Background

I’ve had my eye on the open source world for at least the past decade.  While my roots may be in Microsoft technologies, my first presentations at user groups and conferences were on open source projects and programming in Linux.  Even when I keynoted at Software Freedom Day – Cleveland 2011 – talking about “Keeping an Open Mind About Open Source”, I made sure to mention that yes, Microsoft is included in the list of those involved with open source.  It was nice to be able to mention their company name and get more intrigue than groans.

Microsoft’s Involvement in Open Source in Terms of Development

One myth people have believed is that developers who use Microsoft technologies don’t understand open source.  However, that myth is just that – a myth.  The truth is, developers of all types, including those who use Microsoft technologies, are interested in the open source movement.  Whether they’re contributing to their own projects or encouraging developers to contribute to projects or create their own open source projects, Microsoft has provided developers with a home for open source projects over at CodePlex.

In addition to providing a place to host these open source products, they have encouraged developers to help with the tooling in Visual Studio.  One package management system that’s used commonly in the Microsoft development realm is NuGet, the open source developer focused package management system.  This tool allows those developing with Microsoft’s Visual Studio to easily add 3rd party open source libraries to their applications.

We have a place to host open source packages and tools to give us access to open source libraries.  Microsoft is also known for promoting open source packages and pro-open source solutions in their Web App Gallery, which can be accessed on desktops via Web Platform Installer and can be installed on webhost’s servers for those webhosts that support the Microsoft Web App Gallery. You can even play with these packages and customize them on your own, even if you don’t have Visual Studio.  Microsoft’s WebMatrix tool ties into the Web App Gallery as well and makes it easy to work with applications found in the Web App Gallery.

Microsoft’s Open Source Initiative

Recently, my friend Marques – also known as @tromboneforhire on Twitter – tweeted about stumbling upon the Microsoft Openness site.  I had never ever heard about it up until that point, but I figured I’d poke around the site to see what their site was about.

Microsoft is all about building bridges across platforms.  The Openness site covers how Microsoft is about building these bridges, looking at how openness influences Microsoft and its audience.  It contains stories of Microsoft paired with common open source technologies and packages – including PHP and Drupal.  There’s also a list of resources on openness and interoperability – including standards, Microsoft projects, and other helpful links.  You can also get your short updates from them as @OpenAtMicrosoft on Twitter.

In addition to the Openness site, there’s the Port25 blog that covers communications from the open source community at Microsoft.  Here you can find where Microsoft technologies meet the open source community.  Whether it’s Microsoft appearing at OSCON or something like PhoneGap on Windows Phone being complete, you’ll find all sorts of details on Microsoft’s relations in open source.  As they put it on their site:

Port 25 is about having a healthy conversation with customers and the industry to talk openly and honestly about their biggest interoperability challenges, whether it is on UNIX, Linux, Windows, or other open source packages.

We believe that healthy and productive discussion only occurs when the parties listen and respond to each other, and this is the foundation on which Port 25 is built.

Our goal is to be accessible, approachable and smart, which means our door is always open, that no comment goes unread, that ideas (common sense required) can be openly discussed, and that while change takes time, we’re committed.

Conclusion

In “Keeping an Open Mind About Open Source”, I challenged my audience to keep their mind open for the rest of the conference, as they may have been surprised with what was covered in the conference.  As for now, I challenge you, whoever you may be, to get past the myth that Microsoft isn’t interested in open source.  It’s a myth, and the reality is that Microsoft is interested and has taken big strides over the years to show how they’re interested and want to be involved in the open source realm.

One of my clients started using this tool to help track features on our current project and steps we need to take for those features. While using it for this client, I’ve found multiple uses for it, so I figured I may as well blog about the handy online tool known as Trello.

What I Like About Trello

What’s nice about using Trello to track things like this is that you can assign points to cards and use browser plugins – such as Trello Scrum for Google Chrome – to help get lane totals, which are helpful if you need to calculate velocity or other metrics.

