I've often said that the really good part about Windows is What can be done, or sometimes... what happens ("seemingly automatically"), can be undone (and explained). The same is also true for Visual Studio 2005. At rare occasions there are errors in the IDE which seem magical and mysterious. With the right debugging techniques, commands, some time the mysterious errors can be fixed and explained.

I've been busily coding away at Windows Workflow Foundation for a few months now. Currently I'm using the final released version of Windows workflow foundation with the released version of Workflow extensions for Visual Studio, and my experience with WF has been very good. So when this strange error popped up today without any particular reason, I was a little surprised.

The error wasn't very helpful in describing what was going wrong. All it stated was: Package Load Failure. It basically said - "Package 'Microsoft.Workflow.VSDesginer.DesignerPackage, Microsoft.Workflow.VSDesigner, version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' has failed to Load Properly (GUID = {some_guid}..." and then it went on to ask me If I wanted to disable my workflow foundation extensions for now.

Even though my workflow project opened and worked perfectly this was just an irritating error which popped up every time I started Visual Studio 2005. Determined to put an end to this harmless yet irritating error, I started my investigation and Google searches.

I started off with basic commands like - "devenv.exe /setup" - which did not fix the issue at hand. Then there were posts out there which suggested that I delete my native images and regenerate them using the ngen.exe tool. That solution did not seem to work either.

After a few hours of Google searches I came across this post which basically described what the issue was. Turns out, a few days ago I had tried my hand at writing Visual Studio Add-ins and had forgotten to delete an Add-In I had written. Remains of my HelloWorld Addin existed in "C:\Users\admin\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins" on my Vista Partition.

All I had to do was to delete the ".Addin" file (which btw, had nothing to do with Windows Workflow Foundation, so it's a little difficult to suspect this would be the cause of the problem) and as soon as I had done that Visual Studio Started without any Windows Workflow Extension Add-in errors.

If this doesn't do the trick for you - here are few other commands / resources which are usually helpful in catching and fixing Visual Studio.NET 2005 IDE issues:

1. devenv.exe /setup - very useful for a host of other IDE setting related problems or if you just want to restore VS settings to their original state. Did not help in my case because the failed add-in was something I had written myself and my problem had nothing to do with visual studio settings. In my case, the settings were just fine, even though I had initially suspected that they had gone corrupt. 
2. ngen.exe - Aaron Stebner's Post describes this pretty elaborately. The basic idea here is to delete your Visual Studio Native Image files and regenerate them using this tool.
3. devenv.exe /log - this generates XML log which can be quite helpful in trouble-shooting various startup issues with the IDE.

And if you're still struggling Aaron Stebner also provides a Definitive list of workarounds for Package Load Failure errors in Visual Studio 2005, here.

We spend so much of our time with the IDE everyday writing code. Mysterious errors like give us a chance to look under the hood and see what's going on. It's just like the joy of fixing that little problem in your car, yourself. After all knowing how to fix minor problems with your car, or knowing how to replace a flat tire, is also important besides knowing how to drive. Isn't it? :)

Andy Hunt and David Thomas in their book “The Pragmatic Programmer” make an interesting observation about a persona Fred:

During a discussion with one of my early project Managers, a Mentor and a person I really look up to, he coined Fred’s symptoms and gave it an appropriate name – he calls this the “Junior Developer Syndrome” and feels that every programmer was once Fred.

He also describes another very important feature of Fred. According to him (I couldn’t agree more), during these “hours of trying to fix it”, this Fred guy usually doesn’t tell anyone there’s a problem.

Like all other programmers the first couple of years of my coding life went in getting rid of the Fred within me. These years also taught me lessons all of us have learnt at point in our life. This post is an attempt to organize my own thoughts and try and understand why Fred programs by co-incidence.

There are lots of other complex factors that go into software development life; however, to keep this post simple let’s consider that Fred is worried about the tree most evident factors in a software development project.

1. Quality of Code.
2. Time Needed to write Code.
3. Pressure to ship (from Stake-holders).

I’ll just go ahead and use graphs to illustrate how these three typically play together.

The Graph Plots Time needed to code against the quality of code. Spending a little bit of more time in understanding the Technology and figuring out the “why the code works” part gives a tremendous boost to the quality of code by investing just a little bit of time. The initial tweaks and optimizations are easily achieved by spending a little bit of time on the technology and understanding why the code works and how it works. The Graph depicts this as the distance between points A and B. i.e. [AB].

The most typical example of this I’ve seen is ASP.NET caching. For example, I’ve been on projects where a 4 second Page load was brought down to 300 milliseconds by just spending a day on Caching. In other words spending [AB] time gave us a [XY] increase in the quality of code.

