In fall 2006 we were looking for a way to equip our inspectors with an always on “high-speed” internet connection in the field.  We were planning on getting them setup on ruggedized tablets, so they could complete checklists about various construction tasks that were customized for each home.  This would be used to not only track the progress of homes, but fully automate the production process.  When one checklist was finished for a home, a checklist for the next construction task would be created and would show up on another inspector’s tablet.  We would also be able to tie email notifications to give our trade partners a heads up when it was almost time for them to be involved with a home, and use them to allow inspectors to approve payment for materials and labor out in the field.  So with all this, we really put a lot of effort trying to make it work.

During this time in Lubbock, the data service available from cell phone companies was extremely slow (around 56Kbps), which would was too slow for what we were hoping to do.  At first we were thinking about writing an application that could run online or offline, and when it came into a hot spot it would sync up with the live database.  The inspectors are away from the office all day, so we thought about creating a mesh wireless G network that completely covered some of our larger communities.  This turned out to be pretty expensive for outdoor equipment, and seriously sounded pretty hinky.  So when someone told us about a new company named Xanadoo that might be able to help us out, we were all about it.

I called Xanadoo, and they sent one of their top people in the area (I think he was also a stakeholder in the company) to the office to talk with me.  I explained what we were trying to do, pointed out the locations of our major communities, and they assured me they would be able to provide us with the service we were looking for.  They said their service should be able to provide our guys with a connection anywhere in Lubbock County, which seems more than adequate.  They could provide small wireless modems that received a signal from unidirectional antennas around town.  In fact, they were so confident they wanted to sale me a few of their modems right then.  I told them I would like to get a complementary modem to test with first, and it took them a couple weeks to get one to me. 

Since they were so confident this would work, I moved forward with developing this solution.  When I finally got the modem, our system admin and I hooked it up to a laptop and decided to drive around town and see what kind of connection we could get.  Needless to say we were a little surprised.  I had got them to point out a few places locations of their unidirectional antennas, and we drove near one and were able to get a connection.  However, if we were ½ a mile or more away from the tower (or directly below it) the connection was either unreliable or non-existent.  Their service didn’t even get close to covering the city of Lubbock, much less Lubbock County.  We thought we might have had a faulty unit or be trying to use it incorrectly, so we went to their offices on 82nd St and talked to an employee.  We told them we were having some trouble getting a signal, and we couldn’t even get one in their parking lot.  They acted surprised, and said of course we weren’t getting a signal there … there is never a signal out there.  What?

It turned out we were doing everything right, and their service simply didn’t match up with what they claimed.  We tried a few external antennas, but eventually abandoned the idea after we couldn’t get the Xanadoo office to return our phone calls. 

I can’t say how disappointed I am with Xanadoo.  A few friends have asked me if they should try Xanadoo, and I always give them an emphatic “NO.”  Not only do they have subpar service, but they also chose to flat-out lie about what their service could do even when they were fully aware they were not telling the truth.  Thinking back, on the original visit the rep claimed one of their current clients was using a modem in a vehicle all the way from Wolfforth.  That is physically impossible with unidirectional antennas at that distance, so that must have also been a lie.

I have heard some people say they had an decent experience with them, but people’s experience seem to vary wildly based on how close to the antenna they were and what obstacles there was between them.  If there was any other type of data service you could get, I would definitely try it … I might even opt for dial-up instead of the horrible service and experience I had with Xanadoo.

From Hanselminutes.com:
Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

If I only had time for one podcast a week, this would be the one I listened to.  In fact, if I was stranded on a desert island and could only pick one thing to listen to … well it wouldn’t be this, but if I could somehow get weekly updates I would think about it.

Carl and Scott seem to hit on random topics every week, but it somehow seems to either be something I curious about or didn’t realize I needed to know.  They don’t waste your time with the 10 minutes of small talk upfront, and Scott used to end quite a few podcasts with the line “Hope we didn’t waste your time”, which seems to be one of the driving forces in the show.

Scott has a unique look at software and technology, and there is just something about it I enjoy.  He has a lifehacker-type approach to development and life in general, and is all about finding clever tools that will help him save time or simplify his life.  Bottom line, Scott is a likable guy that cuts the chase, has practical advice, doesn't include fluff, and I can’t remember him ever wasting my time.

I wanted these tools to be first thing I reviewed, because I want everyone to know how amazing they are.  I recently switch to Vista on my production machine, and I tried to prioritize the software I installed in the order of how critical it was to being able to function in my job … the top of the list went something like this:

1. Office 2007
2. Visual Studio 2005
3. SQL Server 2005
4. Red-Gate Tools
   …

These tools are irreplaceable.  SQL Compare alone saves save me and my team a ton of time every week.  Red-Gate has great prices (most tools are $300-400), and I can’t remember ever running into a bug and have been using this stuff for over two years.  Some of this software has to be pretty intelligent in regards to how it orders updates, and in the hundreds of times I have ran it I only had undesired side-effects twice.  Here is what I use each tool for:

SQL Compare: Compares the schema of two databases, including tables, stored procedures, views, functions, users, and roles.  It looks at the structure of the databases … not the actual data contained in them.  It allows a user to see the differences between objects in an intuitive interface, choose which should be moved to the target database, and then generates a T-SQL script to make the changes.  This is the most useful tool for me, because this makes it really easy to move application code and database updates from the development environment to the production environment.

