Paul Glen wrote The truth about "useless" people, which is very interesting. Paul Glen, as you might know is the author of the award-winning book "Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology" (Jossey Bass Pfeiffer, 2003) and Principal of C2 Consulting.
With all due respect to Paul, I'd like to add a little something about The truth about these "useless" people.
Paul clearly mentions more than one time, that these "useless" people are intelligent and talented! They are good at technical analysis, documentation and strategy, but unfortunately not at delivery!
Paul catagorizes these people under "people who are seemingly paralyzed by ambiguity and are incapable of moving forward until every possible question has been answered".
From my experience, I would like to induce another notion here and catagorize these people under "Hackers" (not "Crackers")!
Now before you start running about screaming, perhaps you should take a look at the Hacker FAQ which talks about managing Hackers. Also, check out How To Become A Hacker!
All those who are planning to sue me for trying to make hackers out of people, pls do read the above mentioned papers which are very possitive and helpfull in understanding people.
Note : I didn't say Hackers are useless, I am merely suggesting catagorizing those "useless" people Paul talks about under the category of "Hackers"!
Why do I catagorize those "useless" people under Hackers?
Consider this : These useless people are undoubtedly talented, but they are unable to deliver! Why? Perhaps because their energy is not focused to the right direction?
Most of the students who like programming want to start off as programmers. But for most of them, "too much" programming at some point becomes mundane! They are so good at programming by this stage that programming does not pose the same challenge to them as it used to in the begining. They need more! More challenge!Consider the Hacker Attitude mentioned in How To Become A Hacker :1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.4. Freedom is good.5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.
Clearly the third point takes effect - Programming becomes 'Boredom' from 'Challenge'!
Similary consider EmployeeA engaged in a project yeilds excellent results in analysis and stratergy, but when he is required to do coding, his performance suddenly goes slump!
So what's the solution?
Enter 'Project Manager'!
Paul mentioned the importance of Project Managers and I totally agree.
As you can see in the above scenario, the Project Manger should be able to see this performance slump of EmployeeA and assign him something that he will focus on with enthusiasm thus, boosting his performance. After all, as most of you would agree, a good Project Manager manages people well!
I've been in a similar scenario in the begining of my career, the CTO is happy with my performance, all projects sped up, I introduced time saving methodologies and framework, now the whole company is settling down and just doin projects, so my next task? Programming! And there is comes, drudgery! My head started screaming "Lord, Save Me!". I even bought this upto the CTO, but the company at this point simply had nothing to be done, but programming for the numerous projects running simultaneously!What happened? I quit!It was an obvious choice, either I quit, or suffer the drudgery... 'Have Road, Will Travel'...
Another question raised would be "Who will do the programming then?". Well, there are always people around who love programming, if not there is Mr. Project Manager,to provide incentives and apply other stratergies to make people do programming productively! :)
Any comments appreciated...

An interesting observation :
While I was posting my previous blog entry, I realised something, the formatting toolbars provided by Community Server are blocked by IE7! Cant bold, cant hyperlink!!
The whole toolbar of Community Server is gone!
Anyone else has a similar experience? Care to share?
Cheers!

Finally, an excellent way for those who wanna try IE7 without messing with any of the IE6 current settings.For those who want quick instructions take a look at Jon Galloway's post and for those who want more technical details and wanna try other versions of IE other than 7, check out the entry by Joe Maddalone!
So hurry, what are u waiting for? :)

LoneStar is now somewhat in a visible shape, wobbling, but atleast it has a shape... Yes, its stucture still changes for the better, but again, it still has a shape...
I am looking into making some unit testing models for LoneStar, Yea we all have done unit testings here and there, implemented it maybe, or just wrote more tests into the test files...
But i came across this valuable post by Brian Button, followed by another one from Roy Osherove.
Very valuable indeed...
I have seen the test files written in the project files when i was working with Accenture, and trust me, ppl working in that project really need to read the above posts!
In accenture, we used N-Unit for testing purposes, but after using VSTS, the project created by VSTS looks nicer and easier to use and maintain...
But since we have moved to VS.NET 2005 Professional Edtion from VSTS, I'm planning to follow the test project pattern generated by VSTS to make testing models for LoneStar..

