Jonathan Cogley's Blog

Thycotic Software has always used the software preferred by our clients and has made recommendations in some cases, mostly away from Visual SourceSafe and its exclusive checkout or generally connected nature.  We had been using SourceGear's Vault for our own projects and even had it setup in our online hosted environment for access from our offices and client locations (asides from our own products, we also have open source and internal APIs that our developer consultants would often need to access).  We had been hearing great things in the community about Subversion and were eager to try it out but not having an expert in the company meant we would have a learning curve.  Enter John Morales - our new hire in November of 2005 - John joined our team biting his lip at having to use our existing source control tools but firmly believed he could turn the tide towards his favorite source control tool, Subversion.

I will be presenting at the WinProTeam Vienna .NET Users Group on 3/1/2006 at 6pm.

"Imagine working the code while constantly rethinking the grand scheme of the design in your head.  Imagine catching your typos first time, every time.  Imagine finding bugs twice as fast and having a good conversation about how to approach finding them.  Imagine learning new techniques, ideas and strategies while working on your code everyday.  If you already achieve all of these things on your own then skip the usergroup and go straight to a psychologist!  If not, then come along to learn why Pair Programming is fun, productive and a tremendous improvement to the otherwise black art of lone gun programming."

We had a requirement to provide a support forum in our online store for Secret Server which led to the classic "Buy vs. Build" decision. 

After thinking more on my previous post, the basic flaw in our plan was expecting a programmer to buy support. 

Can you feel the flamethrowers warming up? :-)  Larry O'Brien pointed me to this great SDTimes article "The Changing Face of Open Source".  In the article, Andrew Binstock discusses the challenges in coming up to speed with a complex codebase and contributing real value as a 'volunteer'.  He discusses how large projects tend to be primarily driven by commercial developers and concludes that the economics ultimately comes back to the same model as traditional closed source software.

Our product, Secret Server, now supports ASP.NET 2.0.  Testing on ASP.NET 2.0 started with a horrible crash on the secret view page resulting in the typical "but it worked fine in 1.1?!".

John Morales joined thycotic back in October and has been impressing us since the start with his knowledge of keyboard shortcuts (how often do you see *your* fellow developers writing their own macros in VS.NET?), Regular Expressions, Resharper, DotLucene and his ability to solve problems.  After a little prodding, we now have him blogging with a few gems already on Regular Expressions, a great CruiseControl.NET fix and at least one enjoyable rant.  Subscribed.