dir -recurse -include tempproj.proj | foreach { rm $_ }

Awesome!

Recursively removing files!

Has anyone ever heard that saying? One of my MBA professors said that it was the number one rule for managers. "You get what you reward." Basically, the idea is that if you want a team to work together, then you need to reward good team behavior. It is all about recognizing what true motivation is, because the reward has to be perceived as a reward. A nice pat on the back isn't a real reward for someone unless that pat on the back will motivate them.

Hacknot recently posted an article related to technical leadership and common mistakes related to leading in a technology environment. One of the mistakes he lists is "employing hokey motivational techniques."

...managers value perception and status, so being presented with an award in front of everyone, or receiving a plaque to display on their wall where everyone can see it, may well be motivating to them. However programmers tend to be focused on the practical and functional, and value things that they can use to some advantage. Programmers regard the sorts of rewards that managers typically receive as superficial and trite.

How true that statement is. One of the things I've learned to think about in my MBA program is that good leaders recognize that not everyone is the same. In the same way that people from different cultural backgrounds are motivated by different things (i.e. an individualistic culture versus a collective culture), people in different professions are also motivated by different things. Honestly, different professions ARE different cultures.

It sounds like a fairly simple concept, but apparently it is a lot harder to understand than I realize. That, or more people need to start reading Hacknot.

We were working with partial classes recently at work and we came up with a best practice usage for naming them, at lease for our needs, and I thought I would share it with you.

Basically, do it the way Visual Studio does. For example, with GUI components such as forms, VS2005 names the main class Form1.vb, while it names the partial class Form1.designer.vb. So, if you want to make your Shipment class have a partial piece, have a file that is Shipper.vb and Shipper.stuff.vb.

This way, it is clear by the naming that the files are related. Otherwise, I would think there would be a lot of confusion on how the files are related.

Any thoughts on this?

Most of you probably are already aware of this little development, but there is a freeware IDE for PowerShell development (Scott beat me to the post...). It really is great. One of the most interesting parts about it, at least at first glance, is that it gives a first look at what an IDE might look like if it were to use Office 2007's ribbon. Not only that, but it even has an Mac OS X styled (or ObjectDock if you're so inclined) tool section in the bottom right.

Sweet!

I'll apologize ahead of time... one of the features that I am (or was?) looking most forward to in Office 2007 is the ability to save as PDF. Will I ever use it? I have no idea, but I've really wanted to be able to do that for a long time. And then Adobe goes and messes the whole thing up. How in the world can they truthfully justify letting everyone else (Apple, OpenOffice, etc) have this feature, but Microsoft can't?!? Give me a break! If they didn't want companies putting this feature in, they never should have opened the format in the first place! Via this digg post, I came across this article from the Washington Post. The article states it best:

Then there's the thought that Adobe's Acrobat, at $299, will compete poorly with any free save-as-PDF option. But Adobe had to have foreseen that possibility when it issued a blanket invitation to the world to write PDF-compatible software. As its own documentation reads, "Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to the conditions stated below, to . . . Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format."

Super.

By the way, totally unrelated to this entire post, if you haven't checked out Foxit Reader, I would highly recommend it.

As many of you are aware, if you attempt to access your Outlook data using some of the Outlook Interop assemblies, you'll be seeing a security dialog informing you that something is attempting to access your emails and whether or not you will allow this. If you're like me, you've run into this before and attempted to circumvent it.

Well, with the advent of Office 2007, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. Why, you ask? Because the fine folks at Microsoft heard our collective annoyances about the security model and fixed it! For the long story, check out this MSDN article. Here's the gist of it:

Outlook 2007 introduces an important change in the way that the Outlook object model guard operates. While the behavior of the object model guard has not changed significantly for Outlook add-ins, Outlook 2007 allows external applications to run without object model guard prompts—provided that the computer on which your code is running has functional antivirus software installed and that all antivirus definitions are current."

I've bolded the important part for you. Now, you'll only get the warning if your antivirus software is out of date. You also have the option to either always show the warnings (yeah, right) or completely disable the warnings. Your choice.

Great news!

I don't have much experience with XPath expressions. This was further illustrated to me recently when I was attempting to use XPath to programmatically parse an MSBuild project file. Yeah... I couldn't find anything. So, when presented with a problem, what do all programmers do? They write a program to solve the problem!

Here's a screenshot of my XPath Helper:

As you can see, I learned how to use XPath to parse MSBuild project files. My problem was not using XML namespaces correctly. XPath Helper attempts to automatically find XML namespaces and then add them to an XmlNamespaceManager (see the ListBox on the right - it lists all namespaces that it found). That way, when an XPath expression is used, it will know to use the XmlNamespaceManager. I'm confident that it won't work in all situations, but it is a nice learning tool to play around with XPath.

If anyone is interested, I can post the code... but if I do, don't count on it having any unit tests or anything. This guy is NOT production quality.

One of my co-workers was recently chided for emailing a password to access an internal server recently. "Don't email passwords! Email isn't secure!" I don't know if those were the exact words, but you get the point. Don't send around secure data by insecure means, right?

Later, this same co-worker of mine was handed a sticky note with a server name, userid, and password with which to access a different internal server. This note was from the same group who has been preaching on not sending secure data by insecure means like email.

Let that sink in for a second.

I just have a simple question... what makes a sticky note stuck on a monitor any more secure than sending an email? Just curious...

Marcos, thanks for the heads up on the captcha image not working...

I just tried the comment link myself and it failed. I copied the source for the image it was trying to load and the page I got gave me an error about XML parsing - "no element found". Anyone else having any problems with dasBlog and the captcha image not working?

Am I running an older version? Has there been an update?

I finally got the captcha image up, but it would appear it was more because of my persistence than actually changing anything (aka I kept clicking comments... something about definition of insanity...).

Anyone checked out CodePlex yet?

Looks like a Microsoft site for sharing open source applications, sort of like SourceForge, except a lot more user friendly! Apparently, it is built on Team Foundation Server, too. I just found the 1.0 release of MSBee (target .NET 1.1 with Visual Studio 2005) on there.

Check it out!

If you've ever wondered why the increment and decrement operators weren't included in VB.NET, here's a post explaining why.

Coming from the C/C++ world, I still miss the increment (++) and decrement (--) operators, but I definitely understand why after reading. Basically, it has to do with the fact that assignments in VB are done at the statement level instead of the expression level. If you're not following, consider how you can have things like (if (x = 5) ...) in C, but you can't in VB because the = sign is used for both assignment and equality, depending on the STATEMENT. There isn't any problems in C, because equality is checked with the == sign.

Interesting.

In just over 24 hours, I will be skipping my grad school graduation. For those who didn't know, I've been working on my MBA for the past two years. My employer was willing to pay half the cost of tuition, so I couldn't really turn it down, though I probably would've preferred a more technical degree (I'm a computer nerd).

I didn't really want to wait for hours on end just to hear my name mispronounced. I know Cara didn't want to wait. My parents didn't want to wait - my mom had already told me that she would rather just come visit me than sit in a crowded stadium or gym while thousands of other names were yelled out. Maybe if I had more of an attachment to the U of A (like I did with Harding), it'd be different, but I've been a parttime student. Most of my classes weren't even on campus. I honestly just want to get my degree and have free nights again.

The final reason - I've still got 9 hours to go this summer so I'd rather wait until I'm really done