Cards on the board can have all sorts of features, including:

• Labels – used however you may want to use them. Be it using labels to identify larger features, priorities, risk levels, or some other piece of data. Cards can have multiple labels.
• Assignments – used to see who’s assigned to work on the card. Multiple people can be assigned to a card.
• Checklists – used for lists related to the card. Great for keeping track of steps and resources to complete a card.
• Attachments – good for attaching files related to the card. This is good especially if, for example, you have a gherkin file associated with the feature.
• Vote – good if you have a team of people looking at features and wanting to vote on which features get in a release, for example.

Trello is also a project that is continuously maintained. Not only do they continue to work on Trello, but they use Trello to manage Trello development – check out the Trello Development board.

How I Use Trello – For Business

In addition to using Trello to track the various features and who’s working on each of them for our project with one of my clients, I’ve also decided to use it for my business overall. My Trello boards for my business – Cleveland Tech Consulting, LLC – help me to get a better view of the picture overall. I have a board that I call “Business Pipeline”. This is where I keep track of my various contracts with my clients, as well as potential job leads. I have another board that I use to keep track of some of the apps that I’d like to work on if I had more time. This helps me to at least get my ideas down somewhere where I can revisit them.

On my “Business Pipeline” board, I have 4 columns:

• To Do – tasks I need to do, people to follow up with
• Scheduled – things I’ve scheduled to get taken care of
• In Progress – what I’m currently working on
• Done
• On Hold – tasks waiting on another person or waiting for me to have more time to address

On my apps idea board, I use the default 3 columns:

• To Do
• Doing
• Done

Overall, these boards help me see the big picture of the flow of my business.

How I Use Trello – For Personal Projects

This whole “creating cards, putting them in columns, using checklists” mentality is the story of my life. I tend to break big projects into smaller ones to make them more manageable. I make lists of how to accomplish tasks, to help keep me on task. So using Trello on personal projects just made sense to me. Add to it that I have a very big… project… in my personal life that I really couldn’t see a big picture of… and Trello to the rescue! {cue superhero music}

So my very big “project” in my personal life is preparing for the arrival of my son, who is due April 4th. My husband and I are going to become parents for the first time, and we’ve got a lot of tasks to tackle before Logan’s arrival. I didn’t realize just how much we had to do, but creating a “Baby Planning” board on Trello has helped both of us realize that there’s a lot to do. Here’s what one of our cards looks like:

Whether we need to register for something, purchase something, or preparing something in the house, it’s all getting added to the Trello board. So far, we’ve found this helpful – be it tracking pediatrician recommendations, writing down specific color information for the nursery, or even storing links of nurseries that I like for inspiration.

Conclusion

I’ve found Trello to work well for what I need. I like a simple way of organizing my features and tasks, be it software development/architecture or otherwise. Trello is my choice, and I’d recommend others to try it out and see if it may meet your needs as well.

My Phone

I have a Samsung Focus on AT&T with the Mango update. Hard to believe, I’ve had my phone for over a year now. Very pleased with the Windows Phone interface, I’ve added many apps to my phone since getting it.

Social Media Apps

• 4th & Mayor – It took me awhile to get into the whole Foursquare check-ins trend. But after devLink this summer, I’ve checked into a few places – currently at 184 check-ins, 4 mayorships, 21 badges, 12 tips, and 42 friends. My top places include places where I was contracted to work and where the user groups meet. In the past 6 months, my top categories include airports, food & drink shops, and offices. All of these statistics are easily attainable in 4th & Mayor! Once again, Jeff Wilcox has put out an awesome app.
• Birdsong - While talking with my friend Chris Woodruff while we were in Seattle last year, I asked him if he could recommend any apps for juggling multiple Twitter accounts. Birdsong is great for that! Whether I’m Tweeting as @sadukie, @clevtechevents, or one of my various conference accounts, I have one app that allows me to switch between accounts and tweet from there. While I don’t use it often when I have my laptop on hand, I do find it helpful if I need to post a picture to Twitter while I’m on the road.

