Mark Arteaga

From the outside looking in it seems that I have been pretty dormant since my last 'real' post was about the SDF Webbrowser control and the behaviour on PocketPC and Windows CE.  Two things have been keeping me busy

1. My current project i'm working on is starting to finish up.  I'll post more details on this once the official press release is out and the product is officially announced.  We did frequent releases to the client just to get the product in front of them and start getting feedback quickly.  This was very effective but forced us (really me) to automate everything early in the development stage.  This also kept us busy adding features, fixing bugs teaking etc.  I was also managing five developers for this project which is good and bad. 
   Two bad parts:
• First, many thought I was just a 'manager' with no technical skills. A few tried to pull fast ones on my by saying 'it's not possible', it will take 'x' amount of days (when really it should only take 'y') or 'there is not enought time'.  All bullsh!t excusses that I didn't buy...they quickly came to find out that I was not 'technically challenged'. 
• Second, finding five developers in such a short amount of time was a pain!  This was my first time where I actually had the responsibility to find people. At first I had techinical questions that I would ask to try and weed people out.  This worked somewhat but I had to let go of one guy who knew all the answers to the questions but had no clue on coding!!! Plus to top it off he had his MCSD!!!  Since the techincal questions didn't really work, I started doing a 'technical development test'.  Basically I gave the candidate a box with VS, SQL and internet access.  Then handed him/her a paper with the 'software requirements' and two hours to complete.  I couldn't beleive the amount of people who couldn't even get the application compiling because of all the cut and pasting they did from the internet!!!  Either way this was very effective in finding who was good and who wasn't suitable for the position.  Plus it took up a lot less of my time!
2. Have been working many late nights to get OpenNETCF SDF 2.0 ready.  Stay tuned for more information in the coming days for this....

That's basically the two main things keeping me busy (and this doesn't include all other personal items I won't bore everyone with).  I have a whole list of technical items to blog about (both .NET CF and Fx) so stay tuned....