PainlessSVN. The issue is that people who are new to Subversion set the repository root directory incorrectly. What I'm doing is taking a page from Microsoft Internet Explorer's book.

The reason IE got very popular is that it worked even when people used very bad HTML for their websites. That was all good when the World Wide Web was fairly new. This feature doesn't fly today, because there are a lot more experienced people who want standards in browser DOM. Browser differences in the DOM cause all kinds of headaches for web designers and developers. And that's the main reason I avoid web programming. And that's ok, there's plenty of other types of programming out there. One type of programming is not "better" than another, just different.

Now, back to PainlessSVN... Subversion is just gathering steam in t he programming world. Windows programmers have been stuck with Visual Source Safe (VSS). Both Subversion and VSS are essentially free. Subversion is hands down more stable than VSS. I'm adding code to detect badly setup repository root directories. Here's an example of what I mean:

The highlighted directories should be inside a repository. These directories should not be in the top level directory. I need to add code so that PainlessSVN does not choke when dealing with strange setups like that. In essense, I need to let the software be more usable, and not give users grief. Most people just want it to work, and don't care for the little details that are necessary to make things work correctly.

I'm also in the process of finalizing testing the new changes for the install script in my virtual machines. The problem with Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition has been resolved. It was all the installation script, and not PainlessSVN. Basically, the MMC 3.0 libraries get install in the "wrong" directory. The install script copies them to the right directories. This solves the problem permanently.

Beta 1 will still work, as I haven't put in any time based kill code (yet). My wife, Tammy, was sick all last week, and that killed all of my spare time to work on PainlessSVN. Tammy is much better now, so I should have more time to work on  this.

I'm officially 40 today!

All I really want for my birthday is some sleep! My wife has been sick with straph all week. As you can imagine, I haven't got much sleep myself.

I'm hopefully out of the "young whipper-snapper" zone now.

I had an interesting time fixing a bug in PainlessSVN when using UNC paths. I had a function in SVNManagerLib that converted the path to the file:/// format. This is what the original looked like: 

public static string PathToFileUrl( string pathToConvert )

{

     string parsedDir = "";

     StringBuilder arg = new StringBuilder();

     parsedDir = pathToConvert.Replace("\\", "/");

     arg.Append("file:///");

     arg.Append((char)34);

     arg.Append(parsedDir);

     arg.Append((char)34);

     return arg.ToString();

}

That didn't quite work. I did some Googling and found the answer. Let me post the code first then, I'll explain:

public static string PathToFileUrl( string pathToConvert )

{

    UriBuilder fileURL = new UriBuilder( pathToConvert );

    return fileURL.ToString();

}

The UriBuilder is a special class that helps build valid URIs. I keep learning this lesson over and over... Don't re-invent the wheel, just use what the .NET framework already has. There's quite a bit in there. I've been using .NET since 2002, and I keep finding these little nuggets.

I needed to add a boatload of files to a copy operations to a test FinalBuilder project/script. I remembered the filesets in NAnt. I was extremely happy to discover that FinalBuilder has them. I sure was dreading having to add a copy action for each file.

The specific situation was that I needed to test about 6 different configurations for the problem I had with PainlessSVN and Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition. I just made copies of my original script for PainlessSVN. One of the scenarios had me protecting each separate file using .NET Reactor and not merging them. I needed to copy them to a directory so that both the .NET Reactor and InnoSetup could use the Release version of my assemblies.

I added a fileset to the first test version and used that subsequently. My rule of thumb is to use them when doing operation on more than 3 files.

Anyways, it's been a long time since I felt warm fuzzies for a software utility.

I've decided to freeze the current feature set for PainlessSVN Professional v1.0. This means that these features are not going to make it into version 1.0:

• Load dump files
• Drag and Drop of folders and files
• Parsing of directory based authorization

I need to concentrate on pushing this release out. I'm almost ready for beta 2. If no major problems are found, then I will release it to the public. I was able to fix the problem with PainlessSVN not working on Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition. I still need to test UNC paths used to configure the server registration.

I'm working on licensing and the eCommerce parts now.

I gotta say this is one of the coolest things I've heard in a while!

http://www.svniis.org/

This is start, but it doesn't go far enough for me. The current setup still needs an Apache server running. The author is planning on hacking WebDAV directly, if there is enough interest. I would definitely love being able to get rid of Apache altogether. That's why I run my Subversion servers with svnserve.exe