During my tenure with all my previous companies I was the subject of Source Control abuse at the hands of Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS). VSS was available as a default, it required very little to setup, and prohardly any training. I think this is the main reason why I had gone so many years without trying any alternatives.

At Corillian the main Source Control software is CVS which provides an order of magnitude improvement over VSS. I have been using CVS for a year now in parallel with colleagues and even departments, on projects in various stages of completion. Each project working with the knowledge that they are sufficiently abstracted from one another, yet just a few Beyond Compare reviews away from being in complete synchronized harmony.

Recently we have seen a shift that really started with Product Team towards Subversion (SVN), another Open Source version control software that again provides improvements over CVS. The main issue that SVN addressed at Corillian was the idea of security, as neither VSS or CVS meet the requirements determined by some of our clients and we are obligated to address them quickly.

Corillian sponsored some internal training session, that were necessary, as it takes a little while to get your mind to start thinking in SVN speak, it is as different CVS as CVS is to VSS. However, the training was skillfully executed by one of our Staff Engineers, Stuart Celarier (pronounced like Perrier, but with a 'C', he really set the bar high for remote training ).

There remains no excuse in risking your intellectual property to the abusive and unreliable hands of VSS, there are several viable alternatives that can fit most software development life cycles. Here is a blurb Scott H left on this discussion a year ago.

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." - James M. Barrie

This was going to be my next topic but when Scott Gu blogs on a topic it is difficult to find a new angle. So here it is ... All developers please heed the warning, be careful with our private information and review this blog!

"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes." - Edgard Varese

I was sent an email today that briefly described a job that I thought might be useful for a close friend. This email contained basic information on the job description, location, pay etc ... normal job listing kinda stuff. As I use Gmail email I was given a couple of ads suggesting that I also go for a job or two, and a Map this option.

At first I thought this was useful and harmless enough, until I started to look at the fact that Google was looking into my email and trying to take out information that was relevant to anything it owns. This might be fine as a long as it did not store that kind of information permanently?!

Wrong! Google is storing it ... in fact it stores every single query I have done in Google Search History. Imagine my surprise as I was able to review every query I have run in Google since January of this year. Which coincidentally was the time that I decided to sign up for more Google services. The definition of free email service has just changed for me.

They do provide you with the ability to pause and even switch off the service I am just wondering if they will still be collecting the data somewhere. I did not realize that I need to assume someone else is actually capable of reading my emails, searches, and spreadsheets. Google is still the darling of the press but I think, just one mistake with this kind of information could be quite bad on public relations. AOL is still reeling from its little information snafu.

I worked for a company, that shall remain unnamed, that had specific database naming standards. The standards were strict, as they should be, and I stayed with the company over four almost five years and the naming conventions are now immersed in my SQL conscience.

For example all tables in the database had to be prefixed with a 't' (Why? no one knew but we did it, and there was very little benefit in changing it), so I would begin every SQL select with: "select * from tWhatever"

This is wonderful and harmless until I came to my new place of work in which I do not have to worry about the 't' or the 'idb' or anything else like that. Unfortunately my fingers just cannot seem to break the habit and 'select * from' does not seem complete without the 't'.

The online video world appears to have room for one more player as Microsoft puts the new Soapbox up against YouTube. Currently this service is in beta and is by invite only. I suspect this service will eventually be integrated with the other Windows Live service offerings.

I find that the video service is even more difficult to navigate than the blog world (the cream does not always rise). With a blog all the search engines can look directly at the content and so my searches are easy and effective. With the video world you rely on tags and the comments of others, which are often misleading. I personally will not be signing up for this service. I find that the camera adds 10 pounds to you anyway, and I do not need that kind of help.

Two great posts that were passed to me from my manager. One for debugging issue with IIS app pool crashes the other goes over the fundamentals of MSMQ.

Enjoy!