After you’ve spent that initial time however, the law of Diminishing returns starts to kick in and every other tweak on code takes more and more time. In the same project I mentioned earlier we spent over a week of performance tuning to bring the 300 milliseconds down to less than 150. In other words, we ended up spending [BC] time to increase the quality of code by [YZ].

Now the obvious question is if by spending just [AB] worth of time learning about the “why” and the “how things works under the hood” of the technology on which Fred is working on, if Fred can get and [XY] gain in the quality of code why doesn’t he invest that time in making his code better?

In this past couple of years I've discussed this (in one way or the other) to multiple Senior Associates, Technical Architects and Project Managers. Some have told me that Fred is just stupid. Others claim that Fred just works for a Pay-check and [OX] worth of quality is usually good enough to get the project go through client acceptance. Fred couldn’t care less about code.

Others however, mentioned a reason that sounds more likely – The third factor I talked about earlier in the post - Pressure to ship – that is what causes Fred “Program by Co-incidence”.

Notice the graph above. Here the pressure to ship show up suddenly as your product / project starts getting shape or starts generating excitement. As you move from point E to F tweaking your code, the pressure to ship slowly growing up by [PQ]. As you move from F to G and the Shipping-Date / Dead-Line / Committed Date comes closer the pressure to deliver shoots hugely by [QR].

Now let’s merge both of these graphs.

Merging these two graphs answers some of the questions and gives a new perspective into – Why does Fred write Bad code. Think about it a little more and it makes so much more sense.

At work we use SVN for all our .NET Projects. Being a Microsoft Developer I’ve moved between multiple source control systems during my development life. Starting with Visual Source Safe, I moved to CVS, then to TFS (during its Beta stages) and finally fell in love and settled down with SVN. The love was strong enough to convert all .NET developers I work with, over to SVN! :)

Even today I highly encourage all Microsoft developers I meet outside the workplace to try-out SVN. With Tortoise and Ankh, the whole Visual Studio Integration and Explorer Integration is very easy to get and it (almost) feels as easy as VSS and as powerful as CVS. But this post is not about plugging-in SVN and related tools. It’s about starting a discussion on When-To-Branch and When-To-Work-On-The-Trunk (and When-To-Create-Tags).

Let me being by saying - It’s all about choices, opinions and which way works best your project. In the few years of using CVS (and then SVN) I’ve seen multiple ways in which the Trunk, Branches and Tags are used by multiple teams. Every team has its own “best practice” (the whole idea of a "best" practice is relative, because 'best' depends on so many factors :)) around when they should work on the trunk, when they tag their builds and when they create branches. Here are two most common approaches I’ve usually seen being used depending on the scenario and the project:

Approach 1 - Work on the Trunk, Tag on Each Release / Revision and Branch for Experiment

I’ve personally used this approach in projects where we have very frequent and agile releases. The approach basically involves:

1. The team constantly working on the Trunk.
2. The trunk is tagged at Every Revision as well as at Every Release so that a snap shot of any version can be obtained.
3. The team continues to work on the trunk after the tagging. 
4. If there’s anything the team wants to try out, they branch the code and merge back the changes to the trunk when done.

At any given day the Repository looks much like this:

What I love about this approach:

1. The Simplicity and Speed at which team can work - Really helpful if you’re going to have weekly tags.
2. Allows a “Branch-When-Needed approach” and leaves the branching-for-trying-out-complex-feature-implementations on Developers rather than imposing a strict policy on when to branch. They can freely do it as and when they want it.
3. Easy to understand and work on, specially for VSS developers .
4. Not having to change your Working Folder for each version change, since each developer is just concerned with the trunk and his own branches.

Cons:

1. The Trunk may not always be functionally tested or 100% stable.
2. A colleague brought this up during a discussion and his point was completely valid – “You can’t create patches for Release 1.1.1 and check it in to 1.1.1, if your trunk is at Release 1.2.” – (He’s all for Approach 2, I describe later in the post). Point valid and taken :) but I’m still not fully convinced that you really want to do something like that in a project that’s moving ahead really fast and throwing out revisions every week and a release every month or so; or for that matter, I'm not really sure if you want to do that for any project. 

Personal Opinion: I don’t like the whole Idea of applying SVN patches to a branch of a version that has already been released and then checking-in the patch to that branch. If an immediate patch needs to be applied to an already released version e.g. 1.1.1, I can still checkout the tag, work on the checked out tag, create a patch and then ship the patch. It should be possible to apply the patch on both, the primary trunk (which is now at 1.1.2) and the checked out version of tagged build 1.1.1 (which needs immediate fixing). However what I don’t agree to is the idea of applying the patch to a 1.1.1 branch and then checking in the changes to 1.1.1 specially after 1.1.1 has been officially released. It just creates more confusion and makes things product versioning more complicated. Personally, I feel this is exactly what service packs are for.

