Jonathan Cogley's Blog

What does your code terrain look like?  Are there bodies of dead logic lying here and there?  Maybe they helped briefly while you worked towards a better solution or perhaps they just fell victim to changing business rules.

If you understand hashing and salting then skip the next paragraph.

I attended my first event at the new Rockville .NET User Group (RockNUG) in Maryland tonight.  Geoff Snowman, our local Microsoft integration specialist showed off the latest BizTalk Server (BTS) technology and talked about the future of BTS and its related products.  As Geoff pointed out, BTS is a niche product that works well for large customers that have unique or complex integration requirements.  The power of BTS was clearly in its mapping/transformation abilities, flexibility in talking to various endpoints (on various platforms) and the scalability of dynamically handling large amounts of orchestrations.  My take was that it was especially well suited to integrate different applications especially when they are on different platforms and speak different languages (text vs XML vs EDI etc.).  If you are interested in BTS and more on integration, don't miss Geoff's MICSUG group which has upcoming presentations on WWF and ESB.

Thycotic is gearing up for a new product development cycle and we are looking to grow our team of passionate test-first developers. Our team is one of the best places to learn and improve your agile development skills.

On Saturday, the Thycotic crew (well, only three of us this time) went down to Richmond to the forth Richmond Code Camp.  It is a 2 hour drive but my new handy TomTom GPS did well - asides from one occasion where it decided to re-route us back through Washington DC when we were only 30 minutes from the event!

You can download it here.  The release notes are here.

Shipping software is one of the most exciting times for a development team but this new release is easily the most anticipated version of Secret Server to date by our customers.  Secret Server 3.1 will feature the two most requested features from customers who visited our booth at TechEd in June 2007: full Active Directory synchronization along with remote password changing.  I am very proud of our team being able to take both of these features from whiteboard to release in about 7 weeks.

We recently had a problem on our development build server that had us puzzled.  The ASP.NET tab disappeared and our CruiseControl.NET server quit working.  We had seen the problem with CruiseControl.NET before - a serialization error on DateTime - and we knew it was related to running the dashboard in the wrong version of ASP.NET.  So the two issues seemed to be related.