The problem with "It's not what you know, it's who you know."

I wasn't the most popular kid growing up. Even in college as I lived up to the analytical stereotype and stayed home studying (a better word would be "experimenting" or "training"), my party-going acquaintances would assure me that I was investing in the wrong thing. "It's not what you know, it's who you know. So don't spend so much  effort with the books when it's the relationships that matter." And there certainly is some truth to this. We've all seen the stranger's perfect resume get passed over for the friend's average resume (the stranger is by definition unknown, and therefore risky, so there is business rational to pick the safe candidate over the risky one). People ultimately make the decisions, so people are important. It's one reason I so actively endorse the community user groups.

However, there must be balance. There are three caveats that this cliché misses:

1.       If what you know is valuable, then people will want to know you. Even a hermit who cures cancer will begrudgingly become famous. Recruiters in every major city are scouring over LinkedIn, user groups, monster, dice, and every online job board trying to find good candidates, offering bounties, and poaching top talent from competitor's. In other words, "what you know" will quickly open doors to "who you know" (and "who knows you").

2.       Really, it's not "who you know," but "who knows you." Sharing an elevator, or even a lunch, doesn't mean that they'll risk their reputation giving you a referral, or that you can "phone them for a favor".

3.       There are talkers and doers. Talkers can drop a name for every occasion, have 500+ social-networking friends, and can truthfully say things like "Oh, I know Acme's Chicago director, Bill, we met at last Autumn's pumpkin-throwing contest…" They could get the interview with their connections, but they could never pass the interview itself.

Of course, with "what you know" vs. "who you know", like most two-way debates in life, you'd prefer both. But in the field of software engineering, you can never sell-short the "what you know".

Command-line Cyclomatic Complexity in VS2008 with VS2010 free Metrics.exe

Visual  Studio had code complexity metrics, but they were only available in the GUI. (At least for code coverage you could call the private assemblies and roll your own command-line tool.) However, VS 2010 offers  a free power-tool that lets you run complexity metrics from the command line! The result is an xml file, so you can leverage that for anything you need.

These blogs tell more:

·         http://blogs.msdn.com/b/camerons/archive/2011/01/28/code-metrics-from-the-command-line.aspx

·         http://devmatter.blogspot.com/2011/01/visual-studio-code-metrics-powertool.html

Part of the cool thing is even if you're still on VS2008 (!), and you can't buy a 3rd party tool (NDepend!), you can still use the 2010 power tools to call .Net 3.5 assemblies. So, you could install VS2010 on your build server and use the power tools on 2008 builds.

Detecting if a file is a merge in TFS VersionControl database

I was trying to run some metric calculations on files within a changeset, but I only wanted new files – i.e. I wanted to filter out merged, branched, or renamed files. For example, if someone created a branch, that shouldn’t count as adding 1000 new files.

One solution I found was to check the Command column of the TfsVersionControl.dbo.tbl_Version table. I realize the TfsVersionControl is a transactional database, and reports are encouraged to go off of TfsWareHouse, but that didn’t seem to contain this field.

Here’s the relevant SQL (NOTE: this is for VS2008, I haven’t tested it on VS2010).

select 

      CS.ChangeSetId, FullPath, Command, CreationDate,

      case

            when Command in (2,5,6,7,10,34) then cast(1 as bit)

        else cast(0 as bit)

      end as IsNew

from TfsVersionControl..tbl_Version V with (nolock)

      inner join TfsVersionControl..tbl_ChangeSet CS with (nolock)

      on V.VersionFrom = CS.ChangeSetId

where CS.ChangeSetId = 20123

The question becomes, what does the “tbl_Version .Command” column mean, and why those specific values? I couldn’t find official documentation (probably because it’s discouraged to run queries on it), so I did a distinct search on 50,000 different changesets to find all values being used, and I worked backwards comparing it against the Team Explorer UI to conclude it appears to be a bitflag for actions:

Command	Bit value
add	1
edit	2
branch	4
rename	8
delete	16
undelete	32
branch	64
merge	128

Recall there can be multiple actions (hence the bit field), such as merge and edit. So, if you want to find new code – i.e. adds or edits, then we’d take the following bit flags: 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 34.

Is New?	Bit value	Actions
Yes	2	edit
Yes	5	add (folder)
Yes	6	type/edit
Yes	7	add (add file)
No	8	rename
Yes	10	rename/edit
No	16	delete
No	24	delete,rename
No	32	undelete
Yes	34	undelete, edit
No	68	branch
No	70	branch, edit
No	84	branch,delete
No	128	merge
No	130	merge, edit
No	136	merge,rename
No	138	merge,rename,edit
No	144	merge,delete
No	152	merge, delete, rename
No	160	merge, undelete
No	162	merge, undelete, edit
No	196	merge, branch
No	198	merge, branch, edit
No	212	merge, branch, delete

Of course, this is induction, and it’s possible I may have missed something, but given a large sampling and lots of spot-checking, it appears to be reliable.

It’s not your code, but it is your opportunity

I occasionally hear the developer say “my code”, as in “I’ll check in my code at the end of next week”, or “My code doesn’t need unit tests”.

In one sense, I want developers to think “this is my code” so they take pride in doing the best job possible. But really, it’s not your code, it’s the company’s code – they’re paying for it, and often legally they own it (i.e. it would be illegal to take chunks of code you wrote at one company and either privately sell it, or check it into another company’s source code repository).

This perspective really changes the discussion, i.e. “The company would like their code to be checked-in on a regular basis”, or “The company would like their code to be properly tested”.

However, it is the developer's "opportunity to learn" – i.e. the company keeps the code, but the developer keeps the improved skill from writing that code.

31 User Groups in the Midwest

Clark Sell did a great series on the various user groups in the Midwest. He provided a helpful recap here:

http://csell.net/2011/12/31/31-days-of-community-my-recap/

Here's the link for our Lake County .Net Users Group (LCNUG).

There's over a dozen groups in Illinois alone.  There's something for everyone. Given the benefits of such groups (meeting dedicated peers face to face, hearing from expert presenters, etc…), check it out.