Alexander’s Blog

I have been talking about starting a User Group and finally it has become a reality. If you are from the greater Seattle area, you are invited to join the Seattle Windows Networking User Group.

The purpose of this user group is to bring IT professionals together from various public and private sectors to collaborate on Windows networking technologies. Whether you are already in the IT industry or contemplating a change in your career, you will benefit from joining this User Group by interacting and networking with other technologists.

WNUG is primarily focused on Microsoft networking technologies, such as Windows Server 2008/2003, Windows 7/Vista/XP, Active Directory, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, ISA Server, SMS, etc. The goal is to provide useful information to IT professionals so that they can better configure, deploy, maintain, support, manage, troubleshoot and secure Microsoft networking products and utilities.

WNUG will hold its inaugural meeting at the Lincoln Square Center in Bellevue, just across from the Bellevue Square mall, on Tuesday November 18, 2008 from 6:00pm-7:30pm.

The User Group membership is open to general public and its free for registered users. YOU MUST BE A REGISTERED MEMBER IN ORDER TO ATTEND THE MEETINGS. Registration will allow you to attend the meetings, benefit from specials and giveaways, and have access to certain resources on the User Group Web site.

If you are interested in joining the group and networking with other IT professionals in the Puget Sound area, please go to http://www.WinNetUserGroup.com and click on “Join the group” button. Feel free to pass this information to your colleagues.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) supports Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) which allows the administrators to configure SharePoint so the users can access SharePoint sites using different URLs. The idea is to associate each Web application with a collection of mappings between internal and external URLs. For example, in certain situations, such as environments using reverse proxy or load balancing, the end user may type a different URL to access the site then the URL that is received by the Internet Information Services (IIS). In this situation, AAM will come handy and direct the user’s request to the proper URL.

You can also associate multiple internal URLs with a single public URL using one of 5 different authentication zones: Default, Intranet, Internet, Custom, and Extranet. Check out this TechNet articlefor more information on how to configure AAM in SharePoint.

Microsoft Automotive is extending the Windows platform beyond the desktop computing. Check out this Ford Sync Demo at CES 2008. Ford Sync is an example of how Microsoft Automotive has extended the Windows CE 5.0 platform.

If you haven’t seen this funny video from Microsoft, check this out. There are appearances from several famous people including Matthew Mcconaughey, U2’s Bono, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama, Former V.P. Al Gore, comedian Jon Stewart, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and others.

I am not a programmer but I do know that, just like any other profession, there are good programmers and there are bad programmers. Writing software must not be an easy task or else multi-billion dollar companies like Microsoft would have written a browser that is secure, reliable and bug-free and Apple wouldn’t have to deal with 69 security holes in Mac OS X in less than 3 months. I just read an article about what’s wrong with the software written today. Perhaps the software developers are in a better position than me to to comment on the author’s take on this subject.

Here are a few excerpts from an article written by Shayne Nelson called What’s wrong with 90% of software written today?:

In the early seventies, industry studies revealed that eighty-five percent of all software development efforts went into just one area: maintenance. You can put that figure another way: programmers spend six to seven times as much fixing and modifying software as they do designing and building it.

Since most programmers instinctively (and justifiably) hate maintenance, that means that we are looking at a profession where the practitioners spend most of their day doing something they dislike. What a sad observation, and what a sad profession.

Things are always changing in a company, and therefore the company’s software is going to require changes, lots of them. This is inevitable. The question remains: why does the average company have to spend six-sevenths of its effort and programming manpower and time on fixing stuff rather than building it?

Asking that key question makes the issue (and the right answer) far more obvious. The answer is, BAD ORIGINAL DESIGN.

That’s right. Most software on earth is written with virtually no features incorporated to make debugging and maintenance much easier.

You can read the entire article here.