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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
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Austin .NET Code Camp re-cap

May 8, 2007 The Austin .NET User Group put on another fantastic Code Camp this past weekend. I was especially proud to see 3 members of our staff presenting. You guys rocked. Kevin Miller launched a potential new career as a public speaker/presenter with a well-received talk on Monorail. The attendees were very excited about what they saw. And kudos to Kevin for coding on the fly, which flowed well and showed his confidence in his knowledge and abilities. Coding on the fly takes some stones. Bret Pettichord did a talk on Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby. The participants had lab machines and were able to actually script tests. It was the only hands-on talk that I saw, and I heard  lots of good feedback from the attendees. Scott Bellware filled the big room for his talk on Good Test, Better Code - From Unit Testing to Behavior-Driven Design. He…

My t_head t_hurts from t_looking at t_this t_code

While working on one of our legacy products today, I ran head first into this code: Set cl_list = Cobj_LOR_CLAUSE.Contents For t_int = cl_list.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1 Set cl_rec = cl_list.ItemByIndex(t_int) If cl_rec.GetField("parameterized") = 1 Then t_str = "XYZZYParamXYZZY#" & Trim$(Str$(t_int)) t_pos = 1 While t_pos > 0 t_pos = Instr(sql_stmt, t_str) If t_pos > 0 Then If Left$(cl_rec.GetField("operation"), 3) = "is " And _ Instr(cl_rec.GetField("operation"), "equal")

Real blogs are written by real people

April 29, 2007 Sara Smith from ViaMetric has an interesting post titled A blog is not a brochure. Amen! (Full Disclosure: ViaMetric does some marketing work for us) My favorite line from her post: [Blogs are] your chance to show your customers that your company is run by actual living, breathing humans who like to think about things, and sometimes even write about them  She hits the nail on the head with this one. And it's so easy to tell when a blog is written by an actual human, speaking in their own voice, wanting to engage in a conversation, wanting to share information. Those are the blogs I connect with. Because you're connecting with a person. Not a sales or a marketing message. Sara goes on to say: For a great example of how it can be done, check out the blogs written by…

My Google apps get a style makeover

A cleaner, more functional GMail I use GMail for my personal email, and functionally it's great, but I always thought it could use some help in its look and feel. Even the new beta of Hotmail has a nicer look. Not any more. Lifehacker recently rolled up multiple gmail enhancements and styling into one package: Better Gmail. I love the Super Clean skin, and the Conversation Preview option is sweet - simply right-click on a message to preview its content in a popup bubble.   Goodbye Newsgator, Hello Google Reader I've played with Google Reader here and there, but the look and feel of Newsgator Online kept me with Newsgator. However, using the Stylish extension, with the Google Reader theme, makes for a much nicer looking Google Reader. This was the final straw that pushed me to move away from…

ADO.NET Entity Framework cut from .NET 3.5/Orcas

Kevin Miller recently blogged about the recent confirmation that the EDM Designer will not be in Orcas. Yesterday, the ADO.NET team reported that the ADO.NET Entity Framework will not be in the RTM of Orcas, but should ship in the first half of 2008. When I hear "first half of 2008", I interpret that as June 30, 2008. Microsoft shipped the first CTP of the ADO.NET Entity Framework in August of 2006. That means it will be almost two years from the first CTP to a release. Two years! Unreal. Frans Bouma has some interesting thoughts as the underlying reasons. Our decision to switch to ActiveRecord and nHibernate has been clearly solidified.

Using the fcSDK in PowerShell

April 25, 2007 Years ago, if I wanted to "script" Clarify [formerly linked to www.myclarify.com which no longer exists], I would use UNIX shell scripts, including UNIX mini languages such as sed and awk, that would create dat files that could be imported with dataex. When ClearBasic was introduced, we also got cbbatch, which was a command line interpreter for ClearBasic, so we could script Clarify using CB. When we (First Choice Software) introduced FCFL (First Choice Foundation Library), which was a set of COM objects, we could script using VBScript or JavaScript making COM calls. Same story for the fcSDK. Although the fcSDK is all native .NET, it also exposed a COM interface, so we could still do scripting as we did with FCFL, but we didn't have all of the .NET capabilities of fcSDK. But now, with the availability of PowerShell, we…

Drowning in waterfall documentation

April 23, 2007 I'm currently working on a customer project. They started off by sending me a Functional Requirements Specification document, then a Technical Design Specification document (and multiple revs of said doc), and before I've even had a chance to digest those docs, there's now a Change Document. The Change Document is the same size as the Technical Specifications document. Ugh. We haven't even written one line of code yet!  It really makes me appreciate my internal projects, where everyone is co-located in the same room, story cards (which are NOT specifications - they are simply placeholders for conversations), and our focus is on working software. Update 4/27/07:Today I received an updated version of the Technical Specifications document. Only this time it was in PDF format, which meant there was no way I could compare it to the previous MS Word version, so…

We're a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner again

April 12, 2007 We retained our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for another year by passing the competancy requirements for: ISV/Software Solutions Custom development Solutions Data Management Solutions      As part of our certification process, Dovetail Rulemanager was tested and Certified for Windows Server.

Turning blog entries into customer experiences

John Ragsdale points out a new product that allows companies to monitor what's being said about their products and services in the blogosphere. We've been talking a lot about this here at Dovetail, specifically how a post on a blog or forum can be turned into a customer experience. I've mostly thought about identifying problems that customers may have posted about, but John points out another interesting aspect, identifying expert users who are very knowledgeable about your products, with whom you may want to align. Very cool. A negative blog post about your company, product, or service can automatically create a support case, and the company can reach out, hopefully turning a negative customer experience into a great one. Proactively. Nice. John also talks about identifying new content sources, which I completely agree with. I pointed out in an earlier post that there's…