Welcome.

More to come. I have recently changed all of my old blogs to something more permanent and something I don't have to pay for.

A little about me: I joined the U.S. Marines right after high school, I have been a Project Manager at Apple, Software projects for large companies such as IBM and worked my way to being a Software Architect at several companies in healthcare, automotive repair and defense industries. I enjoy helping to mentor other developers, update upper management on the state of things and been a key developer on critical flagship million dollar products. My experiences have also had me lead software development teams in Vietnam, Uruguay and Sir Lanka.

I have a B.S. in Computer Science from Neumont and I'm a candidate graduate for my M.S. in Cybersecurity with specializations in Cyber Operations and Computer Forensics. I will begin teaching Cybersecurity from High School to College/Universities to give back to the community and when needed, I help an organization named Operation Underground Railroad to help save children being trafficked in international countries and yes, this affects the United States and should be your concern as well.

I will attempt to take all my experience and knowledge and viewpoints to help my readers learn what I have learned, follow through on my personal projects and journey with me in my career change from Software Development to Reverse Engineering and Cybersecurity.

This will be accomplished by detailed step by step walk through of technical research. My philosophical views of the current workforce environment and building foundation knowledge upon complex subjects.

I hope you enjoy learning as much as I do and I hope to become a passive mentor to those that read my blog posts.

I will begin by posting  some of my previous and linked solutions from my old blog and then continue from there.

Thanks for visiting.

Why creating a engineering wiki site. (Living Document) is a good thing.

Recently I’ve started at company that didn’t really have a good solid engineering wiki. Let me state the problems and if you fall in this category, you might want to start thinking about looking at your software development practices.

Problems:

• Knowledge Islands: Anytime and I mean anytime you need answers about something everybody always directs you to somebody else. The alternative is to spend so much time in code that might be so abstracted or not very transparent that although you CAN figure it out, the cost to the company is high. OR It’s pretty much impossible for said individual to move on to another project without constantly being bothered about his “design” six months after he’s left. When I say bothered I mean weekly.
• Knowledge Gaps: Do you have multiple efficient teams but all all of them don’t contribute to the over all “Engine” so that the car all moves in the same direction?
• Very unclear/no requirements: Agile does not mean you do NO documentation.
• Each standup/scrum master does their own thing: On this team you create tasks for unit tests and then you swap to another scrum master and unit tests are atomic and “should” be included in as apart of your tasks already.
• Engine that could: Do you have

Plenty more to add, but you get the idea I think.

Purpose of a Wiki

Some of the benefits of a wiki can be:

• QA can learn how functions changed or work from previous versions.
• PM's can disseminate information to peers, which allows feedback and question to better the existing design.
• PM's can build Releases Notes can be used to communicate outside of engineering about how features work.
• PM's can share with the entire company about their notes on competition, this helps share the knowledge of understanding to all in engineering to help employees understand the market we fight to dominate.
• Managers can use use simple and precise language and general propositions in new or existing processes, or evolve them to fit the reality situation.
• Managers can update status reports for their team, not handled in a TFS Query.
• Developers can reduces the knowledge islands which can can then allow people to move on to the new projects or not leave a knowledge gap.
• Developers to write a very high level outline functional and technical specifications (one page) of a Feature and can do so right after development has taken place. (Not before and not months after..)
• TAMS can build install guides which can be used inside/outside their existing team.
• New employees are empowered to find answers on their own, or become educated enough to ask solid questions.

..... Just to name a few advantages.

Q: Isn't having a wiki kinda anti-agile?

• Document writing is not anti-agile. Fostering open communication and getting feedback from others/customers is a important aspect of being agile. it's more efficient and it allows documentation to evolve from its original to a current working state as well as disseminate that information across the company.

Okay.. so I’ve convinced you to start a wiki for your engineering company. Here are some problems you will want to consider solving.

• If emails are sent out and they link a wiki page. What if that wiki page is changed. Portal sites like Sharepoint have static URLS so you if the page changes, the email link becomes invalid.
• Code Syntax Highlighting, it really helps.
• Flexibility
• Ease of Use
• Can it hook into your Active Directory?
• Does it have a good search?

My recommendation for all this: MediaWiki

Here are some tips for your wiki.

• Prefix all your pages with something like: We call it a “Manual of Style’
  • Design - 
    • (Code is the comment my butt), This page doesn’t capture the design the developer was “going” for. Or the “right” way they intended you to add to their design.
  • Tutorial -
    • How To, this lists step by step how to do something
  • Guide -
    • Best practices
  • Standard -
    • This is a YOU MUST follow this.
  • Process -
    • This is a stream line process. Not something to be blocked on. But it outlines easily what’s expected.  Do this, email this email group. here’s a template that details what we want to capture.
  • ….. etc etc
• Your SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) should be focused on delivering business value with emphasis on high quality frequent releases. It should be based on the following four values:
  • Over communication
  • Empowering Teams
  • Continuous Iteration
  • Delivering Customer value early
• Build a Category system that fits your company. In my current company we have “many” products that “share” components. So I built categories that are “Features – “ Then everybody binds their page to those Features and all those Feature categories are bound to each Product that uses them. That way if they are shared they can be found easily. It also easily shows a Feature list for each product.
• Build a wiki syntax help page that details how to create a new page, or how to bind to the categories. etc.
• Build a email group of wikihelp and add in as many good solid stakeholders. So when question is asked, all get it and understand the solution. i.e. form a committee
• Organize your companies SDLC and Processes, show in there what’s expected from engineering (QA, Installers, Build, Devs, PMs, Mgr) on a Daily, Weekly, Sprint, Release. This way it’s clear and understood by all.

