Spoiler Alert: You can find the answer here.

We use TFS at work.

Because I believe git could be a great solution for a workflow challenge we’re having on one of the accounts I was just assigned to, I decided to experiment with git-tfs.

Here are the installation instructions from the gittfs github repository:

I understand that many C# developers came from Java, thus had to get VERY familiar with instructions like, “Add the directory that contains git-tfs.exe to your path,” but I feel compelled to mention it is a pretty big road blocker to someone who has never seen or had to do that .

Just a Windows Girl Livin’ in a GUI World

Ok, that was an ode to Jon Skeet’s “Glee” Pecha Kucha Codemash 2012 “Don’t Stop Believing” ending, but if you can relate to that header, I wanted to share a link I found interesting. A Brief History of UNIX is a great Unix 101 for Windows devs, with examples that do a good job of providing reference comparisons.

But back to the point of this post: I came from Mac (way back) to Windows. I am not familiar with UNIX environments. I launch installers to get programs to run from my machine. Yes, I’ve been spoiled, and it’s been quite lovely, but I’m now really trying to embrace this unfamiliar command-line environment territory, and that little assumption that I knew what it meant to add a directory to my path made me lose a day I could have been actually experimenting with git-tfs, instead of trying to understand how to just get git tfs commands not to say “not found.”

Am I trying to bag on the author of Git-tfs?
Not at all – it’s just where I hit a roadblock, so I’m using it as an example.

In their defense, should I have “just known” how to do that?
Maybe. I‘ve just never had to know for anything. That’s all. Now I’m aware.

Have I ever done it before?
No.

If I’ve never done it before, is it possible others might hit the same roadblock?
Maybe, that’s why I’m writing this post.

Did I get pissed when my Google search returned multiple results saying stuff like, “just add it to your path – that’s so trivial” without explanation of HOW do actually do it?
Yes. (Isn’t everything “trivial” once you know how to do it? Sheesh. Any reply that answers with how trivial the answer is, is a friggin’ @sshole response, btw, and an attitude I haven’t seen in the c# world – what’s up with that?)

Am I trying to make the author do crazy, explicit documentation? Not necessarily, although James Yu made some great points in his post on Designing Great API Docs.

In this case, a simple hyperlink to something like How to set the path in Windows 7 (great article with interesting info btw!) could have meant the difference between someone bringing Git to work to use it with their TFS environment & abandoning it altogether (because the one day their schedule allowed for them to actually try to use it was spent banging their head against a wall because of an installation instruction assumption).

The Curse of Knowledge

If you’re not familiar with The Curse of Knowledge, @tomjohnson did a great job summarizing it in a context developers can relate to when he posted, “The more you know an application, the better poised you are to write a good help file. But the more you know an application, the more familiar you are with it, and so you are less likely to write a good help file.”

To all of you wonderful people paving the way for the rest of us – yes you with the UNIX backgrounds that make command-line so intuitive to you, please, please go easy on us =)

Git was initially designed and developed for Linux. By bringing it to Windows, command-line-and-all, with it you are bootstrapping your own Curse of Knowledge.

I suspect I’m not the only one for whom Git is acting as the gateway to cross that command-line & deeper-OS-internals-understanding threshold. Please just take a moment to think about instructions that are atypical for those of us who are used to programs “just working,” post-install.

As fascinating as Hack Club Meetings always are, the different languages made the demos even more fascinating (after coding for a couple of hours, each pair demos their approach/solution). One demo was done in a SmallTalk IDE (because, as we learned, Smalltalk doesn’t lend itself to pasting code into Gist or Pastebin for the demos, like the other languages).  Although I’ve heard Smalltalk mentioned in reference to someone’s programming past, or citing parts of its historical influences, I’d never seen Smalltalk syntax or the Smalltalk IDE before. Super-interesting.

My first dip into Ruby

I have a “What’s this Ruby thing all about” itch I’m trying to scratch, but I clearly could not even think about pairing in it at this stage, so when I arrived, I asked Greg Vaughn if I could play 3rd wheel & watch him pair while I tried to wrap my head around it.

I decided to install Ruby. Here’s how that went down:

Thoughts in my head (be sure to read it with a big echo): “Didn’t I see a Tweet from @AlanStevens that he used Chocolately to install Ruby? I’ve been meaning to catch a session on Chocolatey.. isn’t it supposed to be like NuGet for your Windows OS? I wish I hadn’t missed that session at Codemash – I wonder if it was taped? I really need to listen to that Herding Code about Chocolatey. Hrm. I’ll look into that”

Me: “Has anyone used Chocolately? How do you install it?”

Another Hack Club attendee: “I think through NuGet”

My echoey thoughts: “Through Nuget? Do I have to create a project to install Chocolatey then? That’s how I access the non-command-line NuGet.. hrm, let me try that. Ooh getting that code smell I’m going down the wrong rabbit hole… back up, just do the installer. Ok, that was easy. It says it’s installed. Ok… ummmm”

Me: “So, now what? How do I run it or open it?”

Wow, that was a REALLY hard question to say out loud. This clueless person I’m projecting is NOT a persona in my comfort zone.

Greg Vaughn: “What IDE do you like?”

Me: “Visual Studio.”

Greg: “I think there’s an extension for Ruby”

So we floundered through that for a few minutes before someone recommended the 30-day trial of RubyMine by JetBrains. So I installed RubyMine, went to the HackClub dropbox & opened Greg’s “rover.rb” file. During this time, I asked Greg many questions to get my head around all of it.

Me: “Um ok, now what? I hit the little green “play” button in RubyMine & it said no errors.”

Greg: “Oh the only output you’ll see is from the tests. Go to command line & browse to the folder & type “rspec rover.rb.”

Me: “It says rspec is missing. Did you copy all the files up to the dropbox?”

Greg: “It’s a (Ruby) Gem. You have to install it. Go to command line & type, ‘gem install rspec’”

My echoey thoughts: “Wow, that was easy. Seriously, that’s all I had to type? Interesting. Hrm. this is taking a while though.”

Me: “It’s just sitting there.”

~4 different Ruby devs: “Yes, it just sits there & takes a while sometimes.”

My echoey thoughts: “Ok, it’s done. I’ll try the ‘rspec rover.rb’ command again.”.

Me: “Greg, it seems to have run this time, but I don’t’ see any results.”

Greg: “You have to add –f d for ‘full debug.’ That runs test and prints full test results, instead of just the ones that failed. Hold on. I’ll add an .rspec file with that in there.”

