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Sunday, June 28, 2009
SQLDBCrypt; is an in-house encryption tool for SQL Server 2005 or later which makes it really easy for you to encrypt specific columns inside your SQL server databases. Abhijit Ghosh (who gives me a sinister smile when you ask him about his blog URL or his web presence) conceived the idea of writing this in his free time a couple of years ago when were looking for a commercial encryption engine for SQL server in ITOPS. Sticking to the eFORCE culture of giving someone with a genuine idea time; freedom and lots of resources we provided him what he wanted and got out of his way. Within a few weeks we had a fully functional prototype which we took to the next level by starting to use it inside of ITOPS and fully integrating Ad-hoc reporting and some of out other products with it. After almost a year of testing and the product running successfully in production environments we have released SQLDBCrypt out live as a free open source product you can use in your projects. You can read the complete release story here or take a look at the product home page on codeplex. We will also be announcing this on the Treasury sciences blogs page where we intend to talk about how this piece integrates seamlessly with out Ad-hoc reporting piece and the rest of ITOPS. Whether you are in or outside of eFORCE; we would highly recommend you give this product a shot and do let us know your feedback. Abhijit and I will be spending the next few days to chalk out a product roadmap and decide our next steps on packaging the product along with giving out added training material that makes it really easy to get up and running with this product. This tool being brought to you from the Dot-Net-Labs initiative @ eFORCE.
Monday, March 02, 2009
We've just open sourced Crux - a free light weight open source work-flow engine and a web application framework that I worked on. We are fairly excited and so is the recently formed Crux Team. Come, share our excitement here or visit us at CodePlex.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Do you have baby pictures of your kids in yearly albums? Do you watch them every couple of months and get excited about how your kids have grown? Watching your employees grow is not exactly the same thing; but it can be fairly exciting. Getting involved in their growth is a rewarding experience too. Skillz is your organization's continuous and ongoing ‘baby album’ for your employees, their competence, their technical skill-sets, their soft skill-sets and much more. Besides being fun, watching your employees grow can have fairly positive impact on your overall organizational growth. After all, any organization worth it’s salt knows that it is only as good as the employees who work there. We’ve seen skillz meet requirements from oil rigs in texas, to medical institutions and even banks. Some of our teams use it to track increase in competency and growth within the team and they love it too. As a software developer who initially led it’s design and development what particularly amuses me about Skillz is it’s ability to be highly configurable to meet the needs to multiple domains and industries. Not to turn this into a marketing blog; I’ll be doing a series of posts on features I love about Skillz and how we implemented configurability into the product. The formal marketing website and a one month trial, just in case you want to try out the product, be coming out soon and will be announced formally pretty soon. If you’re an existing customer, trial user to have a demo instance of Skillz you’re playing around with please feel free to leave a comment on this blog or send me an email about what you like and dislike about the product.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Treasury Sciences (Code Named: ITOPS) has been our flagship product in the Treasury and Finance Domain; something we've been working on for more than our two years. A product that has been helping our clients measure their Treasury accurately for the past year or so. At eFORCE we're obsessed with answering the why's and when we started working on ITOPS the first question we asked ourselves was simple: Why should the world of treasury care about what we had to offer them? Two years later; I think we've explained that 'Why' pretty well. I've heard many analogies but the one that comes closest to describing what ITOPS does and why the treasury world should care is described by our CEO: "It's almost like a Fuel Gauge. You don't want to to show too much or too little. You expect it to be accurate because you rely on it." A Major part of ITOPS is a Product Called CMO (code named: Seagull) which is what we often refer to as the “Treasury Gauge”. Relentlessly tweaking it and making it dependable is what we've been working on for the past couple of years. If you are into Treasury or just interested in one of the things that we (and I personally) do for a living; check out our first humble website which is far from perfect. It's not clearly an example of best website we can build; in fact to be honest, I don't love it all that much myself, but then, we were busy building this great product that you (and our existing customers) can depend on to make some really important decisions when it comes to treasury management and the website was not one of our biggest concerns. It's the product where most of our energy has been focused so far and we're sure our existing customers, having used our products in a production environment for months, will vouch for that fact. The website was meant to give information about a product we (the development team, the clients who use it and everyone who is associated with it) love and I think it does a decent job at doing that. It'll will continue to get better with time. In the meantime, If you are interested in what eFORCE does with this initiative or are in general interested in the Treasury and Finance space visit us, book-mark us and keep looking out for some exciting free services we are going to announce at the new website pretty soon. We'll be doing more posts on these services as and when we announce them. For now feel free to check out our website and let us know what you think.
