Admiral James Stockdale, a true American military hero running for Vice President, used this line as deadpan joke in 1992.  It failed miserably and they went on to lose the election. Well I’m using it here to explain why my blog has been inactive as of late.

I am currently working on my MBA and working full-time. I will try to do better at updating the blog, but obviously my narcissistic blogging priorities have been lower on the list. I will do better!

Best regards,

Kevin

Did you know your personal answers on FaceBook Quizes/Games/Applications can and are sold to advertisers? Including email address, name, address, relationship status, medical info, etc. Once you open a FB application the application’s developer has access to everything in your profile!!!

I begrudgingly joined FaceBook a few months back to find out about my upcoming year high school class reunion. I was quite surprised how much I liked using the site to keep up with extended family and connecting with old friends (even the ones I did not like so much back them - you know who you are).

After signing up I was inundated with invitations for beer, bowling, and hugs all through FaceBook, of course. But something in the back of my mind prevented me from running any of them. I couldn’t get past the ominous warning that states, “Allowing {application name} access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.“I kept saying whydo they need access to my information so I can go bowling or accept a free virtual beer.

Well now I am very glad I refrained even though I’m sure I could have gotten a 150+ IQ test result and immediately joined Mensa. PC World has a nice article that explains why I kept refusing to click through, even though I didn’t know why at the time. Fear of the unknown is sometimes good.

Great guideline from Toastmasters Intl.

• Give more than you expect others to give.
• Combine optimism and perseverance.
• See everyone as a diamond in the rough.
• Express appreciation; accept responsibility.
• Keep your ego in check.
• Show respect for the people around you.
• Treat team members as family.
• Be a source of inspiration.
• Stress cooperation, not competition.
• Maintain a sense of humor.

http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/FreeResources/QuestionsaboutLeadership/PositiveLeadership/LawsofPositiveLeadership.aspx

Today I responded to an inquiry as how to judge whether an developer is a Senior/Mid/Junior level.

Here is my rule of thumb (with some commentary):

A senior requires little or no supervision, can work with the business teams independently, understands current technology and is looking ahead to new trends, and constantly creates personal growth opportunities, can lead and mentor other developers. (They make others more valuable as well as themselves)

A mid-level can do tasks independently but needs some guidance on architecture or direction. (Their value is the work they produce)

A junior requires task guidance and supervision. (Their value will begin 12-24 months down the road)

I think in our business we have too many seniors that do not the basic soft skills, are not current with technology, and get promoted because of time in the position and not necessarily what value they create for the organization. This is one reasons organizations are seeing their development maintenance cost continue to increase, but productivity flattening or even decreasing.

I think an ideal IT departments spread would be 20-70-10 (Senior/Mid/Junior) but most are top heavy with seniors that should be mid.

On Tuesday I presented, “Getting the Most Out of SharePoint” at the Web Technologies Conference in Spanish Fort, AL, which was co-sponsored by Microsoft, The Gulf Coast Technology Conference, and Bit-Wizards.

Despite a few technical glitches and last minutes emergencies, the entire day went very well. I received a ton of very positive feedback about how the presentation had a good balance between technical and ‘C’ business type level content, which is great because that was the tightrope I was trying to walk. If you’ve never given a technical presentation, you can’t appreciate how difficult it can be to find the right balance.

During intermissions I had a great time mingling and telling old war, IT horror, and Cincinnati/Dayton stories with attendees. I hope we get to do more of these because SharePoint adoption is growing by leaps and bounds, but in the haste to implement too many people (IT and Business teams) are painting themselves in a corner or not getting the ROI they could, thus it becomes SharePoint’s fault.

I don’t think we’ve published our slide deck yet so below are highlights of my presentation:

SharePoint should become the hub of your business activity-

• The built-in resources/features should be leveraged for all future Intranet applications.
• Imagine productivity gains by not having to start from scratch security/reporting/search/workflow/forms when developing Line of Business (LOB) applications
• If you dream it… it can be done.