Me: “Ok, \? isn’t working. How would I figure out what switches to use on my own?”

Greg: “Ruby came from Linux. They use -–help. \? won’t work.’”

My echoey thought: “Seriously? WTH. Why am I doing this to myself? Hrm. I didn’t come from command line anyway. Maybe this is normal or maybe I’ll have LESS baggage as a result? Let’s see how this plays out.”

Greg: “There. I added the .rspec file so just run ‘rspec rover.rb’ again.”

So of course, I had to open the file to see what was in it because I was curious. It was just called .rspec. Lo & behold, it was literally just a text file that had “-f d” in it. (I then inquired on what the .idea folder was that had 7 files in it, including a .name file, an .iml file & 5 .xml files, and was told that was a RubyMine thing.)

The rest of the time was spent looking at the Ruby syntax for a while, before moving a row back to look at the CoffeeScript kata Matt Florence had done but I hadn’t run because when he tweeted this gist a few days prior, this is what happened to me:

My echoey thought: “What is a gist? Oh It’s on Github. I must need to pull it down with command line [barrier to entry - red flag]”

It turns out Gist is really just a good online clipboard to paste & share code, much like pastebin, but I didn’t know that before Tuesday’s Hack Club. I clicked on it anyway & was greeted with these comments at the top of the gist:

# node, jasmine, coffeescript, and rake installed/configured using 

# steps outlined at this website:

# http://brizzled.clapper.org/id/117/index.html

 

# gem install guard

# gem install guard-shell

# guard init

# then put the following in GuardFile

# guard :shell do

#   watch('.*') {`rake`}

# end

My echoey thought: “? ? ?”

I then listened to some Ruby devs discussing one of their real-world problems at work that had to do with the best way to parse an xml file or a dom in Ruby. We all have those questions. Yay.

Some Perception Changes:

The great responses on my previous post made me take a harder look at the many, many Macs in the room. I think all but Greg’s were actually running Windows. I had no idea.

Working through the initial, intimidating Ruby install with people around me who could help guide me through enabled me to feel like now I actually could run Matt’s sample with the comment instructions pasted above. Progress!

One More Surprising Finding

Someone I haven’t talked about is Greg’s Ruby pairing partner, Richard. (All I know about him is his first name because he’s not on Twitter =P) His story was quite interesting. The reason he got into programming Ruby was to become a better software tester. Wow! I’ve known testers who learned a bit of SQL for DB testing, but never any who learned a programming language for software testing.

That kind of blew my mind, to be honest. It made me really think about the people I love to work with the most. Then it made me think of people I’ve enjoyed working with the least, and remembered a Business Analyst I used to have to pull data for ALL THE TIME because she refused to learn anything other than Excel (“if they’re not paying for it, I’m not learning it” – seriously? Even if it can make your life better & you can stop making others write queries & create exports for you? Sigh.). She’s the reason I learned in ~2002 there was a 65,000 row limit in a single Excel Worksheet. No one should have to know there’s a 65,000 row limit in Excel.

Mad props to Richard for stretching so far beyond just learning standard QA tools to the extent that he’s actually attending Dallas Hack Club to practice Ruby & do code katas. How inspiring & very cool.   

Quick Note on Git & Command Line

Tonight (Thursday after the Tuesday Hack Club meeting), I was able to attend David O’Hara’s talk on Git at Dallas C# SIG, and I have to say, it was very compelling. He did an excellent job of thoroughly explaining Git fundamentals & concepts. Fortunately, Shawn Weisfeld was there taping it, so I’ll update this post with a link to David’s talk when it’s posted to UserGroup.TV.

Watching how fast David FLEW through that console was impressive, but his enthusiasm for Git was inspiring. Watching someone who’s as great at public speaking as David is always fun, but seeing great speakers talk about a topic they’re passionate about is a pure joy. He seriously LOVES Git.

I can honestly say I’m starting to feel less… I don’t know if intimidated is the right word… much less repulsed by command line after this week’s meetings than I ever have before.  When I got home, I then got into a discussion with my husband about how he felt the same way about command line years ago, until he had to learn Unix for his job & even his eyes lit up talking about how much he just loves it & feels at home in it.            

Exposure & Opportunities

Mike(@moran742)’s message in response to my Programming: Barriers to Entry post really resonated with me. He said, “So what do you need? An inquisitive mind, discipline, and the willingness to experiment.”

Different people learn in different ways. There’s nothing I love more than to be surrounded by people who know more than I know. The exposure to amazing, diverse & knowledgeable people who are so very helpful that the tech community makes available is incredible.

Learning that it’s ok not to know everything is powerful. Discovering the support in the Tech Community for those who try is motivating. Although I’m sure it would take me working in these technologies for my job to become prolific, I’m surprised at how fast I *am* warming up to & feeling comfortable with these areas that I’ve avoided for so long. In a few hours, I went from, “whoa no way” to “I could / I can.” Who knew Embracing the Uncomfortable could be so interesting, fun, AND rewarding? But for now, I will put my full, swollen brain to sleep. It needs to digest this stuff & prepare for more.

And that, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana shaped. –Sir Bedevere

Agenda:

• Shawn Weisfeld will demo a robot he built with Robotics Studio and a Kinect
• Harold Pulcher will present our Electronics 101 topic on Capacitors
• Hands-on coding time

Our meeting format will follow the following format:

6:00 – 6:30 Food and Drinks, Socialize
6:30 – 6:35 Meeting announcements
6:35 – 6:50 Electronics 101 – Capacitors (presented by Harold Pulcher)
6:50 – 7:10 Flash talks, show and tell, approximately 5 minutes per person
7:10 – 8:30 Agenda (presented by Shawn Weisfeld) and Hands-on coding time.
8:30 – 9:00 Show what you created tonight, door prize giveaways if available, pick presenters for next meeting.

Sponsors:

We will have FREE food, drinks and a meeting room, courtesy of Improving Enterprises.The food will arrive by about 6PM which offers plenty of time to socialize before the event start time at 6:30PM.

Be sure to thank our sponsor, Improving Enterprises, a premier, Dallas-based training and consulting firm and please keep them in mind for your company’s training and consulting needs.

Meeting Details

• Meeting: Robot with Kinect and Capacitors 101
  
• Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2012
• Time: 6:00PM
• Where: Improving Enterprises, Dallas (One Hanover Park, 16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100, Addison, TX 75001)
• Maps: Bing, Google
• Cost: It’s free thanks to our sponsors!

