Not so important emails that I need to keep.

I was called over to look at one of our salesman's laptops and I was amazed at the difference in how people manage email. I'm not trying to poke too much fun at salesman, but what I saw and heard floored me. Looking back, it's a very amusing story so I thought I'd share.

He reported having issues with his Outlook being slow, so I came over and took a look. For starters, he was archiving email, which was the cause of most of his slowness. I cancelled the archive before diving into a few other things. One thing that struck me as odd was the fact that he had over ten THOUSAND items in his deleted items folder. Of course as I'm somewhat of an exchange purist, I asked if it would be alright if I emptied his deleted items.

"No, I generally keep those for 6 months, because I'll end up needing them" he replied.

Then the most idiotic though came out of my mouth: "But if you need it, why did you delete it in the first place?"

"Oh, that's just where I put the emails I need to keep, just the ones that aren't important."

Being the good IT support guy that I am, I showed him a number of links about how large numbers of items in any folder of your inbox greatly decreases mailbox performance. He didn't really seem that interested... go figure.

I decided to ask around and see how others used this folder mistakenly named "Deleted Items." Much to my surprise, most of our sales team uses this folder in the same way as the salesman with the Outlook issue.

So what's the moral of the story? Things are not always as they appear... even ones that are named in a very simple and meaningful way (No matter what Uncle Bob says). Maybe I should inquire what the folder "Junk E-Mail" is for?

What a week

Been a long time since I posted on CoaTA. I figured s small update is in order.

Still employed, still a work-a-holic. This week work was integrating iPhones into Cisco CallManager, setting up a site-site VPN tunnel between two ASAs and continuing the implementation of our new CRM software.

Also working on the preparation of upgrading our Citrix environment from presentation 4.5 to XenApp 6.

Can't wait for next week.




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Chloe The Dog

So this week, Valerie and I decided to expand our family with the addition of a dog. We picked up Chloe from the Meridian Valley Animal Shelter. She is a ~4 years old Beagle with a docked tail.

We picked her up from the Vet on tuesday after having her spayed. She's a little wiped out from the surgery, but so far she's been a wonderful addition to our home.

Chloe has taken up a lot of my time this week, and tonight will be the first night I get to play WoW since the adoption.

So far so good

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Our New Dog

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Project Codename: DRFM

So while I'm currently without a place of employment I've been working on a few "projects" to help keep my technical skills sharp. Warning, this post contains a lot of "Technical" stuff. Be warned the following content may not be suitable for non-developers.

Project Codename: DRFM - Dynamic Runtime Form Manufactoring

I've been working on this .Net development project for a few weeks now. The goal: To create an application that can build rich user interfaces dynamically at runtime. For those of you who don't speak techie, what I'm trying to do is to develop an application that by itself is just a blank window, but with the help of an XML config file will be whatever the user wants.

The intent of this is to allow me to quickly develop applications for customers that use a base application and are then simply configured to look and perform as the end user dictates. Sounds spiffy right?

Right now I'm at a very interesting point in the application development. As of this moment, I am taking Microsoft's controls and wrapping them in my own code to form an UI element that contains XML data from the config file. This way a generic event handler can pickup the event and read the config information from the element sending the event and can execute the appropriate method. This means I can do a lot of really cool stuff with these elements, but it requires me to wrap each of the elements before I can use them. Which is a lot of work.

The idea I'm toying with is to "reflect" the actual MS object, get it's type and then try to match parameters from the config file to the button. This would mean a lot less code changes to the framework of the app, and allow users to use whatever control they would like, not just the controls I've setup for them. The down side is that it's a PITA as far as event handlers go.

The other thing that concerns me is that with all the options available by reflecting the MS controls is that the config file may become complicated and very unwieldy, thus it would just be simpler to write a custom application rather than try to build a config.

A little bit about the app, it's .NET 3.5 using WPF for it's sheer good looks. I'm writing it in C# and hopefully will be marketing it locally in the Boise area to some small businesses for some extra income (hopefully someday). I'm hoping that at somepoint that MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) www.codeplex.com/MEF will become a part of this application, but I'm hoping that the MEF source will stop changing as much before that time comes.

If and when i finish this project, I may move on to building an XML config creation applicaiton where end-users can drag/drop form elements to build their own UI or rearrange an existing one.

Welcome to CoTA

So here I am, one month into joblessness and I'm finding myself going nuts. There are all of these idea bouncing around in my head; Projects to be developed, certifications to pursue and games to play.

Thus CoTA is born. A way for me to outlet some of my frustrations, ideas and communicate to the outside world. I'm hoping this will be a good experience for me. I've tried several times over the years to start and keep a blog going... so hopefully it will work out this time.

As far as what I will be posting, it will be as varied as my hobbies. .Net Development and C# are probably going to be here a lot, along with Unix/Linux, motorcycle related topics, and gaming etc.

So I hope to see you back, fee free to leave a comment.