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Scott Saad
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Scott Saad
No Tweets
The last couple of months (2.5 months and counting) I’ve failed to interact with my twitter account. I’m not sure why as I really enjoy the service. I may be out of things to say or something. Who knows.
One thing I did notice though is that when I pulled the plug, my productivity seemed to sky rocket. There seems to be some sort of correlation between ones ability to focus and the resulting action of getting things done.
Go figure.
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Scott Saad
Crazy, Creative Thinking
I’ve found that the secret recipe to creative thinking is the following:
- Think about some stuff.
- Think some more about stuff.
- Take a break from thinking about stuff.
- No seriously, take a break because it’s just not working.
- Think more.
- And think some more.
- Coffee break.
- Give up on creative thinking completely and go on bike ride.
- Realize that this whole trying to be creative is a waste.
- Sleep, but not all the way. You know, the place where you feel half awake and halfway in a dream?
- Laser beams and flying saucers… you’ve got it!
Anyway, this is what I’ve found to work. It’s the obsessive compulsive thinking to the point where you can’t think of anything else. Then trying to forget about the whole thing, struggling to do so at first, but after a while the obsessive thoughts become distant memories. And then from out of nowhere, it hits you pretty hard.
If this is what being creative is all about I think you can substitute the word crazy for all of this because that’s really what it is. Creativity is nothing more than letting your mind do what it does best… attach itself to something and obsess about it over and over. Sooner or later something will happen and more often than not it will be a thought in the creative direction.
If you’re one that has thought they don’t have the creative bone, it’s because you’re not yet willing to be crazy enough. There is nothing special here as all of our minds are capable of this freakiness.
Be careful, it’s quite scary when you get the hang of it.
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Scott Saad
Cerebral Critical
In this industry, it seems that the one way to get noticed is to be critical and negative of what others are creating. I fail to fully understand the reasons for this but continually witness it through the various pipelines of the Internet.
I wonder if it’s just the times where people feel more free than ever before to speak their mind? It seems that common sense morals of treating people nice are dwindling. It’s open season and you better watch what you create or what technology you use as the super critical that have an opinion about everything are alive and thriving, and looking to get some attention.
Why so negative? It’s so draining, and really… what purpose does it serve? It’s one thing to criticize, but it’s just sad to do so in a manner that is reminiscent of a 5-year-old child telling you she doesn’t like you. The child would say something different if she was developmentally advanced enough to translate her feelings into words other than “I hate you, because you’re stupid!”
So, as engineers, great thinkers, amazing problem solvers, etc… it seems ridiculous for us to flap off at the mouth and share our negative thoughts about product X or technology Y or thingy Z. If you really must have an opinion that’s worth sharing then do so in a manner that is respectable. Hold back if there is any question because chances are it’s just another tantrum that you’re experiencing, and your reactions are purely selfish in hopes of drawing attention to yourself.
Please spare us next time. Don’t worry, even when you’re nice people will still think you’re cool and follow-worthy.
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Scott Saad
New SSRS PowerShell Provider
Introduction
A lot of the code that gets written for any software project can end up being for the supporting systems surrounding the end product. This can include build systems, tests, installers, deployment tools, etc. I’ve found that some of the greatest explorations in learning can be found by writing these systems. One gets to learn potentially new technologies and be a little more experiential with how they approach the problems. To me, some of my favorite projects have been for the supporting systems. One of those recent projects gave me the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into PowerShell.
History
This actually all started years ago when we wanted to find a good way to deploy SSRS reports during part of our one-click build and deploy system, powered by NAnt. We ended up writing a custom NAnt task which worked very well. It could take a source directory tree and pretty much replicate it to SSRS, all using the web service. It ended up being a very efficient, low impact way to deploy reports and resources. We were able to also use this little NAnt gem to deploy reports on a real customer install. Albeit we had to distribute a trimmed NAnt system in our deploy package. This worked for a while but we soon outgrew what the system could provide in a reasonable manner.
The biggest downside is that our NAnt task was pretty much an all or nothing deploy. There was no in between. Plus, being an XML build system, if we wanted to change any aspect of the deploy it required editing the NAnt project file. We therefore turned to PowerShell to help us accomplish this.