I worked through lunch so I could leave early enough to drive home from work in Dallas (23 miles) to pick her up at school in time to turn right around & head to Improving Enterprises in Addison (17 miles): in time for the 6pm http://dallasmicro.net user group meeting.

You think you know your kid, but sometimes they don’t react the way you hope (things parents want their kids to take interest in are sometimes boring to the kids). That was not the case last night.

The drive was worth it. The experience was priceless.

The interest & reaction in her eyes when Harold was explaining bread boards, resistors, capacitors, AC current, DC current, and batteries was just a pure joy. She was engaged. She asked questions, and it only got better as she wrapped her head around the concepts Harold was nice enough to explain. When he broke out the breadboard demos, she jumped right in (with his permission) & learned (first-hand) how one burns out an LED (and saw it turn red to warn it was about to be done). She thought that was very cool.

The 2nd half of the meeting consisted of Shawn showing this Kinect Robot he built. He had to buy the robot kit, use his laptop & add his Kinect to it – most expensive robot ever, but so very cool.

.

Shawn was then nice enough to let Katelyn drive it around Improving using the XBox controller. She would have stayed there all night if she could have.

Shawn then showed a few Kinect demo programs that showed distance, body part detection, etc. One demo app turned her head & hands into Incredible Hulk head & hands. She had fun with that.

The other one drew skeleton lines for the body. Luckily that was toward the end of the evening, since we actually had what I’m calling a “Kinect Casualty.” She was being so silly, watching that move with her actions that she totally bit it. I don’t know exactly what happened, other than I looked over & she was on the floor with a twisted ankle. If that’s not proof she was totally into it & had a ball, I don’t know what is.

As we were walking to the car, I asked her what she thought of her first User Group meeting:

I think it’s pretty natural to want your kids to share your interest. I’ve dreamt of the day I could share user group meetings with my kids since I started loving community events, but never imagined the first one would or could be this much fun (for both me AND for her).

I took her to this, just hoping she could keep up & that she wouldn’t be bored due to concepts going over her head, or too disruptive. I never imagined she would enjoy it so much that she’d ask if there was another meeting she could attend the next night, and would get sad when told it’s only held once a month, That was very cool.

HUGE thanks to Improving for sponsoring this, and to Harold Pulcher & User Group TV’s Shawn Weisfeld for their patience, for being such great teachers, and for making my 3rd grader’s first User Group meeting one she won’t soon forget.

Command Line Environments

I think of command-line as a necessary evil. Buy why? Breaking it down, I’m a programmer. I write code. In a sense, can’t you kind of think of what I do as a huge, compiled command-line environment (it’s a bit of a stretch, but bear with me for analogy sake)?

So why the aversion? I think I finally figured it out. Intellisense (or lack thereof).  Ctrl-spacebar is my friend. It’s what I’ve grown to love. Typing /?—>enter—>up-arrow—>space—>command-I-really-need is a bit of a PITA. It feels like a clunky waste of time.

Maybe my problem is that the majority of my command line experience has happened in the start—>run—>cmd window, which has caused me to think of it as a necessary evil? Is there a better environment? I don’t know. I haven’t had to know.

Maybe my problem is that because I started as a web dev, I never had to embrace creating a “quick & dirty” console app to try stuff out because I always had some test page with c# code-behind available as a test bed? Creating an API magically made me MUCH more tolerant of consuming APIs. Maybe the same would happen if I had grown up using console apps as my test beds?

Maybe my problem is that I just don’t think the command-line way? Caleb Jenkins swears by SmartGit. Maybe our brains just work like that (preferring nice ux experiences over command line experiences). Is it a trained thing? Is it something you just get used to & start thinking that way after practice? I don’t know.

What I DO know is that I’m now realizing my aversion has affected my enthusiasm to expand my horizons in certain areas. I’ve never tried Git. I’ve never pulled from GitHub. This is something I’d be perfectly fine with (we don’t use anything command-line at work), if it weren’t for 2 things: 1. the unabashed enthusiasm for Git in the programmer community (especially around open source), and 2. my belief that learning different approaches / languages / implementations / tools expands comprehension.

Ruby

Macs. That’s what I relate to Ruby. This is a HUGE barrier to entry for me because I don’t have a Mac, and I don’t see myself getting a Mac.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against them. Macs are awesome. I came from a Mac. I bought a PowerMac when I started my graphics career in Photoshop WAY back in the day, but holy COW they’re expensive, and I have a family. I don’t see Mac ownership in my future, and my impression is that Ruby is written on a Mac.

“But surely you’ve HEARD that Ruby CAN run on Windows?”

Sure, I’ve heard that. But have you ever been around Ruby communities? I’ve seen a LOT of Ruby devs at Dallas Hack Club & CodeMash. Let me put that differently. I was one of the only devs in the room on a PC more than once. Macs. Everywhere. Barrier to entry in my mind.

Vim

From vim.org: “Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing.”

I LOVE what Visual Studio does for me to make me more efficient & resourceful without having to rtfm. It seems like 200 steps backward & zero steps forward to me, in terms of productivity potential.

Why in the world would I want to write code in notepad? That is all.

What is this ”Dallas Hack Club” you speak of?

Improving Enterprises sponsors a cool, not-your-run-of-the-mill user group meeting called Dallas Hack Club. In a nutshell, I’d say 12 to 20 programmers, on average, show up once a month to pair on a kata. It doesn’t matter what language you pair in as long as you & your partner are using the same language. I’ve paired in c# & JavaScript. Many (most) pair on their Macs in Ruby.

In my experience, it’s the scariest room EVER to walk in to for the first time (especially when you’re not even familiar with testing because that’s not something supported by your place of employment) but also the most rewarding. Not only have I found it to be delightfully mind-expanding, but the guys who run it (Matt Florence & Amir Rajan, creators of NSpec) are unbelievably helpful, open-minded & brilliant. Here’s a good example of their attitudes (they’re both this awesome):

Tweets that Caused this Post

I’ll be honest. I ignored Amir’s first Tweet, thinking Amir mistakenly directed it at me, as I’m not a Ruby dev.

After the 2nd one, I sent him this private DM (because God forbid I admit my ignorance like that in public haha):

Ruby for windows will work just fine? I’ve never heard anyone say that. Aww crap. I’m comfortable with not knowing all technologies. I have enough to learn around my c#-centric web stack bubble. Sure I want to learn more. I live to learn more, but I have PLENTY to learn without taking an interest in this perceived mac-environment language. 

