MoW poked at me, so I guess I can’t let the crazy dutchman down:

How old were you when you started using computers?

10 or 11

What was your first machine?

An Amstrad CPC 464 with Green screen.

What was the first real script you wrote?

I vaguely remember being delighted at having a rocket (Chr$(239)) ascend the Amstrad’s screen when I figured out that STEP –1 was the key in getting a for/next loop to count backwards.

What languages have you used?

• Powershell, VBScript, JavaScript, Tcl, Perl, Batch/4NT
• Z80A, 8088/8086 (NECv20/v30) assembler
• Basic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET

I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to development. The list above is just what I can remember

What was your first professional Sysadmin Developer gig?

After helping out a friend’s dad put together a training course for Visual Basic 3.0, I then managed to blag a job coding Ireland’s first ever major e-commerce site using MS Merchant Server 1.0 (which predated ASP 1.0) for a leading ISP.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started in IT?

I might have started a little bit earlier even!

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new Sysadmins (or Devs), what would it be?

Just one thing? Learn Regular Expressions as it will pay you back ten-fold for whatever time you put into it.

What is the most fun you have had scripting?

There’s only one answer here: writing extensions for PowerShell.

This particular branch of the meme ends here as I don’t think I can tag anyone who hasn’t been tagged already.

Discovered while playing around with the new SPUserToken class and associated goodness that is the new impersonation APIs in WSS 3.0 / SPS 2007. from Reflector:

public static void SetApplicationCendentialKey(SecureString password)
{
    SPCredentialManager.CreateApplicationCendentialKey(password);
}

Ouch! how did that get past QA? there are only five methods on the class - looks like it was a late night for whomever wrote these bits. Unless I'm very much mistaken, shouldn't that read Credential?

microsoft.sharepoint.spsecurity.setapplicationcendentialkey

Some weeks ago, I started a new contract for a pretty monstrous MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 project. The thing is, this is my first pure Francophone environment since I first came to Canada four years ago. As the agency is part of the Canadian Government -- and located in Quebec -- most of the software installed is the French version. The keyboards are fr-ca, Windows is French, and yep, SharePoint is installed in French. It's proving quite difficult to find my way around as the translations are not really comparable. Sometimes they are not even close. It's worse though, because a lot of the idioms are France-French, not Quebec-French. As Quebecers (and confused French people) will tell you, it can be quite a different language sometimes.

Today, it got a lot worse.

I found myself having to define a calculated column - that is to say, a cell in a list that performs calculations based on other cells in the row. You've got the usual SUM, AVG etc functions available. Only except this time I don't. After several frustration attempts, I discovered that the scripting language itself has been translated into French. At first my reaction was incredulity - what is the point of that? They don't translate C# for other cultures, so why do that? Surely this kind of functionality is aimed at power users, like Excel users! they don't translate the Excel formulas in other locales of Office?!

Except they do.

Merde.

I'm happy to say that the powers that be in Microsoft have deemed me MVP worthy - I am now an official Microsoft Most Valued Professional in Windows Server Admin Frameworks for 2008, more specifically for my open source work and public support of Microsoft's most excellent object-oriented interactive shell, PowerShell during the last 18 months.

I've just returned from an extended computational absence, so hopefully I can get back to churning out code and the odd blog post.

Holy poop! This is huge!

I know Scott was leading the charge in a general source code cleanup which started some times ago, but it looks like they're nearly done! This is amazing - from within VS 2008 (or your favourite source code editor), you'll be able to seemlessly single-step debug from your own code in that of the .NET framework itself.

Bravo Microsoft! This is an incredibly symbolic step!

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Sometimes when I interview people for a technical position, I throw a couple of acronyms at them to see if they can expand them and even better, explain them. I've been challenged on the validity of this as a "filtering" technique to catch out the bullshitters; I'm convinced it's a good way of checking on someone's level of [claimed] knowledge. It can let you see how long they've been in the game -- and at what level they sat in the nerd stack -- if you throw something old at them like SNMP or UUCP. You can also see how current they are with trends with ones like SOA, LINQ or TDD.

I think the funniest answer I got was for SCSI: "System Can't See It."

I wish I could say I'm busy working on my SharePoint provider, but eh, no. I'm currently embroiled in the living hell that is house hunting: mortages, loans, notaries, agents and other such savagery. Why can't I just buy the friggin' thing on eBay? Oh yeah, just remembered why: you would pay $400,000; get hit by PayPal for $50,000; it would be the wrong colour; it would be late; the seller would insist on you paying via Western Union before shipping you a garden shed. etc etc.