Estimating the real value of source code

If you run a software development company of virtually any size, you've no doubt been asked/bullied at some point for the source code; sometimes it's even stipulated as a requirement of the contract.

At The Site Doctor we don't tend to quibble over the source code (especially not for standard websites at least) and that's mainly because we know that the value of what we do isn't in the files of code themselves; instead the value is in our knowledge of you, your product, your requirements and our past experiences in our respective areas of expertise.

Putting to one side for a moment the knowledge gap (this can be filled over time/with enough resources), depending on your future plans, getting access to the source may not be the holy grail you think it is. If you are actively developing your project on an on-going basis (you should be), consideration will need to be given to how you ensure your copy is up to date. We have systems to handle this (called source control) but you have to question whether the additional time required to learn and manage the various processes are of real benefit to you.

There are a few instances however where having access to the source code is definitely worth it. Have you for example got a contingency plan in place for if your supplier was to no longer exist? What would you do and how would you cope if the development company was no longer around? In these instances, having a copy of the source -or more importantly knowing how you can get access to the up-to-date copy is very important.

How can I quantify the worth of the source code to me?

As with many scenarios like this, there's not really a "one solution fits all" answer however after a little internal discussion we came up with the following:

Value of Source	Considerations
High	Was the system completely bespoke? Is it integral to your day-to-day operation? Is it your only source of income?
Medium	Although integral to your business, you have a copy of the software in a usable form and it doesn't change regularly. The system offers "standard" functionality which can be replicated with relative ease should it be required e.g. e-commerce functionality.
Low	The system is something generic, does not need to be changed You have control over the aspects that you need e.g. it's a website with a content management system

Is it worth getting the source code as a client?

Yes; but I would consider the message it's giving to your developers. If you ask for it at the beginning of the contract then there shouldn't be a problem but bringing it up after delivery might leave the developers wondering what your motive is (even if it is totally innocent).

Should I give the source code to my client?

Yes; unless you've clearly stipulated otherwise to the client from the start for some reason e.g. to reduce project costs. You should always write your code in a way that is readable to others anyway and knowing that you might at anytime be offering up the source code will encourage you to keep it that little bit leaner.

How do you handle source code with your clients?

To handle a scenario in which The Site Doctor no longer exists (whether it's because we've gone into administration or we're all hit by a meteor), we use Crisis Cover; an online information storage system that securely stores all the information our clients would need if we were no longer around. Crisis Cover then checks that we're still around and if not, distributes the information to the designated contacts.

If you've not already got some form of contingency plan in place I urge you to set something up now whether it's a service like Crisis Cover, Excel or paper!

In closing I would definitely promote the attitude we have at The Site Doctor in that it's better to build long-term partnerships but you should still have some disaster contingency plan in place.

Missing ratings from Windows Live Writer

As fantastic as it is, and I love the Flickr plugin (being new to Flickr this was what convinced me) but although they look the same, there are a couple of differences (that or I've not found them yet). One of the big issues I've found is that you can't filter the results by ranking, here are two screenshots, the first from Windows Photo Gallery:

And Windows Live Photo Gallery:

So where has the "Ratings" tab gone I wonder.

The other thing that I've not yet worked out is how to flag photos as "Private" and be able to hide them -perhaps that's not possible.

Another thing that would be nice is if it remembered when you had uploaded a photo to Flickr and stopped it re-uploading.

Flickr Pro free to BT Yahoo! users

I've never really got into Flickr but now I'm using Windows Live Photo Gallery which can automatically upload images for you I thought I'd give it ago. While checking out what the restrictions were on my standard (free!) account I was pleasantly surprised to find out I've actually got a pro account courtesy of BT Yahoo! -Shame I'm leaving them this month ;)

Umbraco and Ghost/Cached/Deleted pages appearing in menu

I'm currently investigating a new Open Source ASP.Net CMS system called Umbraco. It looks very promising as it can be fully accessible and has full support for XHTML among many other interesting features. I met with a couple of the guys that are developing the system in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they've got big plans so keep an eye on it.

Anyway yesterday while setting up the new The Site Doctor site on Umbraco I ran into an issue where by I had "broken" the menu. Basically I had deleted the template from the system which should have deleted all copies of the pages that use that template but instead a cache remained somewhere. I ran through a number of steps to re-create the cache but nothing worked.