Adoption:

• Getting a company, it’s employees to switch gears and adopt this culture changing event is going to take time, you need to be active, leadership must adopt this and help enforce and promote it. Eventually it will take as time goes by and people will be able to see the benefits of being able to search for their own answers and understanding clearly what’s going on in the company and what’s expected of them.

Writing more effective emails in your company.

I work at a very email-centric environment and worked under the best CTO I’ve ever had the pleasure to work under. One of his emails he sent out is a great template to follow when writing emails. I wanted to share the email template.

1. Format email responses that consistently repeat the following:

• What is the problem?
• What are the steps that will be taken to identify the fix?
• Who owns driving those steps?
• When will those steps be taken and results published?

2. The above email should be sent daily until the issue is resolved

• A day in SRS time is a week for another company

The second item is clarity of communication.  When we are sending an email that contains release notes, UAT notes/plans, crisis management steps (i.e. what was mentioned above), etc. we need to make sure we are explaining things in layman terms.  Describe the situation like you would to a family member who doesn’t work at the company.  Someone you care about.  This may sound silly, but it’s not.  Terms engineering uses are not universal and are thus a foreign language to others in the company.  Please communicate briefly, but clearly using words that are more likely to appear in Webster’s dictionary than in the wiki.

Reengineering Engineering with a new SDLC, with influences from Salesforce.com and Facebook

Our company has made amazing progress over several years and we create some world class products and we had a SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) that matched.

• We were in a niche market owning about 95% and we were doing excellent.
• We acquired three other companies and placed them under an umbrella corporation.
• We were generating millions in profits after operating expenses.
• For the past five to six years we’ve had a twenty percent profit every year.
• We are the true company that will actual go public. Not just talk about it. You see we’ve been keeping our closet clean and our books show that for the past six years we have profits, a clean SDLC, and a top notch workforce, we continually get on the Inc. 5000 as top 5 fastest growing software company.
• We’ve built up a great culture here. People we hire know how to work hard and we know how to reward that work.

However as the term goes “who moved my cheese” things change. We turned around and had a recession in the automobile industry so we had to adjust. We then had a dozen competitors who were taking our business away from us.

Rant!

We offered a “Premium” package, this means we offered our customers everything. Put our products in your shop. Follow our processes and you WILL make more revenue which pays off our cost and puts a s**t amount more money into your pocket. Just because somebody builds something that looks like clone at a 3rd of the cost, does not mean it equals our product!!. As they soon found out and came back to us. But still! where’s the faith!.

Anyway we got a new presidente that recognized this and ALA Carted our product. Which I think was genius, we now offer completive rates with many behind the covers that our competitors just can’t match.

Reengineering:

Okay so now we want to show these competitors who their dealing with. Lets. We need a new SDLC for the new strategy.  It will be painful and tough to communicate to our offshore teams. A quick look at our old SDLC yielded something like this:

• Milestone I (Define Features)
• Milestone II (Specifications)
• Milestone III (Developer Code Complete)
• Milestone IV (Quality Assurance Complete)
• Milestone V ( User Acceptance Testing)
• General Release

This was built with a vertically integrated, monolithic technology for our onsite client/server architecture (distributed). It served us well and when functionality and reliability were being invented to address the needs of our customers.

Cons of old SDLC:

• It took QA as much time as it took the developer creating the code. Two weeks for a feature, Two weeks for QA.
• There is or can be a lot of finger pointing between QA and Development.
• Development might just code something and throw it over the wall, thus developers were not taking as much ownership over not writing bugs VS allowing somebody to find bugs and then building the cushion for them to fix the bug. This still held up the release date.
• Technical Debt would bite us sometimes because of the all too quick agile design to produce features.
• Million of other projects to add to the existing core products to address other roles in the service departments. But not enough developers as well as cost of training new development into the domain.
• Inaccurate early estimates resulted in missed features and their complete dates.
• Teams compressing their testing schedules to meet the demands of the hard feature date.
• Lack of visibility at all stages of the release.
• Late feedback on features at the end of the release cycle.
• Long and unpredictable release schedules.
• Gradual productivity decline as the team grew.

Research:

Here is some great resources that helps put things in perspective.

1. http://tcrn.ch/qEp6i1
2. http://bit.ly/rntqq6

NOTE: I just want to say in video 2. I love how Eric Schmidt started talking about US workforce and how he believes what America needs to accomplish to help bring it back into the top workforce of the world. I think it starts around 0:45:00. It’s very interesting.