Approach 2: Always work on the Branch Approach - I’ve seen a LOT of development teams take this approach. People claim this is really helpful when you just want to do milestone based branches and tags. The Idea is:

1. For Every Milestone / Release create a New Branch.
2. Everyone works on that branch.
3. No-one works directly on the trunk, and because no-one works on the trunk, the trunk always represents the previous stable release.
4. When the current release is tested, changes are merged to the trunk.

At any given point the repository looks like:

What's good about this approach:

1. The Peace of mind that my trunk is always tested and stable.
2. You can create patches for an older version and check-in the changes to the old version by checking in to the correct branch, even after the product has been released. (Personally, I don’t think this is a Plus, but a lot of development teams use this approach and I've been told by more than one very capable developer that this approach has worked for them in multiple projects).
3. As a colleague / mentor recently pointed out - If you are doing development of two versions in parallel this approach can help. I would have to agree on that one. We've done the "continue to fix the trunk while we work on a new version in a branch" approach and when I look at this approach from that perspective it suddenly starts making a lot of sense.
4. Honestly, I can’t think of other Plus-Points for never-work-on-the-trunk approach.

Cons:

1. The whole idea of never working on the trunk makes it complicated for developers to create their own branch especially when they are already working on a branch. E.g. I want to work on “Feature A” which I am not sure will work out. If I am already on a Branch for version 1.1.2, it makes it a little complicated for me to branch again and merge my sub-branch with the 1.1.2 branch before the 1.1.2 branch is merged with the trunk. (I hope I haven’t confused you already, the more sub-branches from branches that you created the more complicated things become :))

And then there are mix and match of the above two approaches that I’ve seen a lot of teams use. For example a team which creates tags when a build is released, even while following the Approach 2 I described above or the approach where you continue to fix the trunk which holds the first version while you work on a second version on a branch. I've also worked with a Team where every SVN ( / CVS) command was wrapped with a custom wrapper command using Unix shell scripts and use of clients like Tortoise wasn't permitted.

How you use the SVN Branches, Tags, the trunk and in fact, the source control system, is completely based on what works best for the project and the team. Feel free to Mix and Match approaches to control the chaos with predefined guidelines but make sure you leave room for flexibility and agility. 

There are no best practices! How to Manage code depends on the project, the team, how fast you want to go and multiple other scenarios. But it's always a good idea to have a set "SVN Working Practices" (notice the use of word 'working' instead of 'best' :)) for your Projects. Do you have a your SVN Working Practices Documented yet? If not, here's an excellent example you can use to get inspired. :)

Update [2/13/2007]: A colleague / mentor provided this link in a comment on my work blog. It's a practical repository of Branching Patterns for Parallel development. If you're interested in finding out about the various Branching Schemes out there and getting some guidelines on which scheme to use when, the article is a must-read!

If you run a company that owns a product, or have put your mind and soul into writing a product that you believe will make you or your organization big bucks and success in the long run, you’re probably worried about protecting your intellectual property.

Lately, I’ve been hearing a Lot about Intellectual Property and what Organizations should do to protect their intellectual property. Multiple discussions have taken place, with multiple people from different Organizations. Just to give an idea of the crowd I’ve been discussing this with, let me introduce an  acquaintance who works in a 400+ person, Indian solution provider as a developer.

Another individual is a Lawyer in a 100+ employee Organization having offices in US and multiple offshore countries including UK and Europe. Just to bring a slightly different perspective to discussion I’ve also included comments from a very old client that I worked with – who had a no-work-from-home policy. And then there are guys from IT / Administration world back from MCSE days, that I am still in touch with and who work with some really medium-to-small-sized development shops.

Before I go any further however, let me take of my ‘I-know-everything-about-this’ hat off and hide it somewhere. Because, this is my blog which runs on a server I pay for, it goes without saying that I will present my opinions. However, this is also a good time to bring to everyone’s notice that my opinions (by their very nature) here are highly opinionated and may be as far from correct as anything can be. But after hearing so much about this topic I really feel that I have to post about this. If nothing else, this post is an attempt to take a look at one problem from multiple perspectives, including mine. :)

An acquaintance back from my IT Days describes. He works at an Indian IT consultancy firms which is small enough for every employee to know every other employee on a first name basis. By “They” he is referring to the developers. There’s a particular advantage of having worked in various departments in my early part of professional life. I associate with both IT and Development folks equally well, and completely “get-it” when the folks in one camp refer to the folks in other came as “They” :)

These are measures a 400+ employee consultancy firm takes to protect its Intellectual Property. This comes from a Developer and here “they” of course refers to the IT folks :). The third perspective is slightly Non-Technical coming from a lawyer who works for a relatively smaller development firm. 

