First Article Published

Yesterday, my first technical article was published on AspAlliance.com! It's an article about creating and using an ASP.NET custom .config file. It's quite exciting to have an article published in this venue! If you are interested, simply click on the heading above to be taken to the article. I hope you enjoy the article -- both from a standpoint of enjoying my writing style, and from the standpoint of providing some clever approaches to a coding problem. Cheers!

Clueless Software

At my current gig, the client is using Rational Suite. This morning, I attempted to find a list of the files I currently have checked out. This was actually relatively easy to do. I'm currently working on several tickets, and wanted to sort and print the list so I could easily identify which files were associated with each ticket. Again, relatively easy to do. Since some of the files had to be un-checked out, (the ticket was cancelled after work was done ...), I wanted to print the list. NOT easy to do. At first, I thought I was just missing something; or a required permission in the software had not been granted to me. But I checked with another developer who has been here for some time and my initial impression was correct. The only way to get a print-out was to do a screen print! Now I understand that analyzing useabliity can cost a lot of money, and end up causing some modifications to the code and UI, which costs even more money. Not every company can afford this. But Rational? Owned by IBM? At the least, couldn't they just COPY the UI functionality that Microsoft has? How can a company that presents itself as a premier provider, provide a report that can't be printed? Brain-dead software.