Shedding Some Light

This morning I received some great news from Microsoft that I have been named an MVP for the 2006-2007 season (renewed on October 1st each year). This is the sixth consecutive time I have been honored with this award.

The MVP award is the way Microsoft recognizes individuals for their contribution in supporting Visual FoxPro developers by answering questions on forums, presenting sessions at conferences, and writing articles, blogs and books. More information about the MVP program can be found at the MVP site.

This is an absolutely an honor. It is my intention to continue helping other VFP developers on FoxForum.com, the MSDN forum, other forums, at conferences, through this blog, and via some articles I am putting together.

I am pleased to announce the official release of White Light Computing’s ViewEditor Professional v3.6 Service Pack 1! This release is free for registered developers.

List of the new/updated features in this release:

• Include comments in view script (like the date/time it was generated and the view Comment property).
• Added more documentation on setting up macro substitution view parameters with VFP 9 based on feedback from developers in the “Macro expansion and view clauses topic” in this Help file.

Bug Fixes:

• The Inherit Table Properties feature triggered the error message “Not a character expression” when running the ViewEditor from the Stonefield Database Toolkit.
• The Inherit Table Properties feature stopped inheriting field properties if one field has a bad UpdateName.
• The Copy View Code feature was missing the Comment property for fields (it has been in the view properties).
• The Copy View Code feature was using brackets for quoting character strings on DBSETPROP() values. This was a problem if you had bracketed strings for view and field properties such as Caption, RuleText, etc. The code now has brackets ([]) if you have single or double quotes, and double quotes if you have brackets in the strings. Single quotes are used if there are no brackets or single quotes in the string. If you are mixing and matching you may get unexpected results in the code.
• Cleaned up view code with respect to DBSETPROP() in the generated code.

The current ViewEditor Help file is available for you to review if you want to learn more about this popular tool.

I believe you have all experienced a client who asks for the impossible, but despite all odds you some how pull it off. You produced what I call the “IT Miracle”.

Depending on your perspective and beliefs, a miracle can have many meanings. So for the sake of this discussion I propose the meaning to be this:

1. an effect or extraordinary event in the software development world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

An IT Miracle is simple. The user asks for something you figure can only be accomplished by using a time machine, a magic wand, pixie dust, telepathic communications, more money than the customer has, and a truckload of Staples Easy buttons.

Not only do they ask the impossible, they put up several roadblocks, leave out critical details, respond slowly to questions, accelerate deadlines, and maybe toss in a few extra last minute requirements they got to have or the project will not be deemed a success.

Some of these impossible tasks are driven by business needs, some are necessary to provide competitive advantages, some of them are wild and crazy ideas by pointy-haired-bosses, some are in response to project disasters, some are necessitated to help users who are desperate for help, some are driven by governmental legislation, and the list goes on…

Add in the dependency of others pulling their weight on the project. Maybe it is counting on a project manager to handle all the critical paths, solid specs from the business analysts, developers providing good estimates and finishing up their components on time, DBAs making the data changes on time, testers building the proper and efficient test plans, users performing acceptance testing, tech support folks coming up to speed on all the changes, hardware being delivered on time and in some cases designed/developed/built. Maybe you are in charge of all these aspects, which may or may not be better than having others help you.

Clear communications is always one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Forget one little communication and the whole house of cards can come tumbling down.

Quite frankly, I am amazed the simplest of projects come together. Maybe every project is an IT Miracle.

I just finished working on my latest IT Miracle project. It really was not a whole lot of fun. Usually they are fun. Five conversions from four different database schemas to one common database in three months. This means five different customized conversion source code bases (even the data in the common database schemas were different enough from each other). Lots of code had to be written and had to be perfect to ensure no data was lost. Three of the conversions were from databases we had no prior contact. The last time we did one of these from scratch it took four man months and we were asked to do all five in three months. I told the customer it was going to take an IT Miracle. The client was not open even slightly to any deviation to completing this before September 30th.

The last conversion happened last night despite the odds. Only because key players on the team did what ever was necessary to get the job done. This is the key. Find people who are dedicated to pulling off the impossible and be flexible enough to work around those who are speed bumps along the way. Adrenaline junkies with a a few of these qualities: a sense of humor, excellent coding skills, lots of patience, the ability to skip sleep cycles, willing to pick up the slack from others, ability to communicate clearly, and take the heat of those who call you on the carpet and question your integrity. The few and the proud.