New SDLC:

Outcome of our Company Engineering Standards Meeting.

• Foster Open Communication and over communicate.
• Empower teams.
• Continuous iteration.
• Delivering customer value early (More agile type processes in the form of weekly releases).

So what did we do. We looked at how Facebook operates and focus our SDLC towards their structure. Yes we know we are not Facebook. which is why we don’t adopt everything across the board. But obviously they have some good ideas.

• We eliminated quality assurance and took all those resources with their existing domain knowledge and put it back into the development organization.
• This means quality is now the responsibility of all developers.
• We determine to build a software architecture to be more in line with Salesforce.com and their service offerings.
• The development organization will adopt test driven development that allows for the discovery and resolution of bugs at the top of the project effort instead of at the end. “lean manufacturing” or lean software development.
• The development team has ownership over the features, this means they are responsible for seeing their feature promoted to production in a controlled manner.

Each team is now responsible for their own:

• Browser/OS Test Matrix.
• Repository Updates.
• End-to-End Testing.
• Environment Update Testing.
• Crash Emails.
• IT updates.
• Load and Performance Tests.
• Release Version Tracking.
• Server Setup.
• TSG (Trouble Shooting Guide) Documentation.
• User Acceptance Testing, in combination with other teams.

What we learned:

It has now been a 12 months since we’ve completely revamped our engineering SDLC so what have we learned, what’s the the post mortem?

• We are now a loosely coupled organization (Robust).
• We built a CI server that allows every team to use Ant and PowerShell to build their own CI that works for them.
• Every team now implements acceptance tests driven by the ScrumMaster/PM.
• Every team now has all their Ant/Powershell scripts custom to their unique needs and running on every check.
• Each team has dropped off branches and we focus on a single main branch.
• New teams/projects formed pick the new technology. So although we are primarily a Microsoft workshop. We have Java, Rails, Android, I O/S teams. (After approval. of course.)
• Teams have adopted testing as part of their development processes
• Reduced the number of processes.
• Strengthen those processes that remain so they now have more attention.
• Teams that spent a lot of time manually testing their products, now focus that time allocation towards building a effective acceptance test or integration test when applicable.
• Don’t write up bugs caught during the development life cycle. that just slows you down. Only create the bugs after a project has passed all unit and acceptance tests when a bug is found.
• Teams now focus on team throughput rather than individual productivity.
• Simple agile processes with common vocabulary.
• Prioritized work for every team.
• More defined organization roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner…).
• Daily metric visibility into each team.
• Weekly Scrum of Scrums that provides visibility to all teams at a higher level.
• Reduction of bugs.
• Potentially release-able products every 30 days.
• Mandatory design meetings, code reviews. Any change no matter what is reviewed by at least one person
• Our code is beginning to look like one single developer wrote everything, not just a multitudes of everybody.

What we would do next time:

• Involve more individual contributors earlier.
• Train PM earlier.
• Work on automation earlier.
• Communicate delayed deadlines to executives due to the reengineering.
• Be more clear to workforce what the new SDLC rules are and ensure the dev managers enforce them more.
• Encourage more peer to peer coaching.
• Create a better dedicated, fully empowered cross functional rollout team.
• Managers need to understand to be patient and expect mistakes.

I hope this information enlightens you as it has me through this process. Much thanks to my old CTO Marcus Daleyand VP of Software Architecting Nate Zobrist. Marcus is a CTO that can keep at least 600 people all on their toes and pushing them all to be better and everybody should thank him for making them better at their career. Nate is a forward thinker and just has a much higher IQ then most anybody I’ve ever met.

Hiring Fresh Engineers VS Seasoned Engineers.

Me and friend at my company were having a discussion on this topic, I thought I would share.

Company Problem:

In a leadership position you want to attempt to get a talented, preferably super star team.  To assemble this team, every manager is faced with which pool of developer he/she wants to focus efforts in.

Seems the current trend with some larger companies like Google and Facebook is to hire, isolate from the workforce on a boot camp project for a few months (so employees don’t miss Josh, who was a great guy, but gone in a few months.) and then determine termination or placement into the engineering ladder. So who best to focus efforts on attempting to recruit?

His view as I understand it:

His thoughts was to pick only from the Fresh Engineers pool. Because most likely you’ll get the root skillset that drives the best engineers. Passion. With passion you can provide them a great training ground, and with the different degrees of mentoring and reviews, which can be a big help for them in the first couple of years. As a bonus, they can join at a cheaper salary.

You are less likely to find a Seasoned Engineers who has that same level of passion that’s wanted to make a good employee.

Thus, his choice, hire from fresh engineers, put them in boot camp, determine placement.