Solution
We’ve created (and are using internally) a full blown PowerShell Provider to help us accomplish this task:
In performing administrative tasks, the user may need to examine data stored in a data store (for example, the file system, the Windows Registry, or a certificate store). To make these operations easier, Windows PowerShell defines a module called a Windows PowerShell provider that can be used to access a specific data store, such as the Windows Registry. Each provider supports a set of related cmdlets to give the user a symmetrical view of the data in the store.
As you can see a provider fits the bill perfectly and the solution ends up being super dynamic as it currently allows for the following operations on SSRS:
- list items on a report server
- navigate the report server structure
- create/delete reports
- create/delete folders
- create/delete data sources
- create/delete resources
With this in place one can either script the deployment or wrap it up in a pretty GUI front-end by using a Runspace in your favorite .NET language.
Open Source
All of this has been placed on CodePlex under the SSRS PowerShell Provider (ssrsposh) project and is available for the all. It has served our immediate purpose and hopefully it will serve others. If not, my hope is for it to continue to evolve to meet those needs of others.
More to come in the future.
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Scott Saad
For the love of your users!?!
This is supposed to be something good right?
C++Builder 2010 is by far the best release for upgrading existing projects. I was able to open over 110 projects in an external editor, perform some text replacements via a macro for 3rd party runtimes, and rebuild all. And do it fast.
This is taken straight from the official What People Are Saying page on Embarcadero’s (once CodeGear… once Borland) about RAD Studio 2010. Seriously? As one might deduct from this statement, it is not a pleasant experience for the existing users to perform their project upgrades to the latest version of RAD Studio. However, I’ve learned that very little change can happen by being a prick about everything. Therefore, in the spirit of trying to stay positive, let’s approach this in a diplomatic way.
Upgrades are great and all, but I don’t have the luxury of our software ALWAYS building on the freshest version of development tools. At the same time, I don’t let the environments get too stale. Within the last few months, I took the upgrade from RAD Studio 2007 to 2009. It’s always exciting to get on the latest version of the software to see what new features, speed improvements, etc. are available. Part of the reason behind not going to the 2009 version sooner was because of the long, drawn out process I went through with the 2006 to 2007 version. As with most IDE’s when a new version comes out, there is inevitable changes to the project files. This proved to be the pain point I had faith that the experience must have gotten better and that the 2009 upgrade would be a breeze. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
For customers that pay the hefty maintenance price (approx $6K/year for us), the experience and pain to upgrade projects is atrocious. Especially when expectations are being set by having an automatic project upgrade feature in the IDE (which most IDE’s have as well). Oh sure, I open the 2007 version of the project file and the IDE automatically converts it to 2009 but nothing builds! In order to get things working, some TLC and pixie dust is required.
While I won’t go into details, I’ll just say that the experience was tedious and very much like the person described in the quote above. One HAS to actually create scripts to properly modify the project files in a predictable and repeatable pattern. If you didn’t you risk a great deal more doing it manually, by hand or through the IDE. We never get it right the first time and being able to back out a project change, modify the script and try again saves so much time in the end. Without a script or some type of automation, the amount of work to upgrade the project files is directly proportional to the number of project files! This begs the question, why not make this experience better and built in to the software. If a user can script it out, why can’t the people that make the software and dictate the new project file requirements?
As with any software company, priorities get set to work on certain features and the input usually comes from a variety of sources:
- Marketing and sales for the new potential users
- The request from existing users of the software
- Internal engineering input on refactoring and bug fixes.
- Etc.
I have a hard time believing that the existing users of the RAD Studio product line have not complained about the project upgrade process between versions. One would think they’ve experienced the same sort of things I have. There is a reason for everything so the fact that it has not been addressed is a logical one.
- Maybe it’s not painful enough yet for the existing user base to yell.
- Maybe it’s very painful but the existing user base is not yelling loud enough.
- Maybe there is no friendly way to acquire feedback from the existing user base.
- Maybe the existing way of acquiring feedback is not effective.
- Maybe the existing user base has given up because they’re just used to second class treatment (hope not)?
- Maybe the existing user base that is giving feedback only represents a small percentage of the total.
These are hard questions and only the software maker truly has a shot at answering them (or asking new questions all together). What I do know is that as an existing user I find it frustrating when a blog post comes out talking about how the MOST requested feature that made it into the 2010 release is a complete rework of the the Class Explorer. Are we serious here? The Class Explorer was at the top of the list? This doesn’t make sense! Isn’t there better things to work on than investing in a complete rewrite of a small IDE feature? Do people actually use this kind of thing anymore (or ever)? Well, according to the existing users that that are giving feedback, the answer is yes.