“Embrace the Uncomfortable”

#3 from the “12 Resolutions for Programmers” that was going around Twitter this holiday season has really stuck with me. “Embrace the Uncomfortable.” I really, really like that one. There are so many barriers to entry in programming, that insecurities magnify to the nth degree. Every time I’ve thought of that line of advice during a crossroads, it has helped me to feel more empowered to make the harder decision, almost as if it’s a mission statement that gives me purpose for not retreating into competence.

Conclusion

I don’t really have a point (hence the weak section header), other than to expose some of my own perceptions & hope to be proven wrong =). I really enjoy stretching my mind around different paradigms. It helps my troubleshooting / problem solving skills & expands my tool belt.

Although I can definitively say I will not be choosing Ruby (or probably even coffeescript) to pair in at THIS Tuesday’s meeting, I can assure you I will be paying much more attention to, and asking more questions around “Why Ruby?”

And who knows, maybe one of my future posts will be on, “Why I chose Ruby to solve this business problem.” …or if nothing else, we might convince someone (Amir?) to submit a precompiler talk next year for Codemash entitled “A Ruby primer for C# Devs: Yes, you CAN do it on Windows.”

I was asked to implement caching on a project today. At my work, it has historically been our lead architect who has implemented caching across projects, so I was happy to get a new task.

So I cracked open his code (like ya do) & copied out something similar to this;

public List<City> GetActiveCities() {

string cacheKey = “GetCities”;
List<City> retVal = CacheManager.Get(cacheKey) as List<City>;
if (retVal == null) {
lock (__cacheLockGetActiveCities) {
retVal = CacheManager.Get(cacheKey) as List<City>;
if (retVal == null) {
retVal = _dbServices.GetActiveCities();
CacheManager.Insert(cacheKey, retVal, _cacheLengthInSeconds);
}
}
}
return retVal;
}

After the 3rd time I copied/pasted/modified this, I wanted to pull it out and leave less room for careless copy/paste mistakes.

This turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but I got it working with Generics and a Func param like this:

private T HandleItemCacheRetrieval<T>(string cacheKey, object cacheLock, Func<T> nonCachedMethod) where T : new() {
T retVal = default(T);
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey);
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex);
}
if (retVal == null) {
lock (cacheLock) {
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey); //make sure it’s still null (i.e. it didn’t get written while lock was being applied)
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex1) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex1);
}
retVal = nonCachedMethod.Invoke();
if (retVal != null) {
CacheManager.Insert(cacheKey, retVal, _cacheLengthInSeconds);
}
}
}
return retVal;
}

Which enabled the first method (and all methods that returned void) to call it this easily:
public List<City> GetActiveCities() {
return HandleItemCacheRetrieval<List<City>>(“GetActiveCities”, _cacheLockGetActiveCities, _dbServices.GetActiveCities);

But I’m not just returning collections from parameterless methods. So I tried to extend it to something like this with no success:

private T HandleItemCacheRetrieval<T>(string cacheKey, object cacheLock, Func<T> nonCachedMethod, params object[] args) where T : new() {
T retVal = default(T);
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey);
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex);
}
if (retVal == null) {
lock (cacheLock) {
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey); //make sure it’s still null (i.e. it didn’t get written while lock was being applied)
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex1) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex1);
}
if (args.Length < 1) {
retVal = nonCachedMethod.Invoke();
}
else {
retVal = (T)nonCachedMethod.DynamicInvoke(args);
}
if (retVal != null) {
CacheManager.Insert(cacheKey, retVal, _cacheLengthInSeconds);
}
}
}
return retVal;
}

That still worked for parametherless Funcs but not for Metods with params.

I ended up writing these two methods for my workaround, but still want to know if I can get them all into the same method (or if I should even try)

private T HandleItemCacheRetrieval<T>(string cacheKey, object cacheLock, Func<int, T> nonCachedMethod, int arg) where T : new() {
T retVal = default(T);
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey);
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex);
}
if (retVal == null) {
lock (cacheLock) {
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey); //make sure it’s still null (i.e. it didn’t get written while lock was being applied)
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex1) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex1);
}
retVal = nonCachedMethod.Invoke(arg);

if (retVal != null) {
CacheManager.Insert(cacheKey, retVal, _cacheLengthInSeconds);
}
}
}
return retVal;
}

private T HandleItemCacheRetrieval<T>(string cacheKey, object cacheLock, Func<string, T> nonCachedMethod, string arg) where T : new() {
T retVal = default(T);
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey);
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex);
}
if (retVal == null) {
lock (cacheLock) {
try {
retVal = (T)CacheManager.Get(cacheKey); //make sure it’s still null (i.e. it didn’t get written while lock was being applied)
}
catch (InvalidCastException ex1) //it didn’t parse properly
{
LoggerManager.Error(ex1);
}
retVal = nonCachedMethod.Invoke(arg);

if (retVal != null) {
CacheManager.Insert(cacheKey, retVal, _cacheLengthInSeconds);
}
}
}
return retVal;
}

UPDATE:

BIG Thanks to Hugo Dahl & Peter Ritchie, who helped me implement these using a single method (with and/or without params, no longer matters) using Lambdas.

Check it out. This is SLICK:

Although I never understood worshipping “celebrities” (like the Hollywood kind), meeting someone in person whose work, efforts or brilliance have made a difference in my life or to my path is an exciting honor that I admittedly don’t try to contain my enthusiasm for the first time I meet them.

The day after I got home from CodeMash 2012 (most amazing conference ever), a blog post by Evan Cummings and its ensuing Twitter thread made me ask my family for a Pomodoro (although it’s taking WAY more than just one) to blog my 2 cents:

My History (for context, feel free to skip)

Many (especially those who went to school for it) cannot relate to having close to no one to “talk code” with. I am quite fortunate that my husband is technical, but he’s not a programmer, so I can’t get deep into the nuts & bolts on the best or most efficient way to solve [my latest challenge] in c# (or sql or JavaScript or… you get the point).

My favorite thing to do, and something I crave in my everyday life, is to just listen to programmers talk about code and about how they used a technology to solve a business problem (one of the reasons I’ve been so addicted to Herding Code since Alan Stevens made me aware of it at HTML5Austin this year – I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard of it before then, but I am officially addicted to and LOVE that podcast!)