My view on this matter:

I think a Fresh Engineer should try to find a company that will truly grow him/her and fill in the gaps of education or self taught programming with experience to build a well rounded and solid engineer. However some students end up at a company and never learned the modern tools they are using. Do you really think that he/she is going to show you what a super-star they are in a few months? I don’t believe so. Most companies must hire a developer coming out of school and pay them their salary for at least a year before their return on investment starts coming back to them. But during this time the criteria of what’s considered a “super star” is set. Each company. I would even say each manager, has a different set of pre-defined criteria’s on what they consider a excellent talent.

for Seasoned Engineers. This is the engineer that you can put on the un-sexy projects, the projects that are a pretty thankless task and there isn’t really any rewards or spotlight, but are very necessary. These engineers are seasoned enough to get the job done and to not put up a big fight about going to these projects. Of course they also want the sexy projects as well, which helps them enjoy their work too. It’s tough to keep a good programmer as many many other companies will snatch up good talent.

My Conclusion

So the way I see it is that you need a mixed team of both. Fresh and Seasoned Engineers. Passion and Dedication to getting the job done. It won’t take long before the team will close the technological knowledge gap and all your engineers are within the same range skillset focused towards the overall team project outputs.

There is so many more differences I can get into between the two types of developers. But it’s not for this article.

Be nice to your fellow developer in a shared environment.

Hey,

Several times we’ve found the need to hook a debugger from Visual Studio into the deployed central server dll code, to see what’s going on.
However on our shared environment we have several instances of IIS (W3WP.exe) for each instance running. So which one is the one we are supposed to hook into.  If you hook into all the processes you might get a break point from somebody else testing at the same time. So here’s a little trick to find your correct IIS process running to hook your debugger into.

From IIS 7.0 you need you to run IIS Command Tool ( appcmd ).
• Start > Run > Cmd
• Go To Windows > System32 > Inetsrv
• Run “appcmd list wp”

Copy of your dll in the GAC

Search for text in Stored Procedure

I’m tried of searching for this all the time. So here is where I’m storing it. ^_^

SELECT ROUTINE_SCHEMA, ROUTINE_NAME, ROUTINE_DEFINITION
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
    WHERE ROUTINE_DEFINITION LIKE '%text%'
    AND ROUTINE_TYPE='PROCEDURE'
    ORDER BY ROUTINE_SCHEMA, ROUTINE_NAME

Just replace text with whatever you are looking for. But this does not search for functions or such.

Software Construction

1.1 What is Software Construction?

Many books, articles will make analogies that software construction is a lot like building development. They port over concepts from building development into the software construction world. Many points are accurate, but some are not. The root problem that everybody should agree to is that computer software can be a complicated process.

To me programming is human thought codified and crystallized. Today's software metaphor normally relate software to buildings. There are others beside this metaphor, programming to math, programming as a model, or programming as rule-following. Given that my premise of programming is just raw human thought, then it stands to reason that some people are more apt towards this field then others are. That doesn't mean we can't train our brains or though process to be better focused towards this field. But it also means that there are those out there with slight advantages as a "master programmer." however the software industry does not only need "master programmers" just because you are a great problem solver does not mean you are somebody that can stand back and look at the larger picture. So in our field you also need the "Architect." Metaphors, design patterns and coding styles cannot replace actual intelligence, but they do help us to communicate to each other what it is we are trying to do. This is what Software Construction is about.

1.2 Why is Software Construction Important?

In our current market of today, construction is a major part of the Software Development Life Cycle. (SDLC), this is the life cycle of a software project with formalized stages for a start to finish solution. In the business world, it is a major part of their process.

Each software project you begin, you must realized there are four factors that effect that project;

• Time
• Resources
• Quality
• Features

At any given moment, you as the developer, own one of those four items. The other two are controlled by external sources. For example, say you have to complete this project in three months. You have customers flying in to train, or trainers flying out to train on your new feature/product. This is a hard date (meaning it can't be moved). Also the quality of the product must work as a finished product with very high quality requirements. In this situation you should be able to control how many resources it takes to get to this milestone.

• For every project you work on you must pay the price of time. Either you pay for that time up front with some good construction design. Making your application scalable or flexible . Then when you do need to be handle changing something, because you designed your application with flexibility, you can easily "hook" into the existing code "interject" some new behavior at the right processing stage, debug, test and ship over to QA. (because we all know you don't just ship out to the customer without QA approval. That is what we call a "Hope Install.", and your customer should not be your first and last QA).

• Most business stakeholders want you to finish the project faster and meet the requirements. Get it done and quickly. These people do not know that choice leads to greater bug time, as the developer will have to either refactor a lot of code to fit in the new changes. Let me put it to you another way business people. You tell me which is cheaper. When would you like to choose to move a elevator shaft if it ends up not being in the proper position. Would you choose to do this on paper while designing, or once it's completed. If you choose to do so once it's completed, it will be very expensive.

However there is a pitfall here. Anybody can sit down with a architect and produce a "specification" that, in truth does not adequately describe what the customer wants or what the requirements needs. This fact may not be apparent until after the customer sees the first demo of the software. Identifying these features and planning on them moving will money and time for all involved.

• Many software projects fail because of weak specifications, not all of them, but enough to say.. Don't make weak specifications.
• Many formally trained developers might over engineer and take way too much time for specifications that are not accurate. So don’t over engineer, just for the sake of making documentation.