Another person at fairly small US based organization, sites an example of an employee running away with a laptop and some code and the team being worried for a couple of weeks till the employee was tracked down and they had confirmed that he hadn't released the source code to anyone.

After I listening to these discussions, some-thing deep down somewhere kept telling me that there’s something wrong, somewhere. As if one side of the story is being ignored. One thing that seems to resonate through all these comments and remarks is – "It's difficult to trust your Employees. Doing that will always mean big trouble". In an attempt to discover the other side I decided to cling on to Google and go on a search for other opinions.

My Ideas on this topic are very different from the ones that had been brought to the plate so far, and Google seemed like an excellent tool to figure out if there are others who had similar thoughts and to figure out if my thoughts are working out for them too.

The first result is an interesting instance of stealth and sleuthing – what’s most interesting about this article is that it sticks to the side of story that’s been presented by all other quotes in this post so far, but ends with lines that come very close to the other-side of the story, therefore striking a really nice balance. The article includes an interesting and (in my opinion) a very true remark:

Why I particularly like this remark is because it addresses the problem from a real perspective and considers the fact, that when dealing with developers companies are dealing with smart individuals who are capable of writing highly secured and scalable systems. It goes without saying that any developer worth his salt, who is capable of writing these systems, is also capable to stealing code or in fact, anything, if he really wanted to do it, specially if he's a little lucky. There is no such thing as a fully secured process or system! And that’s one thing we tend to forget when talking about Systems that we claim will replace (or enforce) human trust and dignity through security.

There are tons of articles out there which tell you that you cannot trust your employees, not even your administrators – but ones which tell you that it’s OK to place a little bit of trust in sensible programmers who you hired in the first place, are few and difficult to find!

After spending some time on Google searches I finally landed on some sound-advice that came close the kind of answer I was really looking for. A very wise comment on this forum states:

These are not my words, but if I was to say something on this topic this is exactly what I would say and then I would add a few more numbered points (read on).

1. You cannot prevent your employees stealing your code unless you’re planning on frisking people: In each of the remarks people made in their discussions with me, and as they were describing their security-measures to protect their Intellectual Property, I could instantly think of more than one ways by which a developer could easily steal code if he really wanted to. The comment in this forum, that you cannot prevent employees from stealing code unless you’re planning on frisking people, seems quite true and at-least I agree to it.
    
2. What is your Intellectual Property, by the way? As a developer I spend countless hours, throwing away code that I’ve written in the past and writing better code. Those of us, who believe in TDD, refactor ruthlessly and make that a way of life. A lot of the projects I’ve been involved with are re-writes of existing systems. So, as developers, if throw away so much code, is code what you really want to protect? Is it even wise to consider just your code your real (and only) form of intellectual property?
   
   I for once want to, believe that an Organization's Real Intellectual Property is the knowledge that was gathered in writing that code and the individuals who retain that knowledge. That’s what I would be really interested in protecting.
   
   In a discussion one of my Managers once asked me how long my team would take if I was to scrap every single line of code I’ve written for a product and start fresh. My reply was that it would take half the time and I would come up with a product that would be faster and much more feature rich.
   
   As developers, we grow with each project, module and problem that we solve. I personally feel that it’s this growth that organizations and individuals should be striving to protect. Not just Code!
    
3. A Lot of code isn’t complete or looses meaning out of context: some years ago; a part of Windows NT code base and a part of Windows 2000 code base was leaked out. Everyone in the community talked about it. People discussed it. Some of us even downloaded it and took a peek at it. People analyzed it, more out of curiosity than anything anything else. But that was it. People couldn’t build the code. Of-course they couldn’t compile Windows NT / Windows 2000 out of it. The code was incomplete and it was out of context.
   
   There was a particular client that I worked with at an early part of my life, who wouldn’t let any consultants work from home because the DBA was particularly concerned about a Table in the new system which sucked legacy data and had an Item-Id column containing millions of items Ids. While, I completely understood and respected the DBA’s passion to protect data from leaking out, the fact remains that 2 million random numbers (which happen to be a list of item ID) are utterly useless for me, because they are out of context. There is nothing I could have done with a huge list of their Item IDs even if I wanted to. It took quite a bit of convincing to get the permission to be  able to work from home so that I could fix bugs I was really concerned about during late nights and weekends and in the end it worked out really well. We delivered a couple of weeks before the planned date and there was no loss of any intellectual property. 
    