Then came web-farming issue just when life started to seem smooth sailing :)

I am planning to utilize ASP.NET 2.0 profiles in my project and everything was good, then came the scenario whereby the UI layer in running on a Web-Farm! Hmmm...

Profiles utilize a local database to keep the info and in a Web-Farm it would be kinda impossible to perform that feat! Good thing Profiles are configurable!

Not only ASP.NET profiles but membership, roles, and web-part personalization also support web-farms!

So what we do is to configure the profiles to read from a central db (in this case, the db that the web farm machines are pointing to). When u modify the state of the profile object, the modifications are saved between visits to the site. So if the request is directed to a different server within the same session (in web-farm scenario), the profile state will be intact, since its stored and accessed out of central db.

So in a web-farm scenario, this is what you should do :

1)Point each machine on the web farm to the same database server to store the profiles. You can set this by changing the connection string on the provider configuration.
   - Since Profiles are API and Schema over database access, there shouldn't be a lot of considerations while shifting the db target from local to the web-farm central db.

2)Now to make profiles use your application's db instead of its own, use the "aspnet_regsql" tool (Window\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[version]) which will let you add the tables utilised by profiles to your own db. Run it without any command line parameters to get the windows wizard that configures all this for you (you can also point to the db used by ur app with this wizard). [OR, run it with the -? option to see all the command line parameter, yea, i know u already know this ;)]

3)So now, the database tables that profiles are using is in ur own application's db (the tables utilized by Profiles, Membership, etc will have a ASP.NET prefix), now go ahead and create relationships between these tables and your own application's tables!

Remember, Adding fields to the tables utilised by profiles is not recomended, unless you write your own provider that can handle these fields!

Cheers!

Wow! Been so busy with all the new things happening around me that I couldn't finish this months newsletter on time... What little portion I had done for the newsletter was lost along my dearest favourites and my mail duing VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 and SQL Server April 2005 CTP!

And then at work, everyday we had a new challenge to solve. I must admit, past couple of weeks have been very hectic! I didn't even get to sleep properly... yawn...

Well, now things are settling down, newsletter is out, and the clouds in the sky are starting to clear :)

Great times are ahead! ;)

Well, simple answer - MSF!

I am planning to implement MSF in my enterprise level project, and since VSTS supports this, well why not?

Reading this also suggests VSTS is more appropriate in for developing Enterprise Level applications etc...

VSTS definetly looks a ton better than VS std edition, from my point of view...

Manged to get VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 and SQL Server CTP working togther.. finally... phew...

But then, Justin diverted my attention to VS.NET 2005 Team Suite... Damn! How did I miss that??

Time to uninstall VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 Std Edition and go after Team Suite...

Damn! How did i miss that??

All of a sudden, there was a problem, and I found myself infront of Active Directory code..

Well, good atleast i get to explore more of LDAP and AD, cause I know nothing of it!

Talked to few of my friends, got the feedback - "Active Directory is huge dude!!"

Hmm... Started on a path towards LDAP, although I lack the time to study AD first. Google found that this is a good enough article which could get u thru the pains of LDAP, But how about AD?

Turns out, apart from being interesting, it is quite a big concept, so started here on the road to AD! Long AD way ahead....

That is a question which would be best answered, If I start from what happened on 19th March 2005. I've left Jadelite Technologies for good and joined another company where I'm currently working on R&D for .Net 2.0... The plan is to come up with an enterprise project which will be helping as a framework for the company to build other applications upon...

I am planning to build it to be something like Avanade's ACA.Net, but perhaps a smaller version... I am just 1 man after all.. :)

It is a tough and tedious process which will take quite a long time to yeild some visible result, but the good part is I get to get my hands dirty with .Net 2.0 and sql server 2005...