If you run into the same issue as I did, follow these steps:

1. Find out the ID of the page in question (easiest way is just to add the ID to the output of the menu XSLT)
2. Search the database for the ID using the T-SQL I posted in "How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database"
3. Download and install a Unicode and UTF-8 search program such as Text Workbench and search for the ID (I only found it in /data/Umbraco.config)
4. Reset the applications cache -the easiest way to do this is to simply re-upload the web.config file

That should sort it :)

Joost invites for all...

I found out this morning that my Joost account has been credited with 999 invites (I kid you not) so feeling all summery I thought others might want to join in the Joost fun and I’d share them around a little.

I’ve only got 999 Joost invites so it’ll have to be strictly on a first come –first served basis (as if I’m ever going to get rid of them all haha).

I don’t want anything in return but if this offer is too generous or you feel I’ve helped you in the past and you’re debted to me, why not click some of the Google Adverts –or even better, make a donation to our 96 mile canoe race (the Cheshire ring race) in aid of the Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust, Multiple Sclerosis Society, CLIC Sargent and Mac Millan Nurses, I like to think of it of a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” arrangement.

Regardless of whether you want to donate to our worth cause or not, drop me an email (or leave me a comment) and I’ll send an invite over ASAP.

For more information on our 96 mile canoe race (the Cheshire ring race) in aid of charity go to www.paddlathon.co.uk or read my blog posts about the Cheshire ring race.

Some great software I use

I was recently on the search for a new firewall after having so many people complain about it (and having a few issues myself). I asked a forum that was very happy to criticise ZoneAlarms what they recommended to use as people were quick to flame and not explain.

Sadly, despite making very clear I wasn't interested in flaming, the majority of the responses I got back were still flames about ZoneAlarms but there were a couple of nice people who responded with useful suggestions. I thought as there seems to be very little advice about suitable firewall replacements to ZoneAlarms I would post what I've got installed as well as a couple of other useful programs in the process.

Firstly let me explain why I feel the comment "If you've got a hardware firewall you don't need a software firewall" is a ridiculous statement. My reasoning dates back to Greek times -notably the Trojan war when seeking entrance to Troy, Odysseus had a large wooden horse (the sacred animal of Poseidon) made as a gift. As I'm sure everyone is aware, the horse was hollow and filled with a load of soldiers which popped out after the Trojans were done celebrating the end of the siege and let the rest of the army in through the front gates to slaughter all the drunk Trojans. Anyway, back to my point, yes you may have a hardware firewall that will stop nasty attackers getting in but what happens if you unwittingly invite one in? The likelihood is it'll invite a load more in after it which will end up crippling your computer. So for that reason I have a software firewall to monitor the traffic in and out on my machine.

The software

The first thing to note here is that all this software (at time of posting) is free -what can I say? I'm a cheapskate ;) The links are to the file download page so please let me know if they've broken since posting.

• Firewall: Comodo Firewall Pro (www.personalfirewall.comodo.com)
• Virus Scan: avast! 4 Home Edition (www.avast.com)
• Spyware: SpyBot Search and Destroy (www.spybot.info)
• Spam Detector: K9 (http://keir.net/k9.html) -previously I got on very well with SpamBayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) which was very good but appears to conflict with Comodo Firewall Pro
• Screen grabs: Gadwin PrintScreen - Screen capture software (http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/) or Cropper in C# which just gets better and better (http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx)
• Blogging: Although in the past I've tended to use the built in WYSIWYG editor of dasBlog I've recently been trying out Windows Live Writer (windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com) I've got a few issues with it -like the fact it refuses to close tags -or even leave your code alone, but on the whole it's a really useful utility that massively reduces the amount of time taken to post.
• Desktop Search: Windows Desktop Search (www.microsoft.com) -I'll have to post separately about this as it's a superb replacement to Google's Desktop search which I ran into issues with.
• Log file parser: Funnel Web Analyzer (www.quest.com) -loaded with a modified Funnel Web Analyzer custom settings file which includes additional browsers, bots and search engines.
• Keeping track of files on CDs/DVDs: Catalog Now 2.0 -not bad for a CodeProject project, I was going to get a CD Stakka from Imation but this has saved me around £80, really easy and simple to use. I would name your archives with a number and then the reference, then write this number on the CD itself, that way you'll quickly be able to find it.
• Identifying on screen colours: In FireFox I have a little colour picker but in Windows I use ColorPix which is a free screen colour grabber from Color Schemer