4. Shouldn’t you focus on what’s coming in rather than focusing what’s going out? In all the arguments for strict systems to protect intellectual property the focus seems to be on “what is going out of the organization” - either an employee or code. Why not spend more time on focusing on employees that are coming in the organization and create processes for hiring people with Dignity and Maturity. Something makes me feel that if some of these Organizations, that spend huge amounts of time in building these extreme measures, spent as much time in thinking about the quality of employees they're hiring, they wouldn't have to worry about Protecting Intellectual Property.
    
5. I respect NDA’s and honestly, I don't mind signing them: I don't think any developer does. As one of the quotes above mentions "Making the employees sign is the easy part". It really is. And Important too.  Thought I should clarify that before I start getting emails from people I know and don’t know telling me that I am a moron who doesn’t care about protecting intellectual property and respecting NDAs. I completely understand a client's concern to protect their Data and Intellectual Property. I also understand policies of not letting people carry parts of projects or Data on laptops in some cases or projects where the sensitivity is high.
   
   However,  I would find it a little awkward, if I ever had to work in an organization that implementing policies and had systems which constantly keep telling me every-day, that I am a potential threat to the business. In my personal opinion, some of the comments I heard during these conversations sounded a little extreme which is what got me thinking.

I find the measures, mentioned by some of my friends, in this post, a little extreme. It's probably because of the fact that I've changed very few organizations in my professional life and have been lucky to work at Organizations (including clients and project-teams) which have very difficult interview processes but provide tremendous amount trust, freedom and liberty in the hands of their employees once they are a part of the team.

A sarcastic answer to “extreme measures and systems to protect your intellectual property” posted at this forum seems like a good way to end this post. A person with a sense of humor comments –

Do you feel that you work at a place that considers you a significant threat to their business? Wondering what you can do about it? If you answered "Yes" to these questions, remember - you can either change your company, or you can change your company. :)

Here is wishing anyone who reads this a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year! It’s that time of the year again! Time for celebrations, rest, holidays, fun and above all, a time to get inspired!

A whole new year is near, and that itself, is a good reason to take a pause, look back and spend some relaxing time to plan for the year ahead. Personally, these times feel so very similar to those during my long 10+ hour flights, when the plane is standing silently on the runway and we’re all waiting for the takeoff; The plane staff are checking the pre-flight checklists, assessing the weather conditions, checking the flight-plans and we’re all ready to fly and get to where-ever-it-is we want to get.

Of-course, having a flight-plan for life is a very difficult. But, this is the time when most of us make New Year’s Resolutions before we take off for the year. Wikipedia states:

Looking back at the History of New Year Resolutions, it was the Babylonians who started this whole concept. They believed that what a person does on the first day of the year will have an effect on that individual, throughout the year. The most popular Babylonian resolution was to return something they borrowed from a friend (usually, farm equipment).

Today, lists like the List of Top 10 New Year Resolutions seems to cover and claims to provide help with most of the resolutions that a lot of us tend to make these days. Then there are sites out there that also provide help in the form of a paid-service which is supposed to help you meet your New Years Resolutions. Are they effective? Honestly, I haven't tried any and hopefully, don't intend on trying them anytime in the future. 

Personally, I don’t find the whole idea of New Year's Resolutions very appealing. Most of the resolutions we tend to make during this time are way too optimistic and un-real. Maybe, that’s why they fizz out within a couple of months. I’m more inclined towards introducing agility into my life using Professional and Personal TODO Lists for Life and striking off items from these lists whenever life permits. I’m also into doing small and agile sprints of myself. I call this the “Your-Next-Version” approach.

The idea of versioning myself and then working for Self-Version started out during a great vacation this year when I spent a lot of time thinking about my plans of self improvements in the next 6 months. I wrote a lot about the things that I wanted to change and made a lot of so-called-resolutions. Then I announced in this blog that I was done doing an elaboration of “Rajiv 0.2” and construction would being soon and that people would notice the difference.

I’ve always said that too much Analysis doesn't really help and after posting about the problems with analyzing too much, I soon realized that I had ended up doing the same thing with my own versions. My idea of versioning myself and keeping constant track of the self-versions, could work, but if it was to work, it needed to be light-weight and not too-optimistic-big-plan-up-front kind of an approach. The approach was quickly tweaked to support agility.

Each version of “Me” would include just one or two new features. The features included in each version would be both simple and incremental - As an example, a feature could say:  

A version, typically consisting of not more than a couple of features, can take anything between a month to a couple of months to roll out and my life would continue as normal, except of course I would be really careful and serious about committing to and making just one or two features a part of my life. Once this was a habit, I would call this version complete. For the next version, I would move to next one or two features, which may be an extension of the features in current version that was just completed or something completely disconnected. This approach seems to be pretty effective till now.