Productivity Apps

• Amazon Mobile – Definitely handy when you’re buying items from a brick and mortar store and really wondering if you should spend that amount on something that you could wait a few days for. Being an Amazon Prime person and having free 2-day shipping on orders, this is a must-have for me.
• Diagnosis – Whether you’re trying to diagnose battery usage and signal problems or wanting to tether out on your phone, this is a must-have for Samsung Focus users. You can find more on the Samsung Focus Diagnosis app on the XDA-Developers site.
• GoVoice – If you have a Google Voice account, you can check your Google Voice texts and voicemails on your Windows Phone with the GoVoice app. This has been helpful in deciphering what some of my transcribed voice mails really were.
• Last.fm – Listen to the streaming music over last.fm right on your phone with this app!  When I’m not listening to last.fm on my XBOX, I may be listening to it on my phone.  It’s nice to have this option in addition to any other options I’d have in whichever car I’m driving.
• Mileage Log – Being in business for myself, I have a new world of tax write-offs, including mileage to places.  Also, with getting a new car last July, I was curious to see how its mileage would be throughout the year.  This app allows me to track my mileage (including the price) so that I can see the mpg trends in my car.
• Stopwatch – Good for timing laps and as a general timer.
• Translator - Right now, the supported languages include English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.  I like having this on hand when I am dealing with an international audience and need to get words or sentences translated.
• Unit Converter – I’m known to run searches such as “150 lb to stone” or “47 degrees F to C” and then getting the conversion from a search engine.  However, having Unit Converter on my phone means that I have these conversion abilities right at my fingertips when I’m on the go.  Whether I’m looking at length, temperature, speed, time, volume, angle, weight, or area, this app has been very helpful in getting me the conversions I need when I need them.
• WordPress - If you have 1 or even more than 1 WordPress website, this Windows Phone app is great for managing your WordPress sites.  One thing to note, XML-RPC publishing needs to be enabled on self-hosted  WordPress blogs before you can publish from the app. WordPress.com-hosted apps have this enabled by default.
• World Clock – If you have business clients (or in my case, family) throughout the world, this app can help you keep track of what time it is in other parts of the world.  For me, having family in London, Sydney, and Hong Kong, I need to have something like the World Clock app to help keep their times straight.

Misc Apps

• Across the Room – Recommended to me by Jeff, I’ve found this helpful whether it’s delivering a message to friends in the same talk as me at a conference or sending a message to my husband when he’s sitting away from me in our front room. Of course, he steals my phone so that he too can play with this app. This is just a fun way to deliver a message, as the name suggests, across the room.
• Coin Flipper – When you live in a house of indecision like I do, it helps to have a coin flipper for making decisions, especially if you don’t like carrying coins around.
• Fandango – Whether it’s a girls’ night out to Sex and the City 2, a family trip to The Muppets, or a date night to the latest James Bond movie, I like having movie times and being able to purchase movie tickets right at my fingertips. I can see what’s now playing, what’s coming soon, and even what’s showing at nearby theaters – including showtimes for the current day!
• FML - If you’re having a bad day and need something to make you laugh, just know that other people are having it as bad or worse. This app is great, showing the data from fmylife.com.
• Geocaching - After a few of my college friends talked me into geocaching, I’ve found it to be a good excuse to get out of the house and a great way to explore cities. Take scavenger hunts to the next level with this GPS scavenger hunt-like activity. Whether I’m on my own or out with friends, I’ve always enjoyed figuring out where the cache is hidden.  This is tied into the geocaching.com database.
• IMDb - Pulling data from the IMDB.com website, this app is great when you need to wow your friends with a quote from a movie or satisfy your curiosity of who was in the original Ocean’s 11.
• Periodic Table – Have I ever mentioned that some of my friends are super smart when it comes to science?  If they ever get to talking about elementary topics, I’ve got a periodic table of elements on my phone to remind me how that was structured.
• Portal Sounds – I’m a fan of the Portal games, and I’ve found that having the sounds at my fingertips can be a great distracting tool.  There have been times where my little nephew (who’ll be 2 in the spring) has started getting fussy, and I’ve played some of the Portal sounds which have caught his attention and got him to settle down.
• Wikipedia - This app needs to words, other than it takes the data from the Wikipedia.com site.

