Women in technology

Today I found a new blog for a female dev. Her name is Nicole Sullivan-Haas. I read some of the CSS articles she has posted on her blog and I must say, I learned a lot. I still have many articles left to read, but I came across the article that was on her front page entitled "Woman in technology". I agree with her on several points like the definition of "The Code Cowboy", "The Good Developer" and that the dev community certainly is a "Sausage Fest".

With that said let me say that I am all for having more women in the dev field. Truthfully, I would prefer to be working with women mostly because it is not such a competition on who is smarter. I currently work in an I.T. department that does not have any females. I have worked with only a few female devs in my career and those each I would not hire if it was my choice. This has nothing to do with them being women, but instead it has to do with their attitudes and abilities. So what I am saying is although my preference is to work with women, I cannot say I have a lot of experience working with female devs. In the end I really do not care if my co-worker is female or male, but if all experience and abilities are equal I would probably choose a female dev just to keep the environment from being a "Sausage Fest".

My problem here and the reason for my post is more aimed at how people think it is ok to create things like "2010 Google EMEA Travel and Conference Grants for female computer scientists". When you say "for female", you just became sexist. Why am I not good enough to get this grant? Because I am a guy? So because I was born of the opposite sex I cannot apply for this grant. Is me being a guy mean I have more money to spend to attend this conference? Does me being a guy mean I do not need to learn what they have to teach at this conference?

Things like this frustrate me. People say they want to be treated as an equal, but then they find something to like their gender, race, age, etc. to make themself stand out. If you want to be treated equal then fine, give me the same opportunities. Don't exclude me because of my gender. This all just goes to show me how our society cannot learn from our own past. We still have racism running rampent in our society and we only go on to show how we never learned from how wrong that is.

I did not come from a rich family who paid my way through college, in fact I have paid for all the college classes I have attended. I am a self taught dev, who has spent the last 15 years of my life teaching myself to program and design. I have busted my butt to keep my job, do the best I can and learn everything I can on my own. To see something like this just rubs me the wrong way, because it just tells me that it does not matter what you have done or worked to do, you don't deserve any help.

Yours truly,
Bitter Party of 1.

Dexterity Class Review

Well I had originally planned to post this over the weekend, but it was much more fun just to lounge around in my own place again. I really don't do well in hotels. Never can get enough sleep, but that's not what this post is about.

Last week I attended the Dexterity I training at Integrated Business Group over in Orlando. The class was taught by Leslie Vail. I originally met Leslie up in Fargo, ND at the Microsoft Dynamics Tech conference. David Musgrave introduced me to her after I told him I was looking for a good place to take a class on some of the Dynamics GP program. Leslie teaches the class for IBG once a year at this point due to the lack of people requesting to go. There were only six of us attending the class and one of those six actually was a new IBG employee.

The price of the course is just under $3,000.00 USD. This may be a good reason the attendance is low for the course. I don't know many people that can afford to spend that kind of money for training. I got lucky in that my company paid for me to go, as well as paying for my hotel. I only had to take care of my transportation and food. Since Orlando is only an hour and a half away, the transportation was easy (no flight).

Overall I would have to give the week long class a 4 1/2 stars out of 5. The only reason I do not give the class a 5 stars was the course ware. It was a bit out of date. The books still ready that it was for Dynamics GP 9, when now MS is releasing version 11 (aka GP 2010). I would have at least expected that it be upgraded to version 10 by now.

Leslie made sure to note where things where different though. Her instruction was done very well and she is very, very knowledgeable about Dexterity and about GP. In the past I have been to other classes where you could tell that the presenter/instructor was not what you would consider a guru. However, in this case I would certainly consider Leslie to be a guru on the subjects of Dexterity and GP.

Throughout the week Leslie made sure that we were having a good time and tried to keep the class light with some funny videos. She also made sure to take down any notes of things we saw that could be improved in Dexterity or GP.

So if your looking for some training in Dexterity I highly suggest you look into this course. It is well worth the money. If your not looking for a week long course then perhaps you should drop by Leslie's blog and bug her to post more on her blog.  :)

Time to go put some of that new knowledge to work. Till next time.

Dynamics Confessor Blogspot: Dex.ini Switches Part 3

Here is some very useful info on the Dex.ini. Wish I had seen some of this at the GP Conference this last week. Thanks Leslie. Dynamics Confessor Blogspot: Dex.ini Switches Part 3

Getting ready to head out

So on Sunday I will be heading to Fargo, ND for the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009. I am really hoping to pick up a lot of information while there. Guys like Mariano Gomez and David Musgrave will be there doing sessions. I'm also hoping to make some contacts there. So if you're there and see me, stop by and say hello.

My fear is that everything will be all about developing with Dexterity and not about the Visual Studio side of developing. If you search for Great Plains info on Google you will find lots of topics floating around, but most of it will be about Dexterity. It has really amazed me that Microsoft has not moved more towards an interface/API that utilizes .NET. Yes I am aware of eConnect and the webservices, but you are very limited on what you can do via these.

So after a talk with a co-worker I have come to the same conclusion he has - the old school consultants drive what is developed and why learn a new language when you make lots of money utilizing something you have already mastered. Now I know that this is not everyone, I believe it does include a majority of the GP Community. You can read about how people want to open up the community and get more information out there, but there's still very few fresh ideas to be found.

So then after thinking about it more, I realized that those of us who come from a development background and are having problems with developing things in GP are missing something very fundamental. That thing in my mind is the accounting background. In my career I have built many websites, windows apps, services, etc., but I can honestly say that none of the apps I have written have used accounting principles. Many of the legacy app devs I have talked with over my career have always hand built some sort of accounting system. Most modern apps you build in .NET do not take regular accounting principles, i.e. double entry system, into account. Consider the slow of shopping cart apps out there. None that I have built, modified or implemented ever took this into account.