This New Year, I suggest the Your-Next-Version approach as an alternate option to New Year’s resolution. "What’s the difference?" - You might be thinking. The difference is exactly the difference between Waterfall and Agile. A New Year resolution is too generic, long and waterfall-like. E.g. for my friends and colleagues who smoke, A typical New Year's Resolution is often something as generic as “Quit smoking” – (way too optimistic and most likely to fizz out within the first couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months).

With the Your-Next-Version approach, we tweak this slightly and just say - My Next Version / Sprint smokes a cigarette less than my current version. Whenever this is achieved and is a comfortable part of your life, you move to the next version / sprint where the features could be an extension of existing features (a couple of cigarettes lesser) or something completely disconnected. We’ve worked with quick sprints, releases and versions in the software world; isn't it natural to extend the same knowledge and use it to tweak ourselves?

Do you version yourself too? If not, doesn't a whole New Year seem like a good time to try this out? Keep your own versions small and keep them agile. Here’s wishing everyone a very merry Christmas, great Holidays and a beautiful New Year full of lessons, love, family-time, work, excitement, growth and lots of new, exciting and stable versions of your current self! :)

Shhh, don’t say those words! They’re like dark-dark-black-phase of a programmer’s life when his ego and self-respect have already fallen down to an all time low. Don’t make it worse for him. If you're in India, at around this time of the year, you can see so many young software engineers literally playing the change-your-job-musical-chair as they jump from one firm to another. Ask anyone of these young, talented engineers why they are looking for a change and chances are, the answer will be pretty similar this one I heard during a recent interview I was taking:

“And, what’s wrong with being on the bench?” – If you’re like me you will be tempted to ask, but don’t. Shhh, don’t say those words! They’re like dark-dark-black-phase of a programmer’s life when his ego and self-respect have already fallen down to an all time low. Don’t make it worse for him - You’ll insult an already insulted developer. You’ll hurt an already hurt engineer. Don’t you get it? The guy is on the bench! And he has nothing to learn or do because he’s not working in a project.

But wait, isn’t that just… stupid?

Ok, go ahead, say those words, and ask that question. This isn’t an interview where I can hurt someone’s feeling. This is my blog where I can speak my mind! So go ahead, ask that question – “What’s wrong with being on the bench?” – Seriously. I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t get it. Honest.

I’ve heard the words “on the bench” being mentioned as if they are evil. When they're on the bench, I've seen a lot of developers translate that into some pretty conventional (and in my personal opinion: stupid) interpretations. Based on my conversations with a few programmers who are looking for a change because they are on the bench – being on the bench is equal or synonymous to a few things. The list of these interpretations is long, but some of these, I've heard are:

1. You’re on the bench = you don’t have enough opportunity to learn new technologies, so you should move on.
2. You’re on the bench = your company isn’t doing well and is going to shut down, so you should move on. 
3. And last, but not the least, you’re on the bench = you’re not important and there’s nothing you have to offer to the company, so you should move on.

Long story short being a lot of Developers feel that being “On the Bench” means you’re literally “on-the-bench”. In other words, being on the bench is like:

(Only, not just as cute :))

In a recent conversation / discussion / friendly debate with a person who works in the HR department of a software development firm, I was told:

Yet another person who heads the accounting department and participates in HR related decisions, of a solution provider explains in another healthy discussion:

After all these conversations and discussions with people from different companies, different departments and different roles I still don’t get it. If you do, please explain it to me like I’m a six year old, will you? Maybe I am just dumb. If you’re on the bench, isn’t that a golden opportunity?

A chance to write what you always wanted to write, an opportunity to work on what you always wanted to work on, an opportunity to read, learn, teach, discuss, have fun and offer help to departments within your own organization and the community in general (if nothing else, answer a few questions in a technical forum)? Just so, that I don’t digress, let me think and write about each point:

> You’re on the bench = you don’t have enough opportunity to learn new technologies and it’s bad for your career.

So all projects that all developers work on use the latest cutting edge technology, right? Wrong! There are Non-IT companies out there who still haven’t got over Visual Basic 6.0 and many more that are still a little reluctant to move from .NET 1.1 to 2.0.

Any of that sounds familiar? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these statements. It’s a part of the job to provide the best solutions to clients using the tools that are available at hand and keeping the project cost minimum. But being on the bench for a couple of months gives us an added opportunity to go wild, pick our favorite tools and develop what-ever-it-is that we want to develop!