My recommendation to you is, take some time to focus on the most critical 20% of your project core that needs to be worked out (thoughts onto paper) and then proceed with the project. This is a good general rule, but depending on the size of the project, may or may not be necessary. Large projects need more documentation, projects with more then three developers need more documentation to coordinate API's with each other. Small projects or one developer don’t need as much. It's a weighted scale and you must identify what is necessary to get the job done.

1.3 Determine the Kind of Software or Industry requirements you are working on.

Ask yourself what category does this project fit into?

• Business Systems
  • Type of Projects: Internal, Intranet
  • Type of Work: As-needed testing and QA Planning, informal requirements, Design and coding are combined, Developers test their own code and little or no testing by separate test group, somewhat informal deployment procedure.

• Core Systems
  • Type of Projects: Embedded Software, Packaged Software, Tools, Web Services
  • Type of Work: Staged delivery, up front planning, basic test planning, semiformal requirements, architectural designs documented, as-needed design reviews, code reviews, developers test their own code, separate testing group, formal deployment procedure.

• Mission-Critical Systems
  • Type of Projects: Core Embedded Frameworks, Required Release Set Software
  • Type of Work: Staged Delivery, Extensive up-front planning, extensive QA test planning, Rigorous change control, Formal requirements specification, Architectural design, formal architecture inspections, formal detailed design, formal check-in procure, code reviews, developers test their own code, separate testing group, formal deployment procedure.

1.4 Defining the Problem

Defining the problem should be described from the user's point of view, not to be stated in technical computer terms. You don't want to tie the problem to specific technologies, because that may not be the best solution to the problem. If you list something like "Refactor stored procedures to solve performance problems." You are focusing on the specific area that may not be the problem at all. Instead the problem should be stated. "Performance problems when running client reports." This way you are not miscommunicating to the developer where the problem lies. Listing stored procedures may or may not be the solution.

1.5 Categorizing the Software Project

1. Small Projects
   1. Less then 100,000 lines of code

1. Medium Projects
   1. Greater than 100,000 lines of code and less than 3 million lines of code

1. Large Projects
   1. Greater than 3 million lines of code

Lines of Codes of other projects

• Windows NT 3.1 ( 4-5 Million)
• Android OS (12 Million)
• Windows Server 2003 (50 million)

• Mac OS X (86 Million)

1.6 Meeting the Business needs of your Software Project

This is where you choose your technology you want to use to solve your software project. This includes the programming language, any third party libraries or technologies. Most times the programming language has been selected for you, so you might want to determine the type of classes you are going to use. Are you going to consistently use LINQ Query Syntax, or use long query syntax. Maybe you will use EJB's for Java, maybe not, or you might use WCF for .NET technologies.

What types of coding conventions do you follow? Good code should look like one developer wrote all of it, not pieced together from multiple developers. When choosing technologies if it's bleeding edge, realize that the community for it will not be mature. VS a mature community of a proven product or technologies which chances are that somebody already has tried what you are attempting to do. Be certain to choose the best software practices and tools that are best suited to your project.

1.7 Quick Construction example

Focus on documenting 20% of the Core requirements, do this by identifying the most critical components to achieve success. Focus on categorizing each component into three categories:

Lets say my company required me to create a listening web service for a partner to push massive amounts of data through so I can parse some information out of it, and build a held message for another project to pull from my storage cloud down to it's domain.

Identify your components

• Focus on documenting 20% of the Core requirements, do this by identifying the most critical components to achieve success. Focus on categorizing each component into three categories:
• Lets say my company required me to create a listening web service for a partner to push massive amounts of data through so I can parse some information out of it, and build a held message for another project to pull from my storage cloud down to it's domain.

Identify my components

1. Listening Web Service: I choose WCF
2. Partner Interface Method:  I choose to follow a standard in my industry name STAR Standard
3. Extracting data - I will use LINQ Query Syntax
4. Storing Message Structure - Build a project that handles dealing with Message Packets.
5. Storage - Utilize Windows Azure Cloud
6. Testing - Utilize a 3rd party tool. SOAPUI to mimic our partners message, use Azure storage explorer to see data in cloud

1. Deploying -
   1. Dev - (Use host file to build a friendly name for dev testing purpose, no need to bother IT with outside dns) Azure also provides the Cloud Compute Emulator to simulate cloud on dev box
   1. Stage - Azure accounts each have staging and production. This can be combined for a "Dev Azure Account for my final testing"
   1. QA - Get a Domain Name alias (friendly name) to give to partner to use. Map to a "QA" Cloud account. Again there is a Staging and Production in the cloud, so no staging is necessary to configure.
   1. Production- Get a domain name alias (friendly name). Deploy to cloud

1. Maintaining - What can I do to minimize having to redeploy for bug fixes? Research this with the cloud to see what I can use. Estimate: 6 hours for research. 3 for designing something if there is anything. After that.

