What does it take to be a good software professional?

Of the very few Rockstar level technical people I have encountered in the past, there was this one quality all of them possesed-->Everyone approached them for technical advice.

They always answered to technical questions with supreme confidence and they had a consistent track record of being 100% correct. On top of their technical expertise they also had amazing people skills.


In my experience (of watching others) these are the qualities necessary for a software developer to reach the very top of the technical part of the corporate ladder

1. A thorough understanding of the fundamentals (a computer science degree really helps)
2. Constant reading up on the latest and best selling technology books.(Go to amazon.com and sort by popularity)
3. Constantly brushing up on stuff that you have studied in the past (see Spacing effect)
4. A thorugh understanding of the dominant design patterns.
5. Being involved in the developer community (contribute on stackoverflow, go to developer meetups etc)
6. A very high EQ (yes EQ and not IQ. IQ will only take you upto a Jr developer stage)
7. Ability to grasp the business needs very quickly.
8. Impecable domain knowledge (Understanding the business)

It usually takes atleast 13 years of experience to attain this rock star level.

IIS Identity

There are many ways in which an IIS hosted website can access resources on the webserver and a remote server. This fact doesn't seem well documented. To change that, this is what I did. I created a website on server A which accessed a SQL server database on server B. The connection to SQL server used windows authentication. After setting this up, I tried accessing the website from my local desktop and noted down all the credentials it used to access resources.

During the experiment I played around with the IIS Authentication settings

I performed the experiment once each Connect As option in IIS 7.5

The first one as Application user (pass-through authentication)

Results:

IIS AUTHENTICATION	WEB APPLICATION AUTHENTICATION MODE	IMPERSONATION ENABLED?	CREDENTIALS USED TO ACCESS RESOURCES ON THE WEBSERVER	CREDENTIALS USED TO ACCESS RESOURCES ON SQL SERVER
ANONYMOUS	NONE	NO	APPLICATION POOL  IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS	NONE	YES	NT AUTHORITY \IUSR	NT AUTHORITY\ ANONYMOUS LOGON
ANONYMOUS	WINDOWS	YES	NT AUTHORITY \IUSR	NT AUTHORITY\ ANONYMOUS LOGON
ANONYMOUS	WINDOWS	NO	APPLICATION POOL  IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS AND WINDOWS	WINDOWS	NO	APPLICATION POOL IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS AND WINDOWS	WINDOWS	YES	NT AUTHORITY \IUSR	NT AUTHORITY\ ANONYMOUS LOGON
WINDOWS	WINDOWS	YES	LOGGED IN USER	NT AUTHORITY\ ANONYMOUS LOGON

The second one as specific user:

Results

IIS AUTHENTICATION	WEB APPLICATION AUTHENTICATION MODE	IMPERSONATION ENABLED?	CREDENTIALS USED TO ACCESS RESOURCES ON THE WEBSERVER	CREDENTIALS USED TO ACCESS RESOURCES ON SQL SERVER
ANONYMOUS	NONE	NO	APPLICATION POOL IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS	NONE	YES	IIS SPECIFIC USER IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS	WINDOWS	YES	IIS SPECIFIC USER IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS	WINDOWS	NO	APPLICATION POOL IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS AND WINDOWS	WINDOWS	NO	APPLICATION POOL IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
ANONYMOUS AND WINDOWS	WINDOWS	YES	IIS SPECIFIC USER IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN
WINDOWS	WINDOWS	YES	IIS SPECIFIC USER IDENTITY	INVALID LOGIN

If you are trying o access SQL server with windows authentication, the double hop issue prevents you from sending the user credentials to SQL server. One way to overcome that is to impersonate a specific user in your web.config.

<identity impersonate="true"   userName="contoso\Jane"   password="****" />

Button type submit vs button (HTML)

HTML	What it does?
<button type="button">Click me!</button>	Nothing
<button type="submit">Click me!</button>	Submits the page to the url set on form tag’s action attribute. Whether it does a get or a post is determined by the method attribute on the form tag.

 When to use <button type="button">?

When you want to execute a javascript function when a user clicks something that's when you use a <button type="button">.  You could also get away using a div tag or any other tag with an onclick event. But adding a button makes it more intuitive to the user. (Of course you could always style the div tag to look like a button)

Try it yourself

Copy paste this into a text file and name the file with a .html extension

<form action="http://www.google.com/" method="get">

<html>

<head>

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

    <title>Index</title>

</head>

<body>

    <div>

        <button onclick="DisplayHello()" type="button">

            Type Button</button>

        <br />

        <br />

        <button type="submit">

            Type Submit</button>

    </div>

</body>

</html>

<script type="text/javascript">

    function DisplayHello() {

        alert('Hello');

    }

</script>

</form>

How to find shelvesets in TFS 2010

View-->Other Windows-->Pending Changes

Click Unshelve

Type in owner of the shelve set and click find