Daniel Read's blog

This does not bode well for Windows-oriented Open Source, and goes a long way to explain why even 5 years after the release of the framework, .NET-based Open Source has never taken off in a significant way. Projects like NDoc and Dot Net Nuke have been the exception, and now one wonders if independent, non-Microsoft-sponsored projects of any size can make it long term.

Chris Morris's recent post about self-management techniques has provided good food for thought. In particular, one idea from Chris's list--saying "Thank you" in response to someone's discovery of a defect in your code--reminded me of a lesson that took me many years to learn for myself: being open. What I mean is, being open to a direction or idea that is suggested or inspired by someone else. It's easy to remain "closed," a state in which the default posture is defensiveness, or insecurity, or fear, or control, a state in which the default answer is "No."

Just some friendly user interface design advice...

I wanted to acknowledge and thank the online newsletter IT Metrics and Productivity Journal for their recent issue dedicated to our book Software Conflict 2.0 by Robert L. Glass. Regular developer.* readers may already be familiar with the book excerpts that are included in the issue, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to encourage you to add ITM&PJ to your reading list.

One of the first of many pains-in-the-butt that SQL Server Integration Services developers will encounter is how from a Script Task in the Control of Flow to write to and read from package variables. I have blogged a bit about the topic of SSIS variables in script tasks in the past, but in this post I'd like to share two custom functions that I copy and paste into all of my script tasks to simplify dealing with variables. If you use these functions you will not need the Script Task Edtior's ReadWriteVariables field to make your package variables available to the script.

I've had this idea for a while, and I think it's a good one. I hope someone else will run with it, because I would love to have a tool that does what I'll describe. If the consensus is that it's a dumb idea, then so be it. Web developers who either don't use CSS (!) or are abstracted away from CSS by a WYSIWIG tool or development framework might not be too excited by this idea, but I suspect it will resonate with people who hand-code their CSS. My idea is for a "precompiler" (if that's the best label) for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

The scenario is that you have a gigantic SQL Server 2000 table--gigantic not necessarily because it has a lot of rows, but gigantic because it has a ton of columns. I've inherited a couple tables like this on different projects, tables with two or three hundred columns. (Don't look at me, I didn't create these tables.) It's not uncommon to need to add a new index to these kinds of ridiculous tables to cover a query. So you go to try and add your new index and you get an error like this:

Some links and commentary related to a new Joel on Software essay and a series of posts, including a few related to developer.* Books, about the software book publishing market by Pat Eyler.

I thought I would pass along a link to an article called "Strategy, Tactics, and Business Intelligence" that I wrote for TechLINKS magazine. It was just published online today. Here's a brief excerpt...

Andy Tegethoff started a good discussion with his domain-specific knowledge post, and related comment on the thread for Sarah George's recent professionalism article. I've been mulling the topic over this weekend, and I'd like to offer a take from a different angle.

Recently, I was working on the design of a new software system. As the lone designer and programmer, I had the requirements in my head, and had made lists on my white board of some constraints and pitfalls that I knew I had to design around. But I was having trouble. The design was not coming together. How did I get out of it?

I originally posted the following as a comment to a very interesting thread on David Heinemeier's Loud Thinking blog called "Shaking up tech publishing." I thought I would share it here also on my own blog, with the thought in mind that people might be interested in learning more about what we're doing with this developer.* Books thing.

What is it about daylight savings time? DST not only makes it hard to get up on that first, dark Monday morning (it was for me today, that's for sure), but it appears to be a bug-fest for software systems. I may be reading too much into things, but I observed what I believe to be Daylight Savings bugs in the software systems of two different vendors yesterday/today, and, while I don't have any statistical analysis to go with it, our support phones have been ringing off the hook all day.

The problem is that BIDS keeps forcing a checkout when I open the other package (the one my teammate is working on). It's happened once when I drilled into a data flow task, and another time when I was just looking at the variables window. Suddenly a window pops up announcing that a checkout is taking place, and before I know it I've got a mess on my hands... (Post updated 3/30/2006.)

I won't pretend that I'm an expert at running an advertising-funded print magazine with a circulation in the tens of thousands, but it has always seemed to me that the challenge of SD Magazine was the paradox that the readers most interested in technical content are not necessarily the ones who have decision-making power regarding (or even interest in) expensive testing, configuration management, and "lifecycle management" tools.