Monday, March 17, 2008
We've been working on evaluating the Microsoft MVC framework and using it for internal projects like the Appraisal System. I've been highly impressed with it's flexibility, simplicity and elegance. For all those who attended my recent training on it, I'm sure you would agree. For all those who find the whole idea of taming routing with the MCV framework confusing I've posted a detailed step-by-step explanation of the topic here.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
When I was told that we were looking to download 500+ documents from our corporate intranet which runs on SharePoint my instant reaction was that we should throw out some custom code to fetch files from the SharePoint web-services.
But then, why write code when you can do the same thing, just as fast, without writing any code? Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm all for writing code, but if there's a tool out there that will save a few hours of my life and fix a problem, without my having to write any code, I don't really have a problem with that either! :)
Here is an account of how I managed to grab and download some 500+ documents from a SharePoint 2003 Document Repository without writing a single line of code.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
When I first met Powershell, months ago - it wasn't exactly love at first sight. I should rather say that Powershell grew on me. Slowly. But once I "got it" there was no looking back. A few months ago, while blogging about this new command prompt shell from Microsoft I said it's going to change the world and it's way better than any Unix / Linux consoles that I've ever worked with. (Ok, that's just my personal opinion! :)) The post also showed how you can skin Powershell using an open source tool and make it look better and has some links if you are looking to get started with Powershell. You can read the post here. Today we've finally completed pushing a POC for a real deployment script using Powershell to QA and I posted on how easy it is to read XML files using Powershell based on reading and writing that I've been doing for this deployment script for the past few months. That post is available here. This is just one topic, but going ahead, as and when time permits, there'll be more. If you work on a Windows you should learn this tool. Irrespective of whether you're a System Administrator, Managed Service Person, Programmer (J2EE / .NET / C++ or whatever) this tool has something for making everyone's life better. Go ahead. Spend some time with Powershell! The initial learning curve will be a little steep, but once you get it - it'll just grow on you. I just rolled out a POC of Deployment scripts for one of our projects, on Powershell, to QA and I'm happy to say it worked out really well.
Friday, January 26, 2007
When do you Branch? When do you Tag your Code? Does your team ever work directly on the trunk? During my few years with CVS and then SVN, I've been talking to various teams in and outside eFORCE on how they use their version control system to find out what's the 'Best Practice'. The answer that I found after various discussions (some of which were fairly recent) was that "There is no Best Practice! It depends on your project, team and how fast you want to code changes to happen". I ended up documenting two most common approaches and my opinions on when to branch, when to tag and if people should work on the trunk or always work on branches, here. If anyone in or outside eFORCE is using a completely different Approach from the ones I documented or have seen, and the approach has worked well for him / her, do drop in a comment and let me know. It's fascinating to see multiple right answers to the same question :)
Saturday, December 02, 2006
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. It should be up there in a day or two.
However, if you're looking for one single zip which allows you do download the latest copy of article, and source code, you can get it here. All further updates on the article will be posted here.
Thanks to everyone who read the article and commented on it.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The IIS 7.0 Release has been much talked about. Since the changes on IIS side have been huge, I've been particularly interested in knowing if IIS 7.0 would introduce any breaking changes as far as deployment and particularly development environments are concerned. Yesterday I took some of our existing ASP.NET based projects and ported them on IIS 7.0 to see how things go. As far as deployment was concerned things were pretty smooth. As far as using Visual Studio.NET 2005, on IIS 7.0 and Vista, as a development environment, is concerned, it's a slightly bumpy ride which takes some time to learn workarounds and figure out answers. In case, if anyone at eFORCE / anyone reading this, is trying to get Visual Studio.NET 2005 Debugging for Web Applications to work on IIS 7.0 and Vista, I blogged about this Here. Production environments for IIS 7.0 won't be becoming a reality with our internal projects, at-least till Longhorn Server hits a release stage (maybe even later) but it's good to know our existing and future ASP.NET based projects are ready for IIS 7.0 and all of our development environment, Continuous Integration, Version Control etc. (all of it), "just works" on Vista and IIS 7.0... nothing breaks. Based on what I've seen till now, we're one-hundred percent "vista and longhorn compatible"! :)
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