It gives us an opportunity do more-than-just-code. It gives us time to read articles, read blogs, write articles, blog a little more actively, learn things we always wanted to learn and strike out items on both – our Professional and Personal TODO lists of life.

Given the choice, I’m curious what a developer (just for the sake of discussion, let's assume he's a DotNet developer) who makes a lot of noise about being on the bench, would prefer - working in a Visual Basic 6.0 project and billing a client or being on the bench and have fun working on .NET 3.0 pieces? Personally, I would prefer the later; but I haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying some On-the-bench time for the past few years – so, I have no right to pass judgements and we're using .NET 3.0 pieces in the project I'm involved with so I can't even complain! :)

> You’re on the bench = your company isn’t doing well and is going to shut down.

In one of my first jobs, I worked in a company that shut down a few months after I switched jobs. When a firm is about to shut down, it’s usually pretty easy to make out. The stock prices, the ambience, the announcements, the changes in policies, cuts in budgets and everything else that happens in a company about to shut down is very different than things that happen in the normal course of business. Based on what I know, It usually begins to suck and as an employee you can feel it, even if there are no formal announcements! Organizations with huge numbers of employees don't just shutdown one-fine-morning! Unless of-course, you can feel it that your company is about to close operations and pack up, isn't connecting your being on the bench with your company shutting down, being way too paranoid and a little dumb?

> You’re on the bench = you’re not important and there’s nothing you have to offer to the company so you should move on.

Personally, I find the most frustrating. Every client office I’ve visited, every firm I’ve worked at, (I haven’t worked at many - I’m not very good at the change-your-job-musical-chair game :)) there are always things to automate and problems that technology can solve. Walk up to people in different departments. Talk. Offer help. Some of the Excel COM EXEs in .NET, I’ve written for the finance department of our firm, in my free time and weekends have been the most logically challenging and rewarding pieces of code I've written. I continue to support them in my free time, because it’s a rewarding experience. If nothing else, go ahead and participate in an open source project. It’s a Win-Win situation because it helps others and gives you challenging problems you can solve!

Write re-usable components, frameworks, user-controls, web services or anything and post them on the company intranet, or maybe publish them out to the whole wide world. Lookup the Bug Tracking system of an on-going project in your organization and offer them SVN patches, conduct trainings, clear certifications, train others, blog, conduct presentations, participate in forums… seriously, how can you run out of things to do, just because you're not officially assigned to a project?

Coming back to where I started, what is wrong with being on the bench and not working on a real project for a few months? While I ask what’s wrong in not writing code for a client, for couple of months, Jeff Atwood goes one step further and questions: Does writing Code Matter? He advices:

Being On-The-Bench for a couple of months, gives us some time to do just that – it lets us stop talking to a compiler and do whatever it is that we want to do. Including perusing ideas and initiatives we always wanted to pursue. 

If you are someone who looks for a change everytime you're on bench for a couple of months - The next time you’re on the bench,  may I suggest not playing the change-your-job-like-you're-playing-musical-chair game.

Instead, why not strike out a few items from your Professional and Personal TODO lists of life and get them done, so that you can be a better professional and a better person? You do have Professional and Personal TODO lists for life, right? If not, now is a good time to start making them. :)

I Posted this Hello World Article on Atlas (of-course, now called "Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax") on Code Project a few months ago. Recently, I've been receiving multiple emails / comments telling me that the article was helpful but I should think about updating it since Atlas is undergoing a lot of changes (including the name:)).

I've spent some time during this weekend to update the article based on the Beta 2 of Atlas (Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax 1.0) and resubmitted it to CodeProject for updation. The article has been updated and is available at CodeProject.

However, if are looking for one single zip which allows you do download the latest copy of article, and source code, you can get it here. This post will be updated when further changes are made to the article.

Thanks to everyone who read the article and commented on it.

For the past couple of years my desktop ran on a Windows 2003 Server which was tweaked to make windows look like a Mac. I loved my desktop, but I also loved everything that had been going on the Windows Vista side and had been trying things out on VMWare instances and other non-work machines since the Beta 1 days. I had always stated that I would move to Vista as soon as Microsoft comes out with a Released version. Just wasn't adventurous enough to run a Beta version of an Operating System on my primary work machine. Yesterday, I finally made the move to Vista.