Games

• Angry Birds – Shooting birds to attack pigs… this game is an addicting puzzle game.
• Bejeweled™ LIVE – I have to admit that I have a weak spot for PopCap games. The Bejeweled series was the first of their games that roped me in. I love this gem-matching game, whether I’m at the doctor’s office or stuck on a long ride.
• Color Sprouts – a coloring book app, good for keeping kids distracted
• Doodle Jump – a fun little game that makes great use of the accelerometer!
• Fireworks - nice little app to create a distraction for little ones
• Fruit Ninja – Be it on my Windows Phone or on Kinect, I have to admit that I am a fruit-slashing addict. On the phone, your fingers are what does the slashing. Slice and dice the fruit, and watch out for the bombs! This game is great stress relief!
• Parachute Panic – Such a catchy theme song! It’s fun trying to land parachuting guys on boats while working around obstacles.
• PvZ - I’ve got this on my PC and was super thrilled when I saw it was coming out for Windows Phone. I have this on my phone now as well, and I made it a point to unlock the Whack-a-Zombie mini game for yet another form of stress relief!
• Swipy Man – Another game that makes physics fun, trying to land a stick figure guy on a platform.
• Wordament - I’m a words-game junkie. Banagrams, Scrabble, Boggle, and Balderdash are just some of the word games I like playing in person. Wordament is a good Boggle-like game.
• Toy Xylophone - You never know when you need to distract a kid or play as an accompaniment at Music Monday. Having a toy xylophone on the phone is just a silly thing to have on hand.

Conclusion

Got any apps on your phone that you’d like to recommend to others? Blog about it and post a link to your blog post here in the comments! I’d love to see how others are using their phones and what apps they find useful!

Others’ recommendations so far:

• Clarence Klopfstein (OCDProgrammer.com)
• Brian Graham

Microsoft Office 365

My husband works at an IT company that deals with Microsoft BPOS and Office 365.  Thanks to him, I learn about Microsoft products that I as a developer would normally not care much about but that I as a business owner may care about.  Office 365 was one of those.  Since there were trial subscriptions for their various plans, I tried trials for two different plans – one that gave me the cloud based stuff and one that included Office Professional Plus.  Here are my initial thoughts:

• A cloud-only version would not work well for me, as there are many times when I may be on a plane or just disconnected from the Internet in general and want to work on my documents without that tether to the cloud.
• While I like that it has Office Web Apps, it also has SharePoint (which I wouldn’t use, as I prefer other tools), Lync, and Exchange (which, to me, doesn’t make sense for a single user company).
• The Office Professional Plus was nice:
• It was handy for when I had to work on a client’s Access database.
• Having Office available when disconnected from the cloud was handy.
• OneNote… such a great way to organize thoughts, links, receipts, plans in general
• The licensing scheme is typical of Microsoft –  P plans versus E plans.

I would like it if it were more a la carte – give me the cloud part plus Office Professional Plus, minus SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync, and I might be good.  Otherwise, for me personally, there’s a lot of fluff and confusion and not really something for me.  I also didn’t like the idea of setting one of my domains to point to their services – as a long time web developer and domain owner, there are some sacrifices I’m willing to make but moving my domain to point to a SharePoint site didn’t settle well with me.  (SharePoint is a great option for some people, but it’s just not my personal cup of tea.)

However, if you’re looking for this combination, I can recommend a company in Cleveland to help you decide what plan may be right for you.

Note: After letting my Office 365 trials lapse, my Office Professional Plus license also expired, as expected.  There does not appear to be a nice way to upgrade Office Professional Plus with a registration key.  The help file says to contact your system administrator (which is annoying when you are the administrator).  After talking with my husband, there may be 2 spots to edit this – Add/Remove Programs (yay for Microsoft intuition) or the registry.  There isn’t an option under the Help menu like where most Microsoft activation and registration dialogs live.