To me, this seems like a feature that was played with when RAD tools started going mainstream (circa 1990′s?). A cool idea that somebody thought would help illustrate this new idea of a RAD environment, by visually displaying the class structure of the file being edited. I don’t use this feature and cannot see myself ever doing so. For me, there has never been a substitute for actually reading code in an editor. That’s just me though, and I’m a small percentage of the existing user base.
In all honesty I could be at one extreme of the user base, while the majority use the class explorer to navigate their code. Coming from a Unix/Linux background this may just be my preference. Who knows. It just illustrates why being in touch with as many different types of users when getting feedback for future development is so important.
Unfortunately, every new release of the RAD Studio product line that I’ve experienced ends up taking down 1-2 weeks of time to perform the project upgrades. In my opinion this type of work is an unnecessary waste.
Please make it stop for the love of your users!
The last few have hurt so bad that I truly question whether the upgrade is worth it or not. I always end up convincing myself that it is worth because that’s the programmer geek in me who cannot resist the new stuff. Please don’t use this against the users.
The fact that an upgrade can be scripted out via regular expression search and replace is not a feature, but a shame.
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Scott Saad
Taking Tweets to the Grave
Recently, there has been an increase in many Twitter users to have a way at getting back to their old tweets. Apparently, one is currently only able to get back to their 3200 most recent tweets. A problem I don’t yet face, but probably will at some point. Because of this there seem to be services popping up to help those approaching or encroaching on the limit. Sites like, BackupMyTweets, allow one to start archiving the old tweets. For me, one question starts to arise when I hear about this.
Why?
It’s probably just me, but I don’t find my tweets that useful. Sure, I crack myself up sometimes and get to interact with some pretty cool people, but I’m struggling to find the need to relive them. I’m speaking for myself as I know others use Twitter much more intensely that I ever have or will. Some, to the point that it helps them do their job better. Maybe being able to get as these old tweets helps in some way? I’m sure there are reasons that I just don’t understand yet.
To me, this is one of the unique things about Twitter that so many other service miss. Twitter is lightweight. One is allowed to post anything up there, from multiple mediums, about anything the heart desires. This is a benefit! Who cares if anyone (including myself) ever sees it again? The whole fact that they don’t hold on to ALL of our precious tweets is right in line with the service. Short and sweet.
Maybe it’s another one of those things that as we use it more and more we get more attached to it. With this attachment, grows the feeling that there’s more meaning to it. Maybe because we’ve spent so much time on this service… hours and hours of tweeting… that it would be a shame if ALL of that work goes to the bit bucket.
When the ultimate bit bucket calls your name will you be taking your tweets with you? Maybe they’ll help me on the other side… somehow.
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Scott Saad
Mashup: Key Blobs, Win32 CryptoAPI and .NET
A while back I had the pleasure of getting more in touch with my crypto side. It was, and still is, very under-developed. Cryptography (and the surrounding use cases) seems to be one of those elite-like skills that people can spend lifetimes researching and learning more about. Therefore, it generally is difficult to pick up when you run into for the first time.
I had used simple encryption functions with different languages before, but never to the extent at which this project took me. In this case, I had a written a pure C++, Windows dll which produced a session key that needed to be consumed by a .NET application.
It seems that one solution to the complexity (like the .NET framework’s solution) is to make pretty wrappers around the system calls so one doesn’t totally freak out. While this is nice and I think a very natural progression of a framework it actually made it more difficult to solve the problem. Not only is the documentation horrendous for this, it would appear that .NET’s implementation is not really in sync with the native CryptoAPI’s.
Aside from battling through the documentation over at MSDN, Google searches were coming up blank on this. While working through things I ended up posting the question to Stack Overflow. If any of this stuff interests you at all you can check it out over there. I also ended up posting a solution to the problem once I figured things out, as the help at the overfloweth of stacks was limited.
It’s all very anti-climactic but felt since there was no straight answer anywhere on the web, I would try and share mine in hopes of helping some other lost geeky sole.
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gana2k
Hi,
Thanks for the post. I am exactly in the same situation that you outlined in your post.
Would it be possible for you to share source code for both C++/C#?