Have A Plan -

• It is not just an application you install and run with - that is the recipe for failure Business and IT Stake Holders should be involved Develop and communicate the following:
  • Governance Document
  • Business Requirements
  • Project Plan
  • Project Design
  • Branding Design
  • Training Plan

Integrate it with Existing Applications and Data Extend ROI by keeping existing business systems - 

• Any line of business (LOB) application that .NET technologies can communicate with can be integrated with SharePoint
• You can integrate existing web applications or use the underlying data in SharePoint
• Let SharePoint be the ecosystem for your Intranet applications

Brand Your SharePoint - It’s not a question of Fashion or Function – you can have both

• Out of the box SharePoint 2007 looks dated and plain
• Branding will help ‘sell’ SharePoint up and down the organization chart
• For extranets you can extend your corporate brand to vendors and outside companies alike

Microsofts’ SharePoint is the 800lbs gorilla and will continue to get better.

• Fastest growing server product
• 100+ million licenses sold
• 1 billion in revenue in FY08
• Growth of 35% over FY07

If you are having performance issue with IE 8, follow this authors advice and do the following:

From a Command Prompt window, run the following command:

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

That re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library, an obscure DLL that most people (even Microsoft experts) had never heard about. (Update: 27-Mar: Note that if you try this using Windows Vista, you must do this from an elevated Command Prompt window; type cmd in the Start menu Search box, right-click the Cmd.exe shortcut, and then choose Run As Administrator. For detailed instructions with screen shots, see this post.) …The results {ARE} stunning

Without any fanfare Microsoft’s IE 8 browser’s has already surpassed Google Chrome.

Maybe the following article should have been titled, “In One Day Internet Explorer 8 Eclipses Google Chrome”, rather than, “IE8 launch bumps browser’s market share by 30%”.

Here is the overall findings:

• “IE8’s market share averaged 1.63% for the day Thursday from noon Eastern time onward”
• “By comparison, Google Inc.’s Chrome, which debuted last September, had a 1.15% market share during February”

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9130128&intsrc=news_ts_head

If IBM does in fact buy Sun, which according to the WSJ they are in talks to do, I believe that will officially be the first nail in the coffin for JAVA and its legions of downstream vendors. The language itself has been a mature (if not slightly legacy) technology since Sun lost significant market value and stopped trying to compete directly with Microsoft’s .NET. Spring, struts, and all the other major improvements made to JAVA has been done by third parties for some time. Sun went so far as to public source the language awhile back hoping to keep their costs down while still fostering innovation in that product space. I’m no JAVA junkie, but I have not seen much come from that open source licensing effort that has significantly impacted the software development industry. To me, the idea of IBM throwing a ton of resources on JAVA technologies is optimistic at best.

Update: IBM decided against buying Sun Microsystems which is probably good for both Sun and IBM. Oracle then moved in and snatched up Sun less than a week later. This will be a much healthier relationship for both parties involved and may spur some badly needed innovation in the JAVA space. Still yet that might not translate to better business solutions unless you are running Oracle databases.

Over the last couple days we have had an issue with a development Virtual PC ( VPC ) image. After researching several issues/options, we made the following adjustments which resulted in vast improvements:

• Exclude .VHD and .VSV within our anti-virus program
• Install Virtual Machine Additions
• Stop unnecessary Win Services
  • WSearch
  • UXSms
• Enable Hardware Acceleration
• Fixed W3WP.exe
• Defrag
  • Host PC OS
  • VPC OS

• After making those changes we pre-compacted the virtual hard drive
• Compacted the virtual hard drive

If you have additional tips please send them along and I will include them in this list.

At the last Gulf Coast .NET User Group, I presented the following slides. There are a number of great features in Service Pack 1 release of VS 2008 and 3.5.1 Version of the .NET Framework. Here are couple quick things to keep in mind.

•  VS 2008 SP1 and 3.5.1 Framework are pretty much a lockstep upgrade.
• I call the framework 3.5.1 because MS released a service pack for the framework soon after releasing 3.5.
• MVC is not part of this release of the framework and is still a separate install. It will likely be a part of 4.0 Framework due out this year.

Visual Studio SP & .NET 3.5.1 Framework Features Presentation