Brian Nipper

As I have been writing consistently for a bit now I've already found myself referring back to things I've posted, which has prompted me to try and post items which have taken a bit of time to work out. It seems that the act of "writing it down" causes me to remember information better. Perhaps it's all the thought into attempting to write something useful. This post includes two details which took me more than a few hours to sort out so I hope to help others who have a similar need. Funny enough it could be me in the future after I've forgotten this information. First up is a little detail that I know I've forgotten and looked up more than once, and depending on the google/bing results I find sooner or later. Setting up IIS Express to host a site via HTTPS When configuring your site to run in IIS Express using Visual Studio it's fairly trivial to set the attribute to use SSL (i.e. HTTP over SSL which is HTTPS) as it's just an ...

I was recently reminded that order of operation can byte you when trying to troubleshoot intermittent unit test failures. First, I’ll be the first to admit that if you want to avoid problems with unit testing it’s best to avoid any dependency outside of your actual code base, things like databases, API and even the file system are best avoided in execution of your unit tests. That last one, the file system, in some applications is really hard to avoid. If you happen to be using MSTest, a helpful attribute for your test is DeploymentItem. This particular attribute allows you to define a file within your unit test project assuming it’s marked as “Copy Always”. With this attribute in place you can then combine this with TestContext.DeploymentDirectory to find this sample file and then do what you need to do. In my particular case I was having an issue with the unit tests failing on the build machine but not locally. After stumbling around for a bit I finally feel back to t...

It often amazes me at how often I find myself apologizing to others for rashly commenting on a problem before I have all the facts. In fact, after so many years as a professional in the IT space and dealing with countless critical situation/severity one problems (a.k.a. Sev1, crit-sit) I would be able to react in a more appropriate and beneficial manner. The sad truth is that, as I write this post. I JUST "did it wrong" on a Sev1 from earlier in the day and found myself sheepishly apologizing for my brash response. Perhaps by writing this down and publishing for others to read I can obtain the positive results of public shame to result in my correcting my behavior. At least there is a chance someone else can read this and benefit from my mistakes. The fundamental problem I seem to have is that I hear a few pieces of information or even just the subject line of an e-mail or short text message and immediately jump to a conclusion. Having done a bit of a personal post-morte...

I'm always interested to find personality traits that seem to be common to "smart" people. When I use the term "smart" I don't mean to imply that they have some knowledge that is unattainable by others, also I don't mean to imply that they are more intelligent than the average person (although I suspect that if we were going off IQ that could be true). To be clear, I don't typically include myself in the "smart" category, I tend to think that I just happen to have a good memory which gives the impression of being smart, as well as being prone to asking the question why, which I have observed as being a trait of "smart" people. When people passively accept information that is given them without asking the question why, the result is often that the person receiving the information winds up with only a cursory understanding of the subject matter. In some cases I would completely agree that the "right approach" is to onl...

Reversible figures and vase. From Wikimedia Commons I recently remembered a ted talk from a while back about optical illusions and how our eyes can be heavily influenced by the context of what they see, or as mentioned in the talk, "the light that hits our eyes is not what is important, rather it is what we do with the information once it hits our brain that matters." To help illustrate this point the image here shows a famous "illusion" in that depending on your perspective the black area is the silhouette of two faces, or the white area forms a vase, in reality both are true and it is a mater of perspective on which view is "correct". FYI, I believe depending on how my day is going one or the other is true. :) I've also been rediscovering the fun I have playing Sudoku . It's interesting how organizing numbers into patterns according to rules fosters a sense of accomplishment. Probably informs my career choice of...

In the 1997 summer blockbuster "Men in Black" the two main characters, played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, discussed the capabilities of groups of people and individuals. Will Smith's character suggested that it would be safe to tell the entire earth about Aliens, saying "people are smart..." they can handle it. Tommy Lee's character responds "a person is smart, people are dumb..." which implies that while a person is capable, but as a whole people are not. In general I tend to disagree with the idea that the majority of people are dumb, stupid or some other negative quality. I strongly believe that the vast majority of people are very capable and given the right circumstance they are able to surprise, delight and in general exceed most expectations. However, keeping in mind that the "squeaky wheel gets the oil" or in other words the most vocal people get the attention, it seems for some reason that the most vocal people also tend t...

I had the opportunity to attend a meeting wherein the presenter discussed all of the amazing ways that SharePoint 2010 was going to solve all the problems of the company I work for. I work at a company that is made up of 1,000s of employees across most of the globe, and as I listed to how facet search and managed metadata where going to resolve communication and collaboration problems I begin asking myself what is the underlying problem that plagues the company I work at and how is SharePoint going to resolve this problem. Thinking of how most problems boil down to communication issues I realized that while the company I work at (a middle of the road financial institution) is not the "biggest" company by any means it does the the "big" problem, that is, the company is made up of a lot of people. When ever you have an organization, be it government, company or even a family, as the organization grows the issues it faces in keeping everyone in the group "on the s...