Thanks and much appreciated.-
Scott Saad
Hello,
Thanks for leaving a comment. I would be happy to post more code if necessary. Were you able to check out the answer I posted over on Stack Overflow? It definitively is more verbose than the post here. This post was more of an introduction into the solution. Please let me know if you need more details after reading the solution on Stack Overflow. I would be happy to help in any way.
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gana2k
Yes I did. Your post helped me a great deal in understanding the nuances of cross language issues. I am looking for a working sample for both the C++/C# side. You can contact me at gana2k1@gmail.com.
I am using win32 crypto api to encrypt some data, base64 encode it and transmit it to the server where c# services need to decrypt and validate. I am having a little difficulty in matching the C# decryption bit. -
Scott Saad
I will attempt to round up some code example(s).
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Scott Saad
Also, it might be beneficial to post some of the details describing the problem(s) you’re having. It’s something I struggled with for sometime and any problem(s) you encounter can probably be learned from by many others, including myself.
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Scott Saad
Time Well Spent
My time has been divided recently as much is going on. From a missed PDC 2008 event; to a wonderful home birthing experience with our third child; to learning to play more than twinkle twinkle on the guitar; to spending an absorbent amount of time on Stack Overflow.
Like sand through the hour glass, these are the days of my life.
Yes, I missed this years PDC event due to the encroaching due date of our unborn child. Most of the content is now online so it’s just a matter of time before one can be caught up. The biggest thing that is hard to recover is the people networking that occurs at these events. So many bright minds in the industry come to share the knowledge. There is always next time and for now… I can always connect with people on twitter. :)
Next came the birth of our third child. We had this one at our house (yes, it was planned that way). All I can say is that the experience was absolutely amazing and a wonderful switch from the hospital environment.
Where else has the time went? Between family, work and play there is Stack Overflow. A developer’s haven for learning, helping others, etc. It’s a community site for geeks of the software trade to hangout and share their experiences.
I had the pleasure of being part of their private beta and was addicted from the start. It’s now in public beta and open to everyone (has been for months now). Check it out if you have not yet done so. It has become another tool in the box that assists in climbing out of those crazy situations us developers always seem to find ourselves in. If I didn’t have so many other things going on in my life I’m sure that a majority of my time would be spent at this site.
Thank goodness for all the other stuff that tends to bring balance to this software developer’s life.
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Scott Saad
IRC and Distributed Teams
The one thing in this field could use more of (or any field for that matter) is better communication. We have a distributed team where almost 50% of the core engineers are working out of their homes across the country. Inevitably, being remote can always pose obstacles. The remoters are always looking for better ways to connect with the main office.
Our team definitely has tried all sorts of tools and tactics to help facilitate better communication. All have helped in some fashion:
- Human-to-Human – All local engineers sit in the same large room, along with our Product Manager
- Email – We all know that this has its purpose, but ultimately is becoming the snail mail form of communication
- VOIP Phone – All have a Cisco phone where everyone is only an extension away
- IM – Always a great choice where communication needs are non-vocal
- IM & Video- Skype works great for this as having the ability to see the person you’re talking to makes all the difference OK the world
However, even with everything listed above something seemed to be missing. How do you rope in the remoters to conversations that happen on the fly? We’ve tried a speaker phone where everyone is dialed into the number but there is just way to much chatter and background noise. Nothing was going to replace having them here in the office, but we were determined to try and find something. We needed a better way!
Enter IRC:
About 6 months ago I started doing some side contributions to the open source bug tracking solution, Bugzilla. Here is a system that is developed by true remoters… contributors from areas all around the world. Talk about communication nightmares! How the heck do they make this happen?
Within minutes of reading their developer guide, I realized that that use IRC heavily. Their developer wiki indicates that its prefered over any other form of communication. So I opened up my client and was “in the mix” with the developers on Bugzilla. I quickly realized that this was an excellent form of communication for distributed teams.
For those that are unfamiliar with IRC, it has a bit of history. It is still heavily used around the globe as it serves as a very effective way to have group discussions. The best way to think of it is like a chat room with a geek polish (or not-so-much-polish) to it. When I realized how effective it was working for the Bugzilla team, I decided to try and get a similar environment going over in our office.