I’ve been at my job since October of 2000, and have only ever programmed there. I did not go to school for it. I did not know where, other than work, to find others “like me.” Even at work, I have not found very many who love it so much they take it home with them (and some who used to have since accepted “promotions” to managerial positions that forced them to stop coding). I became very grateful for audio ways to enhance my learning, as being a mother of 2 has not left me much time for reading or for home programing projects.

30- to 45-minute podcasts I can listen to on my jogs & during my commute are invaluable to me, and also awe-inspiring. Invaluable because they enable me to multitask & sneak some learning into already “spoken-for” time. Awe-inspiring because it’s hard to imagine having the ability to talk, so eloquently & confidently, about tech. When you don’t have the opportunity to actually talk to others devs & make sure you’re not embarrassing yourself by saying, “instantiate,” instead of, “new up,” for example, it’s quite difficult to have the confidence to go to something like CodeMash where amazing brilliance is everywhere.

Discovering there is a tech community out there has started an amazing & wonderful journey.

CodeMash 2010 was my first (It’s hard to believe that was only two years ago). Walking in the door was terrifying. Fear of knowing less than everyone there was terrifying. Being surrounded by so much passion for problem solving was inspiring & gave me hope.

“What needs to happen to get you over this?”

Keith Elder asked me this question a few times during the week of //build/. Keith took me under this wing, and I couldn’t be more grateful. In doing that, he introduced me to the amazing minds you see in my //build/ photo album, and the coolest thing happened. After that initial, “Wow! I can’t believe I’m meeting you in person! You’ve done so much for me through your [podcast, work on x product, book, Twitter stream, etc.] and I am so very grateful for you,” I actually was able to talk to them “like normal people.” To those who might think that’s a silly reaction, think of someone who DOES awe you & imagine being able to hang out with them, be treated as an equal & talk [their specialty] without being made to feel amateur, or judged, or intimidated, or anything less than a peer.

I saw a tweet earlier that did a good job of capturing how welcoming everyone was and confirmed that feeling was shared:

That speaks volumes about how great our community is.

Heck, Bill Wagner even thought I was a peer on this level (as much as I look forward to the day when I actually might be able to ask why he didn’t make Enumerator<T> a struct, I must swallow my ego and respectfully clarify that I have a lot to learn before a day like that comes). My point is, noone made me feel anything but an equal, and that’s pretty incredible.

What has been unbelievably eye-opening for me has been the realization that just because one person knows more than someone else, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any better or worse (or smarter or dumber). It often means you’ve had a project that caused you to solve a problem using that language or technology or implementation or product. I have a bad habit of assuming that if I know something EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET must know it, and conversations like some I had at CodeMash this year have inspired me to feel more comfortable sharing my enthusiasm for the technologies I’ve worked with, and to think of my own knowledge as something I could offer, instead of fearing I will come across as a know-it-all or a clueless imposter.

I saw many (many, many) of the people I met at //build/ at CodeMash 2012 (my photos) last week. I have never felt more at home or at ease around so many people in my entire life.

“What do you mean, friend? Have you met them?”

Back in 2000, my husband was a huge gamer. He was in IRC all the time, and managed a few CounterStrike teams over the years. His male team went by the name, “TAU” (Texas Area Untouchables) & his female team called themselves the TAU Angels.

This was a time before people really connected online, and I distinctly remember walking into the office & seeing how happy my husband was, and how much fun he was having. Then he said something about how much he loved having such great friends. My reaction of, “what do you mean, your friends, have you ever met ANY of them?!?!” was pretty extreme, as I couldn’t understand the concept of thinking of someone as your friend whom you have never met.

Joining MySpace in ~2005, then Facebook in 2007 still didn’t bridge the gap for me.

It wasn’t until Twitter came along (I joined in late 2008 but didn’t fully embrace it for at least a year thereafter) that I finally understood that feeling of pure joy & symbiotic camaraderie from people I had not actually met in person.

See, although I very happily & proudly call myself a coder / programmer / (software engineer, according to my work) / nerd / geek / etc, what I’ve realized lately is that it stemmed from my love of solving problems. Sure, you can call it “creating solutions” or challenges, whatever – that’s all just nomenclature, right? My point is, I LOVE finding other ways to think about how challenges can be addressed, and I LOVE sharing those, “Oooh, I never thought about using it for THAT before, now I want to go code” moments.

Thanks to the wonderful world of Twitter, I follow (currently 1146) people JUST LIKE ME. People I follow Tweet things like (my recent favorite), “You just can’t explain to non-programmers just how good it feels to get a *Different* Error” and it MAKES MY DAY. I can totally relate to that. Or I can tweet something as esoteric as, “Boo.”The type parameter ‘T’ cannot be used with the ‘as’ operator because it does not have a class type constraint nor a ‘class’ constraint”” and get 30+ replies that spawn a blog post (the one that will be following this one, in fact), from the best & the brightest in our industry. I see people tweeting questions every day to Julie Lerman, Entity Framework Expert & Book Author, and she responds to every single one of them. We live in amazing times.

“Cured?”

Although I’m flattered beyond words that Keith Elder declared me, “cured,” as to me that says I didn’t act “fanboy” at CodeMash (although clearly he didn’t see my initial brush meeting Jon Skeet & Bill Wagner haha), I want to make it clear that I was no less full of awe. (Similarly, if the day comes when I actually meet The Gu & Keith witnesses it, he will most certainly revoke my “cured” diagnosis =)

My comfort level with the influencers I’m so inspired by can be 100% attributed to how down-to-earth, friendly, helpful & passionate THEY are.

So to sum up, I feel the same way you do, Evan, and if we’re lucky, we’ll capture it & cherish it. I hope I can look back on my blog & remember how I’m feeling right now. I hope I always appreciate it & that I never lose (or lose sight of) my appreciation for this unprecedented accessibility we have to the greatest minds of our times.

Because a picture says a thousand words, I’ve posted my pictures from //build/ to an album on my SkyDrive

As you can see from the pictures, I met amazing people from the tech community: Thought leaders; People I knew from Twitter; Podcasters; Speakers… so many passionate people who love what they do.

For me, //build/ was truly an experience & opportunity of a lifetime, and words cannot express how grateful I am that I was able to attend. I sincerely hope I never lose this feeling of awe & appreciation for events like this.

The rest of this entry is much less technically oriented & much more personal & (self-)exposing, so please feel free to just look at the photo album & quit reading here if soul-searching doesn’t interest you =)

Here go some more admissions / learnings / observations. Let me reiterate: If weaknesses make you lose respect for someone, please tune out now. There are plenty of blogs that are 100% professional, with only “safe” personality embellishments out there. For now, this isn’t necessarily going to be one of them.