Microsoft Office (standalone, no cloud)

I’ve been working with Microsoft Office products for a long time in my development career.  One of my first programs while learning VB was learning how to get it to talk to an Access database.  I was used to writing school essays in Word documents.  My drafts for my book were written as Word documents.  My presentations have been done in PowerPoint.  My email – at least 6 accounts – has been in Outlook for awhile.  Microsoft Office, for me, was like my fleece blankets in the winter – something that has kept me in my comfort zone.

However, after that Office Professional Plus expiration after Office 365 trial expired, I was not happy with that user experience.  It made me think that Microsoft Office was more like that holey pair of jeans that I’ve been meaning to get rid of.  On top of it, Office’s licensing model seemed to be pricey to me.

OpenOffice.org

After realizing that I wasn’t content with licensing models or prices, I remembered that there were open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.  After all, I was working on a keynote for Software Freedom Day 2011 here in Cleveland talking about open source.  Going back to my Linux roots, I remembered OpenOffice.org and figured I’d check it out to see how it works.  Here were my thoughts:

• If I work with a book publisher again, it’ll be in my personal VM, which has Microsoft Office through my MSDN subscription (for personal use, not for my business).
• While I can access the Access data by converting it in OpenOffice Base, I won’t be able to deal with Access databases in their MDB format.
• I can still write presentations, using OpenOffice Impress.  I used this to write my keynote slides.
• While there’s no mail client, I can always find a separate email client.  This isn’t a must-have but a nice-to-have.

While working with OpenOffice.org, I found myself missing Outlook.  However, a quick tweet yielded an Outlook replacement – Windows Live Mail!  Other than missing Outlook, I felt fine using it – and I can save their files to other formats if need be.  For example, for my keynote, I made my slides available via both OpenOffice’s ODP format and the PowerPoint format.

Conclusion

For me, as a small business owner, I personally find more value in spending money on training and on partnerships with the right teammates rather than on an office productivity package.  The cloud wasn’t something for me, as I preferred to be detached.  After re-evaluating my situation and taking a couple office suite setups for a test drive, I think OpenOffice.org plus Windows Live Mail is the right decision for me.  In this case, the least confusing licensing model, the cost, and the best value for my investment  were the deciding factors.  Does this mean I’m anti-Microsoft? No.  This just means that, as a business owner, Microsoft is a potential vendor but may not always have the right solution for me.

Background

We have a Visual Studio 2010 solution with numerous projects – class libraries, WiX installers, and at least one web application.  One of the annoyances we have on our team is maintaining the WiX files every time we update a page, in order to make sure our pages get deployed properly.  So imagine our frustration today, after adding about 10 pages of content to our web application, we realized that we had to update our WiX installer for the website.

For those not familiar with WiX – Windows Installer XML (WiX) is what’s used in creating MSI files from XML.  You can use the WiX toolset to help you maintain these packages.  The WiX toolset documentation is available on SourceForge.  Every time we need to add a file to the server, we have to update our WiX wxs file.  Syntax for that looks something like this:

<File Id="SampleFile.aspx" Name="SampleFile.aspx" Source="$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\SampleFile.aspx" />


Problem and Solution

Our problem was that we needed to create that line for 10 new ASPX files.  Sure, we could have borrowed a line from one of the files already in the directory, copied and pasted it 10 times, and then manally search-and-replaced each of these instances.  But even that takes a long time.  Knowing what I did with what tools I had available, this is how I saw it.  That XML above pretty much boiled down to this for me:

<File Id="{0}" Name="{0}" Source="$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\{0}" />


I saw that pattern and realized I could turn that into a string and pass it the names of the files.  I also realized that I could use StudioShell to navigate through my project’s structure to get a list of the new files – which happened to be all of the ASPX files in a particular director and output them into this XML.  My StudioShell commands looked something like this:

cd DTE:
cd solution\projects\ProjectName\SomeSubFolder
dir *.aspx | % { "<File Id=`"{0}`" Name=`"{0}`" Source=`"`$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\{0}`" />" -f $_.Name }

The StudioShell output looked something like this:

<File Id="AgeGroups.aspx" Name="AgeGroups.aspx"
Source="$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\AgeGroups.aspx" />
<File Id="Fees.aspx" Name="Fees.aspx"
Source="$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\Fees.aspx" />
<File Id="Home.aspx" Name="Home.aspx"
Source="$(var.OurSamplePath)\Subfolder\Home.aspx" />

What took me a few minutes to type the command, run, copy the output, and paste into the wxs file could have easily taken longer if I hadn’t had StudioShell.