1. Recovery Plan - Research.

Focus on identifying the 20%

• I know what I know (1 - lowest to 5 - strongest)
  1. (4) WCF
  2. (3) STAR Standard
  3. (4) LINQ Query Syntax - extracting data from where clause. No fancy queries foreseeable.
  4. (1) Azure Storage Cloud
  5. (3) SOAP UI
  6. (3) Azure Storage Explorer
• I know what I don't know (this only focuses on what we actually have in the requirements)
  1. Customer data structure
  2. Performance of WCF in Cloud
  3. Integrating WCF with Web Role or Worker Roles of the Azure Cloud
  4. What types of configuration/power should I give to those that maintain this?
  5. Logging in the cloud. (Limitations?)
  1. Recovery if production is wiped out, how to rebuild this easily? Scripts? What?
• I don't know what I don't know (these are the what if scenarios)
  1. Schema validation?
  1. Duplicate messages one to many?

  So from the look of things, I think I should probably focus my detailed documentation on what happens When I extract the data from the customer and how I'm storing the message. I might end up with a rough draft that looks something like this:

•  

  1. Inputs to Public Azure Roles

  • PutMessageV1.svc : Called by IIK Series Partner to send information through. Message will parse information and create a unique address name.
  • ProcessMessageV1.svc: See PutMessageV1, exact same functionality.

  2. Input to Internal Azure Roles

  • ReceiverV1.svc Receives structured data to store until pulled by another project.

  3. Internal Azure Storage

  • Held Packet Table Held messages in Azure Storage.
  • Delivered Packet Table Once message has been delivered it is stored in this table for archiving or audit purposes as well as guaranteed delivery
  • Log Table Log table for storing log entries.
  

VS Tip Incremental Search

Most of us use Ctrl + F or Ctrl + Shift + F to find code. However you can also use a Ctrl + I which is the Incremental Search. The nice thing about this is you don’t have to wait for the dialog. Just hit Ctrl + i , and as you type it will match the string being typed.

Visual Studio Break When Exception Thrown

Maybe some of you know this, maybe some of you don’t. But I just learned about it. Apparently I’m a old man programmer because I normally just look at the code and try to solve it without debugging the application, or I write it out somewhere.

I’ve been trying to track down this wiggly bug in my factory pattern code, but it was a slippery bugger. I finally asked somebody for some help and they suggested that instead of all my try/catch’s I use the Break when Exception is thrown. By default Visual Studio only breaks when the exception is unhandled in the user code. For me this was some distance from where the exception was thrown.

So if you want to throw the error in the code where the error occurs and not wait for it to catch. You can select the Debug menu, then Exceptions (or use Ctrl-Alt-E) which will bring up this dialog box:

Check the box under Thrown for the “Common Language Runtime Exceptions and viola. You are set.

Replacing NaN in XSLT 1.0

Using MKLINK to create a Symbolic Link

With 64 bit systems you might be writing a bat file and you might want to generate your folder in the Program Files (x86). However to help make life easier for your user you could also create a symbolic link to the Program Files as well which is more or less a shortcut to your folder.

In my company we use Marimba to deploy to our shop servers. As stated above I wanted to create a symbolic link to my Program Files. Below is how I did it.

1. Open Command Prompt (Admin). Start –> type “cmd” in search and hit Ctrl + Shift + Enter and it will open in Administrator mode, or hit Windows + R and type in “Cmd” either way works.
2. Just to get a quick look at what MKLink. Type “mklink /?” to look at the help info.
3. My command line looked like this: mklink /D “C:\Program Files\marimba” “C:\Program Files (x86)\marimba”
4. The command line response was: “symbolic link created for C:\Program Files\marimba <<==>> c:\Program Files (x86)\marimba.”
5. Browse to my C:\Program Files, and now I see a marimba folder that when I click it, takes me to my real URI location.

Using SQLCMD to execute multiple SQL Scripts in folder

My company utilizes a midnight installer process that rebuilds a database every night for a {QA, Prod} environment. But sometimes we the developers need to rebuild our databases from these scripts. Previously I would open up the query window. Assemble all the scripts from each file into one file. Copy and paste all the sql scripts details into the query window and execute. Bleh, slow and I hated it. But now if I need to execute a bunch of sql scripts I can do so in a batch file.

1. First I want to open up a “run as” admin command prompt.
2. Start –> “Search Program and Files”, type in “cmd” this should auto focus on cmd.exe found.
   
3. Then hit “ctrl” + “shift” + “enter” and it will open up a command prompt in administration mode. You can tell because the command prompt will say “Administrator.”
   