Personal Learnings from my Experience at //build/

The fact that this blog is my own is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because speaking only for myself enables me to be (too) candid about my journey.

It’s a curse because I am WAY too honest & public about how much growing up I have to to. I am very much a, “what you see is what you get” kind of person. As someone who’s been happily employed at the same place since October of 2000, not speaking for my employer & not seeking employment enables me to say things I might be advised not to, if I were trying to “brand” myself (isn’t that what the kids are calling it these days?).

Being a Working Mom (with a lot to learn) is HARD

Spontaneity FTL

Because I had asked for the time off for //build/ on such short notice, I booked the latest Monday night flight from DFW to SNA (6PM) so I could work that Monday (& only take 4 days off).

After I had booked my travel plans, a pre-conference workshop was scheduled for Monday, Sept. 12, led by Billy Hollis, whose Dot Net Rocks video was what sparked my interest in WPF.

Afraid the precon would sell out, I bought a ticket, hoping I might be able to catch a flight the night before.

Although I had mentioned the possibility of trying to fly out the night before to my husband, I hadn’t set that expectation well enough. I wasn’t going to attempt it if I wasn’t 100% sure I had done everything in my power to get my work project complete & ready for launch before I left.

After working all day Sunday, then packing as fast as I could, I ran downstairs with my suitcase & told my husband that I was ready.

To say my family was not happy about me trying to fly out a day early is an understatement.

My kids cried the entire way as my husband unhappily drove me to the airport.

I got out of the car, walked toward the check-in, and chickened out. I got scared of flying on 9-11 and afraid I wouldn’t have a car or a hotel room, but more importantly, I couldn’t leave my family so upset.

My 8yo broke out in hives that night. They lasted through Thursday, btw, causing her to miss school & causing daddy to stay home with her & take her to the doctor.

Oh yes, the joys of mommy guilt.

(My family handled my departure the next day much better, as they had been prepared for that).

Your Reputation Precedes You

At the //Build/ conference, I met many, many, many amazing people. Since the conference was in Anaheim, it seems appropriate to compare my reaction to meeting them to the look in a child’s eyes when experiencing Disneyland for the first time.

There was one person at the conference whom I was terrified to meet. This person was Mary Jo Foley.

I feel quite silly for that now, but nevertheless, I’d like to explain where my fear came from.

For a while before PDC 2010, I had been trying to learn XAML-based technologies (WPF & Silverlight) on my own time (nights & weekends), and attended multiple user groups for it (North Texas Silverlight, Dallas XAML, and a smaller group for Expression Blend).

My perception of the “Silverlight Is Dead” firestorm that happened during PDC10, resulting in Bob Muglia no longer working for Microsoft after he had been there for 23 years, is that it was a result of the power of Mary Jo Foley’s written word.

The negative effects I personally saw & experienced from that article were astronomical.

The number of attendees at the XAML-based user group meetings dropped tremendously. The frequency our Blend group met lessened. That firestorm made everyone who had invested in learning XAML insecure & afraid to continue on that path, including me.

An even bigger negative effect that firestorm caused was the damage it did in the minds of the upper-level executives I work with. The “Silverlight is dead” message pretty much cemented Flash in their hearts & minds. Trying to convince them that anything XAML-based, now, frustratingly goes something like this:
“XAML? You mean like Silverlight? Silverlight is DEAD.”
“But I am writing a desktop app, not a web app.”
“Silverlight is dead.”

Even the week of //build/ in her ”Microsoft to developers: Metro is your future” summary, she wrote, “Silverlight and .Net are not dead (yet).”

…Yet? Silverlight aside, why would she want to allude that .NET is dead?

I don’t understand why someone who is such a great journalist, seems to put a negative spin on Microsoft futures. Negativity scares me, so the thought of meeting her scared me.

My point is, I don’t know her. I know OF her, but because of the effect (losing jobs, losing interest, losing HOPE) that single article had on so many developers I knew personally, I realized I had vilified her in my mind as a result.

I briefly met her on the Thursday of //build/. She was very kind, and many who know her verified that she’s an incredibly nice person.

I apologize for the persona I built up in my head. Admittedly, it was ridiculous, but that is where it came from.

I’ve listened to quite a few podcasts with her speaking on them since meeting her, and she is unbelievably knowledgeable, well-spoken, confident, and bold. The saddest part of all this, to me, is that I hadn’t heard of her before that firestorm.

Kindred Spirits & Questioning My Social Crutch

I’ve always felt socially-challenged. I just don’t click with many people, day-to-day. I often find myself thinking how much better my time could be spent if I were doing something productive instead of talking about the weather or making small talk (no developer pun intended).

During //build/, I felt shockingly comfortable with people I had never met before, even able to have incredibly in-depth conversations right off the bat, like I’d known them for years. The more developers I meet, the more I’m excited to meet. Somehow, even discussing the weather with fellow devs is interesting (probably because it’s usually referencing how to code a weather app, but that’s beside the point). The only way I can describe it is that it felt like I was completely surrounded by this world I’ve only dreamt of, a world of kindred spirits.

During my last night there, I saw SmashMouth play at a crazy, fantastic party at the House of Blues, put on by DevExpress. When I arrived, I got a margarita & took a seat in the balcony. In my mind, I drank one margarita. What I realized when I got up to leave a few hours later was, that margarita had magically become bottomless (great & stealth service at the House of Blues).

Interestingly, that night became my only regret from the conference because I missed out on so many great conversations I could have had if I hadn’t gone to my hotel room to drink Gatorade before the next day of sessions.  For the first time ever, I truly wondered why I drank (especially when I felt so comfortable).

But here’s the interesting realization I had.

The weekend after I got back, I went to what any normal person would call the best night ever. My husband & I were picked up in a limo for a friend’s 40th birthday. We then went to dinner & dancing & didn’t have to worry about having a designated driver.

During dinner, everyone was talking about material things like what if means if you live on the East side of a local road or the West side. I just sat there feeling out of place & like an outsider, longing for someone to talk tech to, so I started asking people what they do for a living. Most groaned and said what they did briefly but didn’t want to talk about work. Then someone told me he used to work at Texas Instruments, up the street from my work, as an Oracle dev. My eyes lit up. It was like a drink of ice water in this oasis of profession non-passion. I had someone to talk to! But alas, he quickly cut me off with, “oh, I quit to become a house husband 6 years ago.” To be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. I merely want to share my reaction: “Bartender!”

