If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you do some sort of project work within your job. My blog doesn’t attact a lot of people outside of IT and the typical IT guy is working on project X, Y or Z and sometimes all 3 at the same time. If this isn’t you, I’ll save you some time and you can stop reading now.
Ok, so you are working with your boss and he/she has assigned you a project.
Being a programmer by trade, I get thrown into many projects that aren’t always my forte, but I can figure them out and get them working the way that I want.
I’ve been messing with powershell for a while now with VMware, but never really getting into big time scripting with it. Its mainly be something to use to accomplish some various tasks on mutliple hosts. Very little error checking in the scripts since I’m watching them was they run.
Today I had the chance to get back to some code for CreateFolder which creates a public folder within our Exchange 2007 environment support by Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration frame work. I’ve been highly critical of Microsoft’s code before, and today has taken that to a new level.
Here is what I’m dealing with. First, let’s go to the documentation on TechNet:
Pretty clear that we have a few required parameters and a few optional ones to set some quotas.
I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested.
But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.
As a programmer, I have had the joy of seeing a lot of my code ship with various projects in my career. One thing that I have found is, no matter how much I have tested, no matter how solid I feel about the code, there is always that moment of anxiety right before it ships. Its a natural feeling as a programmer to have these. You constantly strive for perfection but in the back of your mind you know that you’re a human who makes mistakes.