Deleting "Ghost" extensions from FireFox

Since updating Firefox to v1.5 I had a number of extensions that I couldn’t remove from the list because they were greyed out, this was somewhat irritating as I had the later versions installed too and so I was getting duplicates (see below)

Today I decided to see if I could resolve this, it turns out removing these ghost/incompatible extensions is fairly simple:

1. Close any instances of Firefox you have open
2. Navigate to %Documents and Settings%\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\
3. Backup the file: “extensions.rdf”
4. Open “extensions.rdf” in a text editor i.e. Notepad or TextPad
5. Find the line that starts with: <RDF:Seq RDF:about="urn:mozilla:item:root">

Below is a list of the extensions you have installed, I can only talk about my case but the ones that were greyed out extensions in Firefox were the ones that had a resource value of a URL rather than “urn:mozilla:item:{Guid}”. My file looked like this:

Simply delete these lines from the file, save it and restart Firefox. All should be back as it should be now…

Setup.exe

I'm forever downloading application trials to see how other developers write applications, partly out of curiosity but moreover to improve applications we’re developing –seeing what we’ve left out, how we may be able to do it better etc.

I keep a fairly clear desktop but today I booted up and noticed a “setup.exe” file sitting there and I had no idea what it was, I knew it must be something I downloaded to test so I ran it which probably wasn’t the most logical thing to do but hey. Luckily it was something I’d downloaded but it got me thinking, what if it was a malicious script that a virus had placed there for me to click? I wonder how many people would be caught out by that…

Useful Visual Studio Plugin

On surfing around the net the other day looking for a replacement to Visual Studio 2003’s clipboard monitor I stumbled across this excellent Clipboard manager plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. As his blog was offline at the time I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it but now I’ve had a play I’m not sure I’ll be able to do without it!

Check out the Clipboard Manager plug-in at
http://www.csharper.net/blog/clipboard_manager_upgraded_to_package.aspx

For those of you interested, the plug-in monitors the clipboard activity allowing you to resurrect previous clipboards and make them current and even locking items so you can use them at a later date. I’ve found it incredibly useful when testing sites as it allows me to keep common messages on the clip. Downside is you have to have Visual Studio open at the time so I’ll have to look into a standalone version.

Here are a few shots of it in “action”:

The items that have been added to the clipboard in the past show up in the list at the top and there's a small preview window below (which I think you can select parts out of). You can also remove all items from the history by clicking the icon in the top left.

To re-select an old item double click it and it's instantly the main item! The currently selected item is the one in black text with a green arrow next to it.

The context menu offers a number of extra options including the ability to lock and unlock an item, this means when you restart your computer the item is still in the history -great if you have common items such as test credit card numbers! If you want to remove a single item from the history, you can do that using the context menu too. I've not yet used the "Save to File" or "Search Online" items.

Update: There does seem to be some sort of glitch with it, I think my history has got corrupt at somepoint so when I clear all the unlocked items new items weren’t getting caught anymore. I've found two solutions: The first is to restart Visual Studio, the other is to unlock all items and clear the history completely. This seemed to sort it. I did also note that I had one blank item at the top of the list so I guess that's what was causing it.

Cisco VPN Software and Local Network conflicts

This is a post for anyone else having connectivity issues with their LAN while connected to a VPN of some sort. When setting up the Virtual Private Network (VPN) on our new server we encountered a number of issues of not being able to connect to the local network while the VPN was established. Initially it was merely an inconvenience and something that we could live with, but as time went on we needed to stay connected and access files from the local network, it grew more and more irritating.

After much searching on the internet for a solution with terms like “Cisco VPN Local Area Connection Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN files” and various inflections of we didn’t find anything useful.

While trying to sort the issue, I noticed that the VPN was establishing itself on the subnet of 192.168.1.x, that in itself is not a problem but we were running our LAN under the same subnet. It was only then that we realised that we had a conflict as the VPN was overriding the local subnet so on trying to access 192.168.1.5 it would attempt to contact the remote server group (which didn’t exist).

If you’ve got the same issue, the fix is simple, all you need to do is change your local subnet to something else i.e. 3, this means when the VPN is connected it will connect over 1 and the LAN will remain unaffected –lovely!