Note: While I could have fired up PowerShell and navigated my code via the FileSystem provider (as the dir command and the string formatting are PowerShell), I preferred to use StudioShell because our projects in the solution were in different folders and having the DTE:\solution\projects navigation that StudioShell made it that much more easier and convenient to just do this work from within Visual Studio.

Conclusion

Once again, having StudioShell as part of my installed Visual Studio tools made it that much easier for me to script out a process and get the results I needed within a much shorter period of time than doing it manually.  If you haven’t checked out StudioShell yet, you can find it at http://studioshell.codeplex.com.

The [Your App Here] Campaign

Yesterday, I received an email from Microsoft about their [Your App Here] advertising campaign program.  They’re looking for the next wave of great apps for Mango (Windows Phone 7.5) phones.  Unfortunately, this program is limited to developers in the United States.

The email mentions two campaigns – January and February – with respective submission deadlines of 11/16 and 12/22.  By submitting your app, you are entering for a chance to win placement in a digital Windows Phone campaign, with banner ads and up to a million impressions through the MSN Network.  The app will also be featured at the Windows Phone marketplace.

So that app you’ve been thinking about… maybe it’s time to build it and get others using it as well!  For more details, see The [Your App Here] Campaign site.

Windows Phone Camp Hands On Accelerator Lab

What better way to work on your Windows Phone app than to check out the Windows Phone Camp Hands On Accelerator Labs that Microsoft is hosting in various cities throughout the country?  Next week, Tuesday (11/15) through Thursday (11/17), Microsoft is hosting a 3-day camp in Columbus, OH to help you get your apps out to the Windows Phone market.  Whether you’ve got a totally new app idea or maybe have an Android, iPhone, or BlackBerry app that you want to see on Windows Phone, this can be a great opportunity to work with Microsoft resources on how to get your app built and out to the Windows Phone Marketplace.  For more details on the Columbus Windows Phone Camp Hands On Accelerator Lab, click here.

31 Days of Mango

My friend Jeff Blankenburg is a Developer Evangelist over at Microsoft who’s been passionate about Windows Phone for quite awhile.  He wrote a “31 Days of Windows Phone” series awhile back, and now he’s publishing his new series – 31 Days of Mango.  If you aren’t familiar with some of the new features in Windows Phone 7.5, then you really should check this series out.  I really like that these articles have pictures to go along with the descriptions, so that as the reader, we have some context as to what we should be seeing if we’re following along with the blog post.  There are plenty of resources in this series for working with Mango – to date, including emulator tools, reminders, motion, contacts API, and the calendar API. For more details, you can check this out at http://jeffblankenburg.com/31daysofmango.

Other Resources

There are plenty of resources for getting started with Windows Phone.  In addition to those above, you can always check out http://create.msdn.com.  With all of these resources at your fingertips and the need for an app on your Windows Phone, what are you waiting for?  Start your app today!

Theresa Alfaro Daytner is the owner of a construction company.  Inc.’s success story is here: http://www.inc.com/video/201101/success-stories-daytner-construction-group.html.

There’s one question in particular that stands out:

What would you say to other women looking to break into male-dominated fields?

3:10 Theresa: As a woman, coming into a male-dominated field, look at the opportunities I have to redefine how we do it. So, I’m very intent on value-add to our clients. I really want to be a partner with our clients, and I gravitate toward the type of clients and projects that profoundly impact me, whether that’s in education, health care… Those are things that I naturally gravitate toward. So, what I would tell women who are interested is, “I wouldn’t worry about whether there are more men or women in a particular field.” If you feel like you have the resources to put together in a particular area to be exceptional at it, whether it’s something that more women are in, like marketing or advertising, or something like construction or engineering. If you think you can be excellent at it from a business model standpoint, and you’re passionate about the value-add that you can bring there, I say there’s really nothing that should stand in your way.