As a developer / geek, there were a few minor hiccups in 'getting up and working' and I'll probably post about all of those and their workarounds in other posts but this post is focused on getting Visual Studio 2005 to run with F5 / Play based Debugging on ASP.NET 2.0 Web-sites. I thought I would post about and document this, since this was the most tricky part and 'almost' kept me awake all night, trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

The Vista Install itself was a Smooth install. Minor hiccups here and there. Surprisingly, there were no drivers issues (things have come a long way since the Beta 1 days, when I had a bad time with the drivers). I didn't have to install a single driver manually. It detected everything on my Dell 700m and pretty much installed it, automatically. Sweet! Most hiccups were compatibility issues with 3rd Party tools, which is expected anyway, because of the enhanced security. Workarounds and alternate tools that work in Vista were pretty easy to find. Yes, there were some very minor issues with the default display drivers - which work fine with extended monitors but somehow, will not let me run on a external projector. I think I can live with that till Dell comes out with their own drivers. [This was resolved. If you googled to this page, in search of Intel-Adaptor-on-Dell Display Driver issues for Vista, see update at the end of the post.]

The real "Opps!" moment however, came when I was done with installing IIS 7.0 and started installing Visual Studio 2005. This is when I was warned that Visual Studio 2005 has known compatibility issues with Vista. I ignored the warning and the installation continued smoothly. Finally I decided to test my installation by making a simple ASP.NET 2.0 Hello-World website. Apparently, Studio would not let me open a website from the Local IIS.

The Warning Said: "You must be a member of the Administrator group on the local computer to access the IIS..."; This however, is a known issues and has to do with the Vista's On-Demand Administrator (i.e. UAC) feature. Installation of additional IIS components, A right click on Studio's Shortcut, followed by a "Run As Administrator" fixes this issue. There's a detailed post on this both as Scott Guthrie's Blog and MSDN. Both of these are pretty helpful and elaborate; So I won't repeat that information here.

After I did everything mentioned in the MSDN / Scott's Post, I could now open web sites from the local IIS. But wait, that was not the complete Fix. Once those steps were applied there were issues with Visual Studio which wanted me to have Integrated Windows Authentication in the Virtual Directory. Now this is something that is not installed by default with IIS 7.0. Which means that I had to explicitly go to "Turn Windows features on or off" and install Integrated Authentication for IIS. (I went ahead and installed all three since I am used-to and use all three - Integrated, Digest and Basic, in different projects. With this done I configured the virtual directory to use Integrated Windows Authentication using IIS Manager.)

So, was that it? Not Really. I still wasn't able to Debug my website. This time Visual Studio showed a security Dialog Box telling me that wasn't able to start debugging on the web server:

The workaround for this is to configure the site / virtual directory (depending on what you're trying to debug from Visual Studio) to run under the "Classic .NET Pool". To Do this just right-click the site on the new IIS Management console and click "Advanced Settings". In the Property Pane that opens up, change the Application Pool Setting to "Classic .NET AppPool" instead of "DefaultAppPool". 

With this done I opened my sample site in Visual Studio.NET 2005 and clicked the Play button (F5 key) and the Debugging worked, just like it should!

Yet another tricky Gotcha here is that changing the Application Pool for the website to Classic .NET pool doesn't seem to change the pool for all virtual directories under it. In other words, if you moved your entire site to DefaultAppPool but are trying to debug a specific virtual directory, you still need to go ahead and manually change the Advanced settings of that Virtual Directory to run Classic .NET AppPool, to enable debugging on it.

There were some 'really convincing' posts out there, that I came across, in a couple of Forums (I can't seem to find the link to those) where people suggested that F5 / Play and Debug is something you cannot do in Vista. I guess, that information is either old (from early beta builds) or just inaccurate. I would have liked to post a reply there and clear this up, but I can't seem to find the link again after reaching the right answer. So, I'm going to post this article here and hopefully Google will index it and help others who're trying to get this to work. 

Update [12/29/2006]: If you are looking for more details and other approaches, Mike has recently provided detailed step-by-step instructions on various approaches you can take and has described several tradeoffs associated with each approach. His detailed post is available here.

Update [02/07/2007]: Even though this post is not directly related to Dell 700m Intel Display Cards and Vista drivers for these cards a lot of people seem to be googling their way to this page in search of similar answers. This update might help. If you are running Intel(R) 82852/82855 Graphic Adaptor on Your Dell 700m and are having problems switching to clone mode with Dual Monitors or running on a Projector by pressing Fn-F8 key, start your Add New Hardware Wizard on Vista, select the manual driver installation process, choose Display Adaptor in the type of device and from the list of drivers Vita offers, choose Intel as Manufacturer, and "Intel(R) 82852 / 82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller (Microsoft Corporation - XDDM)" as your driver, even if Vista had detected your driver successfully during installation. Complete the Wizard and Reboot. Once the reboot is complete, you should be able to see two display adaptors with the same name installed in your Device Manager. Now disable Extended Desktop and should be able to switch to a projector or clone your desktop on your second monitor using the Fn-F8 key.