IMHO I think that those on the in with GP take that knowledge of the accounting principles for granted and assume that the new devs should know that. The problem with that is, current devs usually work on many different systems. When I first started programming about 13 years ago, you usually were given an area to work in. If I was building apps in the manufacturing area, I would not be given a project in the accounting area. That was left to other devs.

Technology allows us to work on every aspect of a company's apps from the websites to windows apps and now GP. The technology we have now allows us to move across projects easier as most projects are integrated with another at some level. It's rare to have an application that is truly a stand-alone app. At least in each of the companies I have worked in.

So now I am charged with building live apps in GP, and find myself having to learn accounting along the way.  If you go read the forum posts on any GP related forum you will see that many others out ther are really struggling with the same issue - they don't understand the core processes behind the applications they are developing. Now don't get me wrong here, I know that there are those that will want you to write their app for them and figure if they just keep playing dumb you will write the code, but there are many of us out there that just want to know the concept and the only way we can understand it is seeing how it is done.

I learn by doing things. I did not finish college. I do not have a degree. I just picked up a computer and was able to figure out how it worked, by doing things with it. So hopefully when I come back to work after the conference I will have a better understanding of what concepts are needed to work in GP. Any help is appreciated. :-)

Ready...Set...Go

This is one of those posts that will be mostly for me, but if it helps anyone else out there, well great. At this point I am re-writing a web page that takes in an Excel spreadsheet and lets the user select which worksheet to process. Well the processing can be done between an old VB6 DLL, which is very slow, and a .NET 2.0 DLL. Now of course the .NET version is much faster, but by how much?

Well in my classic ASP days I would set a Date variable at the beginning and one at the end and find the difference between the two. However, .NET has this nice little feature in the SSystem.Diagnostics assembly that is called "Stopwatch". Once you instantiate the stopwatch you need to call the Start method at the beginning of your code and the Stop method at the end of your code. From there all you need to do is call for the Elapsed property and it will give you back a TimeSpan. So much easier than trying to calculate the difference between two dates.

Dim sw As New System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch
sw.Start()
'... Do some long code stuff here ...
sw.Stop()
Dim ts As TimeSpan = sw.Elapsed
lblErrorMessages.Text = String.Format("{0:00}:{1:00}:{2:00}.{3:00}", sw.Elapsed.Hours, sw.Elapsed.Minutes, sw.Elapsed.Seconds, sw.Elapsed.Milliseconds / 10)

Multi-Browser/OS Testing

So Scott Hanselman has a post up today about "MultiBrowser or CrossBrowser Testing and deconstructing Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview". He mentions BrowserShots, and the Virtual PC versions of Windows that you can download, but I think he missed on important one and that is from Adobe.

Adobe has one called, BrowserLab, and this will emulate multiple browsers, as well as multiple operating systems. I have not fully tested this site yet, but our graphic designer showed me this site and it seems to cover most if not all the browser bases.

One of the nicest features is the Onion Skin. This feature allows you to take two browser views and overlay them so that you can see where they differ. Wow, is all I have to say about this feature. Where was this when I was freelancing as a designer/dev? This is a must in any designer or developer's toolbox.

Stanley

Pet Peeve with Exceptions

Private Sub MyMethod()
    Try
        '...do something
    Catch ex As Exception
        Throw New Exception("MyMethod", ex)
    End Try
End Sub

The code above is a big pet peave of mine because with code like the above you end up having to dig down through multiple InnerException objects to find the right exception message.

Working with exceptions is a very easy task. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. Re-thowing the exception is not doing something about it. Reporting the error via email, event viewer, etc., is also not doing something about the exception. All of this can be done at the form/view/page level of the application.

For instance, lets say your building a class:

Public Class Person
    Implements IDisposable

    Private m_FirstName As String = String.Empty
    Private m_LastName As String = String.Empty

    Public Property FirstName() As String
        Get
            Return m_FirstName
        End Get
        Set(ByVal value As String)
            m_FirstName = value
        End Set
    End Property

    Public Property LastName() As String
        Get
            Return m_LastName
        End Get
        Set(ByVal value As String)
            m_LastName= value
        End Set
    End Property

    Public Sub New()
    End Sub

   Public Function GetAddressByNameTheWrongWay(ByVal FirstName As String, ByVal LastName As String) As String
        Try
            '...do something and return
        Catch ex as Exception
            Throw New Exception("some dumb message here",ex)
        End Try
    End Sub

   Public Function GetAddressByNameTheRightWay(ByVal FirstName As String, ByVal LastName As String) As String
        '...do something and return
    End Sub
End Class

So now with that class we have two ways of capturing the exception in our page.

Partial Class Maintenance_IVANSAgentApplications
    Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

    Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
        Dim objPerson As New Person
        'Lets call it the wrong way first.
        Response.Write(objPerson.GetAddressByNameTheWrongWay(txtFirstName.text, txtLastName.text))
        'Now lets call it the correct way.
        Try
            Response.Write(objPerson.GetAddressByNameTheWrongWay(txtFirstName.text, txtLastName.text))
        Catch ex as Exception
            Response.Write(ex.Message)
        End Try
    End Sub
End Class

Since we were not able to actually do anything about the error message then we let it bubble up to our page level and catch it there.

Something that you may have been able to catch in our Class Person, would be a database connection issue. Perhaps the database was not available we could put code in to try a different database or to keep trying for so many tries. Just make sure you limit the re-tries, so that you do not get a timeout on your page while waiting for a database to return data when it will never come back.

Stanley