Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren

May 23, 2011 Richard

[This is the first in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Back in April I wrote a bit about my own history, and about the problems, systemic and idiosyncratic, plaguing women who chose a career in most sectors of the tech world. Writing it was surprisingly cathartic, and the response to it was powerful enough to make me want to push it further. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. I’m so thrilled that we get to kick off with Sadie Van Buren, whom many of you already know as a dynamic voice in the SharePoint community, and as the author of the ingenious SharePoint Maturity Model. If reading Sadie’s story inspires any of you to tell yours, please feel free to email me.]

My name is Sadie Van Buren and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Blue Metal Architects in Watertown, MA. I’m a Microsoft SharePoint consultant and have been working with that product since late 2002. Over the past nine years I’ve participated in about 50 implementations of the product and have acted as project manager, business analyst, developer, and solution architect.

1) Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I’m not sure there was a specific moment. One of my brothers gave me a new Commodore Vic-20 when I was a kid, and it may have been a disappointment to him that I mainly used it to play Q-bert. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren →

Events, SharePoint

Around the World in 139 Days: Further SharePoint Vacations

May 18, 2011 Richard

[Oh yes, this view can be yours]

In honor of our own city’s upcoming, much anticipated Dux Raymond Sy/Jared Spataro-keynoted SPTechCon, and because the crop of international SharePoint fests just keeps mushrooming, I’ve put together another globetrot. Whether you’re hankering for swan boats and Sox games (.500? I’ll take it), hefeweizen and street art, waffles and, er, other Belgian things, or straight-up networking with the grand poo-bahs, this list will scratch that itch. The end of it puts us squarely into fall, which I can’t. Gahh. No. I refuse to think about it. Warm weather, where art thou?

What: SPTechCon Boston
Where: Boston, MA
When: June 3-5
Who: Dux Raymond Sy, Mark Miller, Paul Culmsee, Marc Anderson, Sadie Van Buren, Laura Rogers
Twitter: @SPTechCon

What: SharePoint Fest Chicago
Where: Chicago, IL
When: July 27
Who: Richard Riley, Ira Fuchs, Richard Harbridge, Jeff Willinger
Twitter: @sharepointfest Continue reading Around the World in 139 Days: Further SharePoint Vacations →

Programming

Simple powershell automated FTP upload script

May 16, 2011 jim

[This post was originally posted on my personal blog, http://simplystallings.com]

At work, we manually patch our web servers. Part of the process requires ftping the updates to each server. This process is tedious considering the number of web servers and number of steps required. I decided this past patch Tuesday that I would invest a little time into automating the process using powershell.

I located a simple ftp upload script located @ http://poshcode.org/1134. With a few modifications I had my script:

$file = "somefilename"

$filePath = "C:\" + $file

$servers = "ftp://username:password@example1.com/incoming/",

"ftp://username:password@example2.com/incoming/", "ftp://username:password@example3.com/incoming/"

for ($i=0;$i-lt$servers.length;$i++)

{

"ftp url: $ftp"

#FTP URL syntax

#$ftp = "ftp://username:password@example.com/incoming/"+$file

$ftp = $servers[$i]+$file

$webclient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient

$uri = New-Object System.Uri($ftp)

"Uploading $File..."

$webclient.UploadFile($uri, $filePath)

}

I added an array that contains the ftp URL syntax for each web server then I iterate over the array using a for loop. Continue reading Simple powershell automated FTP upload script →

Mobile, SharePoint

Suspending Development of our BlackBerry client software for Microsoft SharePoint

May 11, 2011 wihl

On May 6, 2011, we suspended development of Pylon, a BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint. This was a very difficult decision, as we started working on this product over three years ago and invested significant R&D, sales and marketing effort into it. Three issues factored into the decision:

Breadth of Features: Microsoft SharePoint is a large and multi-dimensional product. As we narrowed the feature set to appeal to a few customers, we grappled with how to scale to a broader base. Enterprise SharePoint customers frequently build solutions assuming that Internet Explorer will be the user interface. Bringing these custom solutions to multiple mobile environments would require significant engineering work from both SoftArtisans and the customer.
Microsoft’s SharePoint Protocol Patent Licensing, which imposes a significant royalty on a product like Pylon: By our reading, a client-only, software-only product like Pylon would require a minimum royalty payment of $5.80 per license, which is unfeasible in a typical app marketplace where products are either free or typically less than $20, not counting an app store’s 30% fees. Continue reading Suspending Development of our BlackBerry client software for Microsoft SharePoint →

ASP.NET, Programming

A loss of precision, but not a loss of magnitude

May 10, 2011 sean

Those of us working with relatively high-level languages spend most of our time able to blissfully ignore the mucky little details that go into making a program actually run. C# allows us to not think about allocating and freeing memory, for example, or how our strings are terminated. It’s all too easy to extend this willful blindness to other details, like how numeric types actually work. Can this variable ever have a fractional part? Yes? Double! No? Int! Can it be really big? Long! Done, sorted.

Recently I was writing some functions to do unit conversions. Specifically, I was converting between points (1/72 of an inch) and EMUs (1/914400 of an inch). Part of the point of EMUs is that you can use them for high-precision values without needing floating point arithmetic, so I was storing them in a long. The application in question deals with fractional points, so those went into a double. Now, what’s the largest positive point that we can convert into an EMU without any overflow? If we do a little math we see that there are 12,700 EMUs per point, so the obvious answer should be long.MaxValue / 12700.0, which comes out to a bit over 7.2E14. Excellent. However, if I turn that around and convert that many points back into EMUs, I get -9.2E18. Oh dear. Continue reading A loss of precision, but not a loss of magnitude →

SQL Server

Unexpected Issues with the New Office 2007 File Format MIME types

May 9, 2011 Alison

One of the differences between the new OOXML file formats (e.g. .xlsx, .xlsm, .docx, .docm) that were released with Office 2007 and the older binary file formats (eg. .xls, .doc) is that each OOXML file extension has a unique Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) type. This is a departure from the MIME types for the binary file formats, where the same MIME type could apply to several file extensions.

For example, the binary “application/vnd.ms-excel” MIME type applies to the .xls, .xlt, and .xla file extensions, but OOXML .xlsx and .xltx have separate MIME types: “application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet” and “application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template,” respectively.

An unexpected issue

The change in MIME types can cause unexpected issues to occur. I recently helped a customer who was experiencing strange behavior in his upload application. In his application, he was using FileUp to upload files to a SQL server database, in addition to some information about the files. When the customer tried to upload an XLS file, the upload completed successfully, but if he tried to upload an XLSX file, he started getting error messages. Continue reading Unexpected Issues with the New Office 2007 File Format MIME types →

Office Life, Programming

Scrum Debates: Research as a Task

May 4, 2011 Richard

The concept of scrum can seem very simple in theory. As stories come in, the team analyzes them, and then story points them based on the complexity of the story. It couldn’t be simpler. But in practice, it is rarely this simple. The problem is that sometimes you won’t know just how complex a story is until after you’ve played around with it a bit. At my company, this is a problem we face almost every time we meet to story point backlog items.

Usually, a bit of uncertainty is fine. That’s the entire reason teams usually story point with a non-linear scale (one the popular scales being: 1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100). If a story could be anywhere from a 30 to a 40, then just give it a 40 (assuming we’re using the popular scale). Even if the story ends up closer the 30, there’s probably some other story that was more complex than its story point implied and it all generally averages out. But every now and then, there’s just too much uncertainty. A story might be anywhere from a 5 to a 50 depending on factors you won’t know until you’ve looked into it a bit and done some research. Continue reading Scrum Debates: Research as a Task →

SQL Server

Meme Monday: I Got 99 SQL Problems And the Disk Ain’t One

May 2, 2011 Richard

Unlike Tom, I’m not in the habit of substituting “disk” for the original non-problem, but here goes:

9 Database Problems that Are NOT Related to Disks

Sloppy database design
Sloppy TSQL code
Legacy code
Inconsistent naming conventions
Superfluous comment blocks!
Dynamic queries
Dirty reads
Parallel execution
Linked servers

Gimme more in the comments!

An unexpected issue

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