These words of advice are so very true. When I decided to explore computers professionally, it was based on a few things – (1) I could make better money with less effort in computers rather than in music, (2) I had a lot of fun tinkering around with code at home – from releasing a freeware address book on NoNags to working on websites, I liked it all, and (3) while I knew it was a male-dominated field, I wasn’t going to college for my MRS degree (awful joke some people made) – I had my supportive boyfriend back then and didn’t put any thought like that towards my friends.

I pursued a field that I was not only interested in from an educational standpoint, but I was also interested in tinkering with as a hobby.  I knew that I could work in the field writing business apps – if I could stay focused enough to write something as simple as an address book application, then I could handle writing serious applications.  However, at the end of the day, I knew I’d probably go home to work on some other projects, since I really really enjoyed playing with code.  It didn’t matter if it was Visual Basic, HTML, Perl, or even my nemesis at the time  - Javascript.  Here I am, out of college almost 10 years, playing with computers for over a decade,  and it still hasn’t gotten me bored or driven me away.  And you know what… I never considered the gender factor through any of this because I was too busy doing what I loved and wasn’t taught to worry about these factors.

So I agree with Theresa’s advice – if you think you can be excellent at whatever it is you’re interested in from a business model standpoint and you’re passionate about it, then go for it.  Live your dreams!

- Monty Python’s Flying Circus

I feel a lot like the wife in the Monty Python Spam skit.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t like spam – be it from someone I used to do business with, someone I’m currently doing business with, or even someone I may deal with in the future.  Though if you want to deal with me in the future, you’re smart enough not to spam me in the first place.  Lately, though, there have been some reputable companies that have been turning to spam that have made me sad and made me wonder – When did spam become an acceptable business practice?

Definition of Spam

Taken from Encarta, via Bing:

Definition

spam

NOUN

spams

plural

1. electronic junk mail: an unsolicited, often commercial, message transmitted through the Internet as a mass mailing to a large number of recipients

TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE VERB

spammed		past and past participle
spam·ming		present participle
spams		3rd person present singular

1. send unwanted e-mail: to send an unsolicited e-mail message, often an advertisement, to many people

2. post unwanted electronic messages: to post a message many times to a newsgroup, or an inappropriate message to multiple newsgroups

Let’s see… words that stand out there – unsolicited, unwanted, and inappropriate.  That describes the piece that I am covering here in this post.

Chase – Threatening to Spam

This was piece of mail that we received at home, telling us that Chase realized that we weren’t on any of their mailing lists and that they were going to start mailing us all sorts of stuff unless we opted out.  Really?  My husband and I each got a copy of this letter – so count the postage on both to be sent out, the paper to print said letter, the trees that were killed unnecessarily.  Apparently one of the guys I follow on Twitter had this same experience:

Really, Chase, when did it become acceptable to realize you weren’t mailing your customers and figured it’d be good to warn them that you’d be mailing them if they didn’t opt out?  Rather than taking that approach, why couldn’t you have said, “We have {such and such services}.  If you’re interested, please fill in the circles of those you’re interested in.”  Sad state of affairs when you’re forcing people into your programs and making them opt out rather than taking the opt-in approach.   Customers really don’t appreciate that kind of business.

It was great to see so many of my friends yesterday, and it was great to see at least one speaker outside of the Heartland District.  I was glad to see David Hoerster made it out from Pittsburgh!  For me, I wanted to catch sessions that I’ve been meaning to catch for awhile or sessions that I could learn from to apply to my current projects.  Here’s what I caught yesterday.