4. Normally I just opened up sql query and copy and pasted the single scripts that run the create database and constraints/foreign key scripts. But now I need to add all the stored procedures. In our company we keep a static database of that product with all of our stored procedures to keep them all in once location. With one table “About” for versioning the set of stored procedures/functions etc. So I will browse to my current TFS workspace location.  In my case: “cd C:\srs_source\Team\Product\Main\Databases\ProductCode\Database\Programmability\Stored Procedures”.
5. Now I use the command line “dir /b > myFile.cmd” (dir /b list directory with the format I want) and the greater than sign “>” (writes the command output to a file, instead of the command prompt window).http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/redirection.mspx?mfr=true
6. Open up “myFile.cmd” in Notepad or I use Notepad++
7. Remove the “myFile.cmd” from the list
8. Place cursor on first line and hit “ctrl” + “h” for Replace window prompt.
9. In Find what type: “\r\n”
10. In Replace with: type: “\r\nsqlcmd –E –n –i” (Update) I now use something like “\r\nsqlcmd -d <databaseName> –E –i” i.e. “\r\nsqlcmd -d Mpi_Data –E –i”
11.   Hit the button “Replace All”
12.   This will replace everything but the first line. At the bottom you will have a empty command “sqlcmd –E –n –I”  just copy this to the first line and you are set to run your batch command.
    
13.   We are always certain all our sql scripts have the “USE [ProductCode]” for each of our “CREATE PROCEDURES”at the top of each .sql so from this point we can just run it on the command line “myFile.cmd” and it will add these stored procedures to the correct database.

Changing the Diff/Merge Tool in Visual Studio

Compare Settings:

%1 %2 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

Merge Settings:

%1 %2 %3 %4 /title1=%6 /title2=%7 /title3=%8 /title4=%9

C# Development Best Practice

I didn’t want to re-import pictures, so here are some snapshots from my old blog:

 

Casing / Notation

Camel Case

The capitalization of a word is such that the first letter is lowercase and the first letter of each successive word is uppercase, e.g. "propertiesFilename".

Pascal Case

The capitalization of a word, similar to Camel Case except that even the first word is capitalized, e.g. "PropertiesFilename".

Acronyms

Two-letter acronyms use all uppercase letters, such as "DH" or "IO". Acronyms of three or more letters use Pascal casing, such as "Dms" or "Xml".

See MSDN documentation on this topic.

Magic Number

A number that is used in the code, other than 0, that has some special meaning and is not defined by the use of a "const int" or similar declaration. Such a number is difficult to understand why that number is used or what the number actually refers to. Using a "const int" or similar construct to define it also will give it a meaning and allow it to be understood. Compare

if (i == 64)

with

if (debugLevel == DEBUGLEVEL_FULL).

Hungarian Notation

The naming of variables such that the variable type is imbedded in the variable name. For example, "int iLineNumber = 0;" starts with the letter "i" in order to show that the variable is of type "int".

Patterns

Code Smell

A recognizable and problematic pattern in the source code of computer programming. Such a pattern indicates that the source code could be better written to avoid the problematic pattern. When code smells are recognized, known solutions are applied to remedy the problem. For example, code that is repeated multiple times is a code smell. The solution for that particular code smell is to make a function or method of that code that can be used or called when necessar.

Code Styles

OO:Object oriented

The creation of classes to contain both the structures of data wanted and the methods to operate on that data. (Data will be treated as singular or plural in this document; that data, those data. Datum will not be used for the singular of data.)

Guide: How to Enable Concurrent RDP Sessions in Vista

Scenario: I RDP into my home machine which is running Vista Ultimate. My wife has her own user account, but everytime I RDP in, I have to kick her off. Seems Concurrent Sessions just doesn't exist out of the box for the O/S Vista like it does for Windows Server.

This is not my hack so Thank you to "Sunmorgus" on this forum thread for making this possible: TheGreenButton

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some things to check. Make sure your version of Vista SUPPORTS Remote Desktop connection to begin with. OnlyVista BUSINESS & Vista ULTIMATE. If you have Vista HOME PREMIUM you have to use another hacked Termsrv.dll

Here are the steps for Vista BUSINESS & Vista ULTIMATE Instructions::

1. Download Sunmorgus' hacked Termsrv.dll file (see links below) 
   1. EDIT 7/24: Thanks to Sunmorgus, here is the new location for the files:

For the 32bit:
http://dl.jtstroup.net/termsrv/termsrv_new.dll
for the 64bit:
http://dl.jtstroup.net/termsrv/termsrv64.dll

For Vista HOME PREMIUM: (Instructions are located within the zip)

http://dl.jtstroup.net/termsrv/termsrvHomePremium.zip

1. We need to modify termsrv.dll to enable us to swap out the hacked assembly. termsrv.dll is located at C:\Windows\System32;
2. Click Start, then type "cmd" in the search box & hit enter. This will launch the Command prompt
3. Type the following & hit enter: takeown /f C:\Windows\System32\termsrv.dll
4. Then type this & hit enter (NOTE: Replace USERNAME with YOUR USERNAME!! If your name has a space in it, enclose it with quotes, like "Richard Rahl"): cacls C:\Windows\System32\termsrv.dll /G USERNAME:F
5. Then go to your Windows Explorer, and go to C:\Windows\System32
6. It is always a good idea to rename any original files you want to replace and store them for safe keeping so we can always return to the original state if something was to go wrong. I suggest renaming Termsrv.dll to something like "termsrvOriginal.dll" or "termsrv.dll.Original"
7. *NOTE* If you are unable to do the above, try rebooting into SAFE MODE
8. Then copy & paste the Hacked DLL you downloaded in Step 1 into the C:\Windows\System32 folder
9. You should now have concurrent sessions.