SQL Data Compare: Compares the data in two databases … not the schema.  Allows a user to view the individual rows that are different in each database, generates a script to update the target to match the source database.  I don’t use this quite as often, because you typically have a production set of data and don’t need to move actual rows from a development environment to the production environment.  But it comes in useful enough to justify the cost.

SQL Refactor:  I don’t think I have realized what all this tool is capable of, but just what I am aware of makes it pretty cool.  My team has to view/edit stored procedures written by another company that have extremely poor formatting to the point that they are almost impossible to read.  When you install this tool, it creates a menu item inside SQL Management Studio.  I have the ability to set options related to how I prefer my T-SQL code to be formatted (placement of things like columns, join clauses, subqueries and other things like wrapping, spacing, etc), and when I open one of those ugly procedures I can go in the menu to SQL Refactor > Lay Out SQL … and that’s it.  You can share the same settings between a whole team, and then make sure everyone formats procedures the same.  It also allows you to do things like “Expand Wildcards”, which intelligently converts a “SELECT *” to a list of qualified columns.  And one more really cool thing is that it can help you rename tables, columns, parameters, and other objects, and SQL Refactor will find all of the dependencies and change them accordingly.  Yes, I mean it … all dependencies (inside procedures, views, relationships, and other objects).  All this and more for around $300.

Conclusion: These Red-Gate tools are a no-brainer.  Compared to other development tools they are incredibly cheap, and their software quality is flawless.

http://www.red-gate.com

My name is Cal Zant and I currently manage the IT team for Betenbough Companies, a production home builder in West Texas.  I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Texas Tech College of Engineering, and have been working as a .NET developer since the original 1.0 release.  It seems the construction industry usually stays pretty far behind the technology curve, and there aren't a lot of cutting-edge solutions out there for home builders ... at least none that are clean and stable.  So I am constantly trying to find ways to leverage technology, which provides a significant competitive advantage in our field.

Our company holds a fundamental strategy of constantly evaluating our processes and evolving to meet constantly changing market demands and become more efficient, which has led us to become a world-class home builder (included in the "Professional Builder Giant 400" builders in the world).  And although we always try to buy existing software solutions when we can (e.g. Dynamics GP 10.0 for accounting/purchasing, Exchange 2007 for office communications), some of our processes are quite unique to our company.  So we created our own enterprise application that not only links all of our different software solutions together, but also contains our own custom functionality for those areas that are unique to us.

This enterprise application is a custom ASP.NET 3.5 web application written in C#, with a SQL Server 2005 backend, and leverages several other technologies like ASP.NET AJAX, WCF Web Services, SQL Reporting Services, and .netTiers.  The areas of our business that are unique to us are the relationship and experience associated with our homebuyers, as well as some fundamental differences in our construction process.  So almost everything that has to do with these areas is handled in our web application including:

• Home purchase agreements and associated legal documents
• Information about homebuyers and all of our interactions with them
• Community, floor plan, and option relationships and pricing
• Manage what purchase orders should be generated for a particular home
• Manage work order information after the sale of the home
• View reports created in a variety of environments in a central location

We also have a mobile version of the application, which completely automates our production scheduling and allows employees in the field to stay connected by:

• Keeping track of the current status of homes
• Completing customized checklists for each construction task on all home
• Approving payment for labor or materials in the accounting system
• Logging any costs variances that we weren't anticipating to evaluate and use to update our purchasing or improve our various aspects in our construction process
• Communicate using comments and photos through custom forums for each home
• Automatically trigger notifications to our trade partners at various milestones in the contruction of a particular home

One thing I love about my job is being able to continually learn by keeping up with the latest technology.  It always keeps it fresh and exciting.  Plus I don’t know anything more fulfilling than digging into a complex, real-world problem and solving it with a clean, elegant software solution.  At Betenbough Companies, the majority of my time is spent architecting software solutions, researching and making decisions related to company technology, leading the IT team in implementing our technology strategies, and I still find myself coding in Visual Studio a considerable amount, and designing database structures or stored procedures in SQL Server.

I graduated from the Texas Tech College of Engineering with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2005.  From 2003-2006, I worked for Smooth Fusion, a Microsoft gold partner, as a software developer working on database-driven web applications.  By the end of that term I was working as lead developer on some some pretty high-profile Microsoft sites like CodeZone.com.  In 2006, I had a major role in revising a popular Computer Science textbook used in college and high school classrooms entitled Visual Basic 2005 BASICS (although I have to admit, I prefer C#).

It seems I have a lot of hobbies, including hunting, guitar, gardening, photography, and researching family history.  My best friend is my amazing wife, who somehow puts up with all of it, and tries to keep me from taking myself too seriously.

Is it just me, or do you feel like every time you try to find a good reference or example for a particular subject all you can find is stuff that is incomplete, incorrect, buggy, or only works in theory or when the winds are just right?  Also, like most people I have also had painful experiences with a few products or services that left me with the desire to climb on top of the tallest roof I could find and tell the world about it so that: 1) others wouldn’t have to go through the same frustration experience 2) to send a message to companies who continually provide poor service or subpar products that we are smart consumers and we will rebel against such tyranny.  I have also run across an equal number of companies that exceeded my expectations and gave me a “wow” experience, and in turn I have become evangelistic on their behalf.  Really I want this to be a place to share my experiences in terms of what did and didn’t work for me for: software, code, books, training, and some other random topics that temporarily captured my attention.