Usage:
For our team, since half of us are in the same room, and the other half in other geolocations, we use this to complement our existing forms of communication. It would be crazy if I had to ask Joe, who is sitting right next to me, a question and I did so in IRC. Just ask him! What I may end up doing is posting the answer to my question in IRC for everyone to see if it relates. Otherwise, we try and keep conversations that relate to the team in the IRC, even if it means that Joe is sitting right next to me.
Observed Benefits:
This is a touchy one as the benefits completely depend the experiences. For us, our experience has been good and therefore, the benefits are great. Put it this way, it only helped communication get better and now occurs at a whole other level. The remoters feel more connected to the team as they have a complete running log of all conversations, and therefore can pipe in at anytime to give input or ask questions.
The Nitty Gritty Details:
While there are many public IRC servers out there that could potentially host our channel we wanted to keep things inside our network for security reasons. Many server software exists out there so this I will leave up to the reader their own research. Here is what we ended up using:
- Server: UnlrealIRCd (required)
- IRC Services: Anope IRC Services (optional, but nice to have to increase your IRC geek-ness level)
- IRC Bot(s): Supybot (optional, but provides for some nice hooks/bells/whistles that are just plain cool)
- Clients: This one we left up to the developers as there are many out there to choose from
Platform Concerns:
IRC servers thrive mainly on Linux/Unix systems, but we are a Windows shop and the above configuration worked great as all had Windows options available. However, if you have any questions while setting things up, please feel free to contact me anytime and I can try to be of assistance.
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Max Kanat-Alexander
Great post! :-) I’ve always thought that people with distributed teams should use IRC more–it works so well for us.
-Max
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Scott
Thanks for the comment Max. I definitely was inspired by you and the rest of the Bugzilla team.
Oh and… I definitely will be finishing up my work there with the WebService interface. Just looking for a little slice of time.
Thanks again for the comment!
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Peter Parkes (Skype Blogger)
You might also like to compare and contrast with Skype’s group chat feature – but I’m glad you like video calling :)
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Scott
Thanks Peter for the comment. To be honest, I didn’t know Skype had group chat. Will definitely check it out.
The one think that deters me away from IM group chat is that it has to be initiated by somebody. IRC is “always on” and people can join when they’re ready, or just leave their client connected.
What happens when the organizer of the group chat leaves?
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Peter Parkes (Skype Blogger)
Skype group chats don’t have an organiser per se – just members.
If you want a more formal chat ‘hierarchy’ you might like to have a look at public chats, which function much more like IRC.
Oh, and IRC-style commands work in Skype too – just type /help for a full list :)
gana2k, and 
gana2k are discussing. 
David Dean 15:43 on September 4, 2009 Permalink |
Indeed the class explorer was the highest voted QC report.
Are the issues you are concerned with in QC?
Have you brought them up in the discussion forums and asked people to vote for them?
Please feel free to email me directly with a list.
Scott Saad 21:13 on September 10, 2009 Permalink |
Thanks for the comment! Sorry for my late reply.
To be honest I have not brought this up as I’ve had little traction in the past getting anything to move in these forums for the CodeGear C++ product. This was actually a main point that I guess I failed to make in the post. It seems that the avenues that CodeGear/Embarcadero are taking to reach user feedback might not be as good as it could be. I’ve used the QC system before and it’s just a little discouraging when you see bug fix requests not move anywhere for seemingly years.
From the outside, a feature like a better upgrade experience for existing users, wouldn’t seem to gain a lot of traction in the new sales arena. I understand that problem… a company needs to keep pushing boundaries to gain new sales. However, I would also expect that when a Team or Product Manager sees that the TOP request for existing users in the QC system is for a new Class Explorer that they might look twice at validity of this. I won’t claim to know how these types of decisions get made on the inside, but my goodness… I’m just failing to see the payoff of this feature. To invest X amount of resources into this just seems absurd when there are seemingly bigger things to tackle.
What are the bigger things? I can only speak for myself. As an existing user the project upgrade experience is horrid. I have not taken the initiative (yet) to log a QC request. I’m literally blown away that nobody else has complained about this type of thing and that I would be the first one to make such a stink. The fact that it was listed on the What People Are Saying page shows that nobody is complaining and at some level this is being touted as a feature.
It would seem that the bigger problem here for CodeGear/Embarcadero is finding out if other users think the current project upgrade experience is as good as the person made it sound (search and replace technique). And if it’s not, why nobody has heard of this being a problem until now? Meaning, if people don’t like this why are they not complaining?