*MS Updates* if any Microsoft patches come out which may replace the "termsrv.dll" then you will need to reapply the patch. I've never had a problem on Vista ULTIMATE, but have read that some Vista HOME PREMIUM users have needed to reapply their patch.

P.S. 

Some people have had some issues with the termsrv.dll not working on their machines or their services is unable to register the new termsrv file and then run the service. if that is the case you can download a program called "UniversalTermsrvPatch" here: http://deepxw.blogspot.com/2009/04/universal-termsrvdll-patch.html

use your ORIGINAL termsrv.dll and run the program. It will then restart your computer and you will be back to normal with Terminal Services working.

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

I received a very interesting bug that’s been plaguing our product for a long time now. The problem is that intermittently our WinForm client users would view an image using the WebBrowser Control that would cause the program to crash. Listing this error:

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

This problem happen when our users attempted to use a SVG Viewer or Tiff Viewer ActiveX object. (Which worked perfectly in IE outside of our app) and this did not occur on every machine. Some machines would work, others would not. We were finally able to narrow it down to those using MS Vista’s 32 bit operating system.

After loads of research I was able to narrow it down to Vistas Data Execution Prevention (DEP).

Snippet from Wikipedia about this:

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature that is intended to prevent an application or service from executing code from a non-executable memory region. This helps prevent certain exploits that store code via a buffer overflow, for example. DEP runs in two modes: hardware-enforced DEP for CPUs that can mark memory pages as nonexecutable, and software-enforced DEP with a limited prevention for CPUs that do not have hardware support. Software-enforced DEP does not protect from execution of code in data pages, but instead from another type of attack (SEH overwrite).

DEP was introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and is included in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows Server 2003Service Pack 1 and later,[1] Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

Software configuration

So how does one configure DEP. There are multiple ways of configuring this. Boot.ini (XP and VISTA) ,command line and using Microsoft’s ACT 5.0. By far the easiest method is to use the command line.

1) Find your Command prompt and right click and select “run as administrator”

2) Then type “bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx XXXXXXX”

a. Where XXXXXXX can be the following:

OptIn ( 2 ): This setting is the default configuration for Windows XP. On systems with processors that can implement hardware-enforced DEP, DEP is enabled by default for limited system binaries and programs that "opt-in." With this option, only Windows system binaries are covered by DEP by default.

OptOut( 3 ): This setting is the default configuration for Windows 2003 SP1. DEP is enabled by default for all processes. A list of specific programs that should not have DEP applied can be entered using the System dialog box in Control Panel. Network administrators can use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to "opt-out" one or more programs from DEP protection. System compatibility fixes, or shims, for DEP do take effect. Also note that Windows silently disables DEP for certain executables, such as those packaged with ASPack. [5]

AlwaysOn( 1 ): This setting provides full DEP coverage for the whole system. All processes always run with DEP applied. The exceptions list to exempt specific programs from DEP protection is not available. System compatibility fixes for DEP do not take effect. Programs that have been opted-out by using the Application Compatibility Toolkit run with DEP applied.

AlwaysOff( 0 ): This setting does not provide any DEP coverage for any part of the system, regardless of hardware DEP support. (except in Windows Vista Ultimate)

So your commandline might look something like this:

“ bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff”

Once you are done with this you will need to restart your computer.

To check the status of your DEP Policy you can run this command:

“wmic os get dataexecutionprevention_supportpolicy” This will return a number value.  See values above to see what numbers mean.

Now this is how we defined what the problem was. But turning off DEP entirely isn’t a viable solution since that will expose your computer to many evil virus and hacking code.

Vista provides an interface to select specific programs to be marked as DEP non compliance. You can get to it by going to:

1) Start

2) Right Click “My Computer” à Properties

3) Advanced System Settings

4) Advanced Tab

5) Under Performance select “Settings”

6) Select the tab “Data Execution Prevention”

Here is where you are able to add DEP for all programs and services except those I select. This will set your DEP Policy to 3 (OptOut). You can then select the exe programs that enable you to mark that program as DEP noncompliant.

Well that might work for other people, but it didn’t work for me on my machine. Everytime I tried to select my program’s exe, I got the message “This program must run with data execution protection(DEP) enabled. You cannot turn off DEP for this program.”

Later I found a website that lists a NXCOMPAT and the C# compiler.

Turns out that you can add this switch to your postbuild event of your project and it will mark your compiled project as DEP non compliant.

1) Right click on project in Visual Studio

2) Properties

3) Build Events

4) Edit Post Build ...

REM Mark project as DEP Noncompliant

call "$(DevEnvDir)..\..\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat"

call "$(DevEnvDir)..\..\VC\bin\editbin.exe" /NXCOMPAT:NO "$(TargetPath)"

Another way to do this is to open up the Visual Studio command prompt, browse to your exe location and type:

editbin.exe /NXCOMPAT:NO YourProgram.exe

That’s it, now our product will compile and it fixes many crash log errors we were receiving previously.