Over the last few weeks I’ve had several instances where I’ve had to learn new things and, in my struggles, have had the opportunity to get help from people I have met recently (both in person and on-line).  Notice I said “opportunity”.  One thing I’ve learned recently is that people like to help other people!   As part of my professional development I’ve been attempting to work on my networking skills, and, in my opinion, networking is more than meeting people, it is interacting with them to help and to be helped.

What the heck is jQuery?

The current project I am working on is using ASP.NET MVC and AJAX for the web site and my HTML and javascript skills are not strong so I was reading and workring with Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0.  As I went through the examples I encountered a jQuery script that was not working.  I posted a question on Twitter which was answered by Jeremiah Peschka (Blog|Twitter).  He sent me his email address and offered to look at the script for me.  He also forwarded on the problem to a jQuery guru he knows.  All that effort and we’ve never met!  See people DO like to help!

How does this work in Powershell?

A few months ago I began interacting with Chad Miller (Blog|Twitter) on Twitter and was able to set him up to speak at my local user group (OPASS).  Chad is a Powershell guru and presented on T-SQL vs. Powershell back in July.  I’m working on a presentation about the Default Trace and I wanted to provide some examples of how to archive the Default Trace files/data.  This seemed like a good opportunity to learn some Powershell, so I sent Chad an email asking him to point me in the right direction, which he did.  I completed a “working” Powershell script and sent it to him for review.  He responded with explanations of what I had done wrong and a corrected script.

Why can’t I get this file processed?

Again as part of the Default Trace presentation I wanted to present a solution using SSIS.  Now I have some experience with SSIS and consider myself to be at an intermediate level so I figured I could get it done without trouble.  Well, I was wrong.  I had what I thought was a working solution, until I got Log_10.trc at the same time as Log_9.trc.  The ForEach File Enumerator orders files by name so the active Log_10.trc file was the first file the File System Task attempted to move and it is locked, thus the task failed.  So once I again I used Twitter to ask an SSIS guru, Andy Leonard (Blog|Twitter), if there was a way to change the sort order on the ForEach File Enumerator.  He said that you needed to script it, unfortunately.  He also emailed me an example script.

Those are just 3 instances where I’ve had the opportunity to truly practice networking (I blogged about another here).  Interacting with people and using those interactions to learn new skills and share your skills.  In my mind this is real networking.  Sure these are examples where I got something from my network, but there have been times where I’ve been on the other side, and you’d better believe if I can help out any of these guys I’ll do it!