Holy cow. Do I drink so I find non-technical conversations more interesting?

Wow, So Much Anger for… The Disney Channel?

During the DevExpress party mentioned above, I was approached by someone who told me he read my blog & felt the same way about his daughters watching the Disney Channel. I completely went off about it. I didn’t realize I had so much frustration with so few good, strong female role models, and with the level of Diva, flirting, teasing & sassy attitude those shows teach our kids, and I don’t think I shut up about it for the next 20 minutes. Oh, then I learned that the person I was talking to didn’t drink, which meant I went off in a non-sober rant to someone who had all his wits about him. Oh joy.

The funny thing is, all I thought about until I got home from my flight the next day (other than how much I wish I hadn’t wasted that night’s opportunity for more of the awesome developer discussions) was wondering where that outburst came from.

Then I got home. The TV was on the Disney channel when I turned it on, and this was literally the first thing I saw upon my return (I paused it, got my flip, and taped it, hoping that it could help the person I was talking to the night before possibly understand what about it made me so crazy. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

Seeing this reinforced, to me, what made me react like I did (but I still feel quite apologetic for the poor soul who got an earful). I’ve also changed TV-watching rules at the house (yes I am now that mom that says TV can rot your brain – I hated when my mom said that!).

Why Put Myself Out There Like This?

So yes, I’ve said a few things I would probably be advised not to say, but I’m human. I try my best to learn from things and move on (I now have a strict “no tequila at conferences” policy, as a matter of fact – ha).

The reason I risk feeling this vulnerable with what I share stems from the response I got from my original blog post. It was surprisingly rewarding on many levels.

Not only have I had great conversations with many people about how it resonated with them, but it also exposed a shocking amount of supporters who have offered mentorship, words of encouragement and friendship.

But more than that, writing about my fears & weaknesses freed me to explore what had been replaying over & over in my head and actually let those repeat thoughts go. It has also helped me take a better look at what my fears are and why, and helped me figure out how to address them.

For example, public speaking is something I was able to avoid for 10 years. Preparing for a talk is hard & time-consuming. The fear of equipment failure is terrifying. The thought of being judged is paralyzing. Within THREE months of that post, I faced my biggest fear & did a presentation of NuGet at work. Think about that. I’d say that made this forum a pretty powerful catalyst for me to make myself accountable, so let’s keep going, shall we?

If I say something that makes me too vulnerable, I can always “go dark,” no?

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

In part 2, I’ll stick to the first day of the conference. It was so eventful I’m breaking it into its own blog post to try to keep the length of each one of these reasonable, so here it goes:

//build/ Day 1

The keynote started at 9am Tuesday, after a very nice breakfast was served, starting at 7am.

Walking to the keynote, I noticed men who reminded me of Ghostbusters circling the halls. Coolest backpacks ever. They were refilling our coffee from those things!

COFFEE BACKPACKS!
“Who ya gonna call?”

I can’t imagine what goes into planning something like this conference. I’ve never seen anything this well-orchestrated, and I certainly have never been around this many developers.

Breathtaking stage setup!
I snapped this as I walked into the day1 keynote a bit early.
I took a seat up front, toward the right.

As I walked toward the front, I recognized Kate Gregory (@gregcons), sitting in the audience, and introduced myself. I learned her name after watching her Pluralsight courses on Extending Visual Studio. She is amazing, confident, unbelievably well-spoken, a great teacher, and a great role model.

(Unfortunately blurry) picture I took, trying to show how big the arena was, and how many people were there.

This entry is verbose enough without my recap of sessions you can watch on Channel 9, but I do want to note that I got to see all of these AMAZING people speak IRL during the first Keynote from the 2nd row:

• Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division
• Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President, Windows
• Antoine Leblond, Corporate Vice President, Windows Web Services
• Mike Angiulo, Corporate Vice President, Windows Planning, Hardware & PC Ecosystem
• Chris Jones, Senior Vice President, Windows Live

It was during this morning keynote that the announcement was made that every attendee of the conference would be receiving a Windows 8 Tablet. Right after that announcement, I got a text from my husband that said, “I just saw you!” Lo & behold, he was right. There I am, at around 1:28:23 in the black shirt (probably tweeting this): 2nd row, third seat  Proof hehe. But even better, that spot in the video from about 1:28:20 through 1:28:35 shows how many people were in that keynote. Thousands!

After the morning sessions, we broke for lunch. On my way to the Dining Hall, I took this picture to illustrate a huge benefit of being a nerd girl:

Line to men’s restroom

Line to women’s restroom

The number of people who had to be fed & back in the arena in 1.5 hours was crazy. Here’s a picture I took in “line” to eat.

Lunch Rush in Dining Hall during day 1, 11:30-1pm break

They had buffet tables around the entire circumference of the room. It was pretty amazing to see how streamlined it was. After texting my DE from Dallas, Chris Koenig, asking if he could meet me (didn’t want to be the kid sitting alone in the school cafeteria), I ate lunch with him as he pointed out the big brains in the room he recognized (he tried to introduce me to a few but I was feeling very shy that day). It’s so so so so SO great to see / meet up with friends at events where you know so few.

After lunch, Big Picture sessions continued until 5:30, when the Welcome Reception started. Afternoon speakers included:

• Chris Jones, Senior Vice President, Windows Live
• Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience team
• Aleš Holeček, Windows Team Engineer
• John Sheehan, Microsoft Architect
• Kieran Mockford, Principal Architect VS Pro (whom I actually met, in person, at Thursday night’s “Ask the Experts”)
• Chris Sells, Program Manager in the Developer Division

I got to the Welcome Reception late because I stood in line for the Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC (Windows 8 Developer Slate), given out to all “green badge” (non-employee & non-speaker) attendees.

The line for the Slate

They announced slates would be given out that day, starting at 5:30pm. The last session ended about 15 minutes early.

I did not leave early to stand in line for the slate. Heck, I was unsure if I even qualified for one since I had won my (what turned out to be even more golden) ticket.

By the time I found the end of the line for the slate, it was down the halls, out the door & wrapping around the building. The line was not moving at all… until (close to) 5:30, and thus it began.

As the line moved through the hall, I hopped from plug to plug trying to charge my cell phone, Although it slowed from the video above once we got closer to the distribution hall, it consistently moved too fast for me to charge my phone at any hall plug for more than a few minutes. Wow!