Dealing with Data in a Mobile Application, presented by Jeff Fansler

In this presentation, Jeff talked about consuming data, storing data, and caching data.  We looked at sync vs. async and how those worked.  When it comes to storing data, Jeff mentioned three options – isolated storage, Sterling DB, and – now with Mango – SQL CE!  I was already familiar with isolated storage, since I’ve used it in my Silverlight apps.  However, I hadn’t seen examples of Sterling, and his example would have been a good guide for that.  I was a little bummed that there wasn’t a SQL CE example, as I have an app that I’m working on that would benefit from SQL CE.  But alas, I’ve got something new to learn!  The last thing Jeff covered was saving data – both on demand and as a background task.  Overall, I really enjoyed this talk and have a lot to take away from it.  If you were at AADODN and didn’t catch this, you can catch it again at CodeMash!

Going Independent, presented by Michael Eaton

As you may know, I have gone independent, as of August.  I’ve got a couple clients that I’m working on now, and I’m learning to balance my work demands and my life demands.  I caught this session at devLink this past August, and although I had already asked Mike for advice before this, I still learned a bit from it.  As he mentions – when you go independent, you typically aren’t 100% billable – you can’t really bill for invoicing, other accounting business, and other administrivia.  He also mentioned a bunch of other helpful tidbits for those getting started on going on their own.  Like he said in his presentation, the ideas he covers in his presentation are based on what he has experienced in this past decade, and each indie has a different story.  If you didn’t catch this session, it will be done as a PreCompiler at CodeMash!

Develop IT: Intro to PowerShell, presented by Sarah Dutkiewicz

I was asked by Jay Harris awhile back if I would consider submitting this talk to Ann Arbor Day of .NET, and since it’s my favorite talk to give, I was happy to oblige.  Once again, this session was for a packed room, with an interesting audience.  This time around, I didn’t speak to my help files as much as I have in the past.  However, I did continue to keep this slideless and work from a custom module.  You can download the module from http://qtlil.me/aadond2011ps.

I also managed to cut a little bit out so that I could mention Jim Christopher‘s StudioShell.  As a developer with a little bit of PowerShell background, you can make this tool work for you in ways you couldn’t imagine.  For example, we have a client who stored error messages in a class, but our business analysts wanted to maintain those messages.  Rather than manually creating the XML file that we had envisioned, I had one of my teammates show me what he was looking for format-wise, and I got it for him in a matter of minutes.  Most of the minutes were me waiting to install StudioShell in my VM – otherwise, with one line of code, I was able to extract the constant string variables’ names and values and put them into an XML file.

If you haven’t caught this presentation yet, I’ll be giving it in the Detroit, MI-area at MIGANG on February 15.  If you’re interested in hearing it at your user group, please contact me at sarah at codinggeekette dot com.

Stone Soup or Creating a Culture of Change, presented by James Bender

It was great to wind down from the conference with this session. Throughout this session, James talks of how to deal with change in a company.  One of my recent favorite phrases was near the beginning of this presentation – Change where you work or change where you work.  If things aren’t going the way you like, you can try implementing change in the workplace to  make things better.  For example, maybe you work at a company that seems to hesitate with developer training.  Rather than letting them slack in that department, you could encourage your teammates to learn by doing lunch’n'learns.  But let’s say that the company seems to be lacking in ways that you can’t change.  Then maybe it’s to change your work in terms of finding a new place to work.  This is one of many phrases and stories that James’ presentation suggests.  Unfortunately, he is retiring this talk for now.  But if you find yourself trying to initiate change in the workplace and have troubles, James is a good guy to talk with about that.

Conclusion

I unfortunately didn’t stay for the closing ceremony, as I needed to get on the road for a 3 hour ride back to Cleveland.  However, from what I’ve been able to experience, Ann Arbor Day of .NET once again turned out to be a great event, well worth the 6-hour total travel time.  I’m glad I drove up for it!  Thanks again to those who organized the event and made the event happen!

If you, my readers, haven’t had the chance to attend a Day of .NET event, you’re missing quite a bit.  Typically, for a small fee (approximately $10 nowadays), you can get a day’s worth of training from regional experts on a variety of topics.  It’s a great event to learn something new.  It’s also a great event for networking with those in the community, finding other people who have the same problems as you or who have had your problem and may have a solution.  You can always find more on Days of .NET at http://dayofdotnet.org/.  Hope to see you at one in the future!