I have been lucky in my career to have surrounded myself with quality developers with these qualities.

The question pestering me today: how many IT Miracles are we allowed in our careers? Reading my earlier conclusion about the possibility all projects are IT Miracles has me thinking I should be praying there is no limit.

Fortunately most of my clients have reasonable expectations. For this I am blessed. I am sure the next IT Miracle project is just over the horizon so I have decided to enjoy the break in between them this time while I work in projects with sane requirements.

I was surfing the Web this morning looking for the latest images of the International Space Station to see the latest changes done by the crew of STS-115. My hunt lead me across some more transit pictures and actual video of one such transit with the lunar surface as the back drop. Check out the video on Ed Morana’s page to see how fast ISS is traveling when some of these pictures are captured. Very impressive stuff.

Shuttle Atlantis and IIS with the sun as a backdrop. The local weather guy on channel 4 showed this last night on the broadcast and sent me the link (thanks Chuck). I thought taking pictures of lightning was difficult.

If I remember the details correctly: this picture was only possible from a six mile wide slice of Earth for 6 tenths of a second. More details on the Web page with the images.

I am in total awe.

Here it is a late Sunday night in Sterling Heights. I worked hard today painting the outside of the White Light Computing World Headquarters and stained some windows. Manual labor that I am not cut out to be doing (I was born to code).

I am suppose to be working on two projects because I am taking tomorrow off. Instead I get distracted and start surfing the Web. I have no real idea how I got here, but I come across FoxProSuccess.com. I recall reading something about this a while back, but tonight I went through the site.

I really enjoyed reading the different success stories, but I must say I got a big “pick-me-up” when I read Vassilis Aggelakos’ post: VFP does Windows. We have sold very few copies of Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions, but reading how it impacted Vassilis really made my night! It is posts like this and the emails we get on how the book helped a developer makes the 600+ man hours I worked on the book completely worthwhile.

Anyway, a special thanks to Mike Hogan for creating this site!

It looks like Andrew MacNeill’s and Kevin Ragsdale’s call to bloggers to cover the conferences is really taking off. I thought the Prague coverage by Dave Crozier and Doug Hennig was really good, and the FoxForward “day one” coverage is instantly heating up. Check out Kevin Ragsdale (wall flower, right!), John Koziol (who is giving the behind the scenes of the Fox Team session), and the real behind the scenes coverage by conference organizer Kevin Cully. (any I missed??)

Are there any negative side effects to the bloggers covering the conferences? I started thinking about this a little bit this morning as I was going through the FoxForward posts. Does this mean the UniversalThread coverage is dead? Could be. Is there a need? I see both the Southwest Fox and German DevCon will have official coverages. I know the conference organizers have costs associated with the coverage. With so many bloggers picking up the coverage, why should they add this cost to their already tight budgets? One reason is the bloggers are doing this on-the-fly with no guarantee it will be done. The official UT coverage has deadlines.

I really like the different perspectives. This is much better than just one blogger covering the conference like I did for the Advisor Summit 2006 and German DevCon 2005.

The one thing I disagree with in some of the conference coverage is the concept of doing screencasts of the sessions. I don’t think it would be hard to do with Camtasia, and I doubt it would concern me as a presenter because I could rehearse it before I arrived at the conference. My concerns are with the availability and how this would affect future conferences.

If this material is so readily available to people who don’t attend, what will be the incentive to go to the conference? Sure there is the networking and the ability to ask questions in person. But if the material is accessible about half the incentive to attend will be removed and conference will completely evaporate. I have been involved in many conversations about how the Internet has impacted conferences already. There is so much information easily accessible, so do I really need to attend a conference when I can read someone’s whitepaper online the next week? Same thing with selling the conference proceedings, slides and whitepapers. I want the conferences to flourish and this is completely dependent on attendees attending.

My hope is the conference coverage will make you feel you are really missing the experience and raise your desire to attend. I can tell you this is what the Prague and FoxForward posts are doing to me. Pick a conference and go, they are all good. It is simply the best way to get training on your career.