After less than an hour, it was my turn in line (yes! I actually got one!)

There are some really great facts (like a distribution rate of 1 per second) on this blog post, and this Channel 9 video is very interesting, as Mike Angiulo unboxes & talks about the slates being hand-imaged by employees to ensure the latest build (no pun intended).

Day 1 Welcome Reception

Microsoft knows what makes tech folks happy. The day 1 reception was awesome.

Reception activities included retro, arcade-style video games (Frogger, Galaga, Pacman, etc), Foosball, Pinball machines, Air hockey, open bars, dessert tables, and the most entertaining area of all, the “wall o’Kinect,” surrounded by beanbags near power plugs.

Do you know what that means? That means those of us walking around alone could stealthily slink down into a beanbag & play with our slates while watching people (brave enough to) Kinect in public. Words can’t capture how great this was, so here’s a video: 

I talked with Brandon Satrom & Clark Sell again at the reception for a while & got to show them the slate (employee attendees didn’t get them). I was also able to meet up with @RobinDotNet through the power of Twitter at Tuesday’s reception. Interesting but useless fact: she had trouble finding me because she didn’t know to look for a girl. Meeting her was very cool. I’ve followed her on Twitter for a long time.

I walked around the booths & saw Rachel Appel near the DevExpress booth. She made me feel so very welcome (the fact that she even remembered me was unbelievable); then she introduced me to @RachelReese of #TheRachii.

I am not a good enough wordsmith to put into words how welcoming Rachel Reese was to me. This was the first time we had ever met. I can honestly say there have been times I haven’t felt that welcomed by my own mother. It was really great, and the more I talked with her through the rest of the week, the more I adored her even more. 2 seconds with #TheRachii and you will not question why they’re so beloved.

I also visited with Seth Juarez from Devexpress briefly while picking up my ticket for their Thursday night Dev Express party. I met Seth when he spoke at Dallas Day O .NET in March. He did a talk on Machine Learning in the Expert Track room, and I have never seen so many hard-core developers walk out of a room, nodding, admitting they weren’t smart enough for that content (before or since) but I did that day. The noteworthy part of that experience was Seth’s genuine desire for feedback, and his humble demeanor. If you haven’t heard Seth’s interview on This Developer’s Life, it’s fascinating. Super-smart, motivated, passionate people without a chip on their shoulder are my favorite, and I’ve gotten to meet more at community events than I actually thought existed.

Speaking of which, toward the end of the reception, I ran into Glenn Block & had the privilege of talking to him for about 45 minutes (and I got to be the cool kid & show him my slate too hehe).

So it’s no secret that Glenn is brilliant, but the thing that surprised me the most was how nice he was. It didn’t come across as just a courteous, polite nice, though. It was an “I feel like I’ve known this guy my whole life” best-friend-from-high-school or favorite-brother-you-don’t-fight-with comfortable-nice. How could you be that smart, work for Microsoft, and not have a megalomaniac ego… or not react to the general public-of-strong-Microsoft-opinions by becoming defensive (like what happened to this guy)? How can you make someone who just met you feel so comfortable they debate the “pure” definition of REST vs the “Kleenex is another name for tissue” perception of REST? Hell I was proud I knew the term, “idempotent,” and Glenn challenged me with, “yes, but what’s the difference between idempotent and safe?” Only at an event like this can you be told by the Program Manager for WCF, “I’ll take your idempotent & raise you a safe,” and NOT be made to feel like a complete ignoramus (though in retrospect I’m sure I should have haha).

Random RANDOM tangent alert (for analogy sake): I used to have a pitt bull named Brown Sugar. She was the sweetest dog I’ve ever met, and fascinating to watch. In the company of other dogs, they always barked & yapped to try to prove who was alpha. Sugar would just stand there, as if to say, “whassup?” She’d play if the other dog could, but she wouldn’t bark back. She wouldn’t try to attack. She just stood there, happy, chilling out, confident, dignified. Glenn is pitt-bull-awesome =)

After talking to Glenn, I headed back to my hotel & got to work. I had pictures & videos to download from my phone, my digital camera & my flip. I had to charge my cell phone & my laptop. I had to charge (and play with!) my new slate. I wish I had taken a picture of what I woke up to the next morning. It looked like a robot threw up in my hotel room, and it was awesome =D

If you’ve ever had the displeasure of installing a fake SSL cert into localhost on your development box, you know why this property made me run from Cassini to IIS Express without looking back:

Quick IIS Express 101:

After you’ve installed VS2010 SP1 & IIS Express, right-click your project & select “Use IIS Express”

Doing that will assign & configure a port to your site. By default, SSL will not be enabled.

For example, when I did that with this test app, it assigned the non-SSL port to be 20568 (http://localhost:20568/).

If I want to change that value, I right-click on the project, select “properties,” and go to the web tab.

From this screen, I can easily change the non-SSL port:

Adding SSL to IIS Express localhost site

With the properties WINDOW open (“View—>Properties Window” which is different than right-clicking on the project & selecting “properties”), click on the project in Solution Explorer.

By default, you will see “SSL Enabled” is set to False.

When you set it to true, the SSL Url will auto-populate to the next auto-incremented port number on your local environment (based on how many SSL projects you’ve developed locally), starting with 44300.

Why we need to change the SSL port

My web search results for how to change the SSL port in IIS Express have returned instructions that say it’s only possible using WebMatrix.

We have configuration values that must match in dev environments so we don’t have to change the “facebook dev app” ssl url for every developer (concurrently) working on a facebook app in our shop.

How to change the SSL port

We use Visual Studio, so asking devs to install WebMatrix just to change the SSL port is not really feasible (convincing them to install SP1 & IIS Express has been hard enough).

After you run your app, you’ll see IIS Express in your system tray

1. Right-click on that system tray icon and select “Show All Applications”

2. Click on the Site Name of the ssl site you want to change (in this example, it would be IISExpressExample.Web with the ssl url)

3. Click on the link referenced in Config so it opens applicationhost.config for the site you want to change the SSL for.

4. Ctrl + F the ssl port number (in this example, I searched for 44308)

5. Change the binding protocol port number to match your coworker’s

In this example, I changed

    <binding protocol=”https” bindingInformation=”*:44301:localhost” />

to

    <binding protocol=”https” bindingInformation=”*:44308:localhost” />

6. Save & close.

Voila! That’s all it takes to change the SSL port in IIS Express =) Enjoy!