Question

What do you do at the Church?

Answer

I work on the .NET Stack Team with Bryan Hinton and Jim Byer.

Question

What does the .NET Stack Team do?

Answer

There are two main goals of the .NET Stack Team. The first is to provide general support to all teams at the Church working on projects with components that use the Microsoft .NET Framework. This support can range from answering technology questions to identifying and resolving specific problems that project teams encounter.

The second goal, which facilitates the first, is to maintain and continue to develop the .NET Stack Library and Services, which are a set of tools to help Church developers quickly accomplish common tasks so that teams can focus on the unique and project-specific design issues they face instead of re-writing the code blocks that occur across most ICS projects. The .NET Stack includes tools for ASP.NET web pages, WPF projects, WCF services, authentication through LDS Account, application logging, and much more. We have even developed Visual Studio New Project templates to enable developers to create Stack-enabled projects with just a few clicks.

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University of Utah (Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library)

The electronic television: Philo T. Farnsworth

Philo T. Farnsworth is known as the “Father of Television.” Born in Utah in 1906, Farnsworth was always fascinated by technology and inventions that used electricity. At a young age, he was amazed by a telephone conversation with his far-away aunt. When he asked his father who made such amazing devices, his father said, “Inventors make these things.” Farnsworth wanted to join the ranks of great inventors.

When his family moved to his uncle’s farm in Idaho, he was thrilled to find it equipped with a Delco generator. Philo observed the technician who serviced the generator, and one day when it stopped he volunteered to repair it. Although the adults around him doubted his abilities, he repaired the generator and was declared “engineer in charge of the generator.” Farnsworth found a collection of technology magazines in the attic of the home which furthered his aspirations to be an inventor. His imagination was captured by an article about sending images through the air along with audio. In 1921, while running a plow line by line across his father’s field near Rigby, Idaho, Farnsworth realized that transmitting an image was like a field and must be transmitted one line at a time. In high school, he sketched ideas to transmit these images for his teacher and mentor, Justin Tolman. This sketch later played a key role in patent dispute of a key television component.

When the Farnsworth family moved to Provo, UT in 1923, Philo attended Brigham Young University until the death of his father later that year. Philo continued to dream of television but knew he would have to learn all that he could to perfect and prove his idea. Farnsworth became acquainted with and began working for Leslie Gorrell and George Everson in Salt Lake City, who saw the great potential in Philo’s ideas. They agreed to fund his work and Philo moved with his new wife, Elma Gardner, first to Hollywood and then to San Francisco to set up a laboratory and begin working on the television.

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It has been my experience that homegrown applications can present a number of challenges as they expand and evolve. One of these challenges is the absence of a defined build and release schedule. A homegrown application that I currently manage has evolved over the years into a massive system that is accessed around the clock by users worldwide. Because it has evolved so much over the years, there has been a great deal of interpretation left to different teams as to how builds and releases should be handled.

To add a little more flavor to the situation, this application is not written in Java, the long-standing development platform of choice at the Church. It is written in a mixture of classic ASP and ASP.NET, something that has only recently been adopted as an acceptable platform here. Due to the efforts of strong development and QA teams, we’ve seen an increase in application stability and improvements in overall functionality as we’ve worked to get this homegrown behemoth under control. We have now come to another fork in the improvement road: an acceptable release process.

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How does the Church train 50,000 clerks in 40 or more languages? That’s a challenge that is getting easier to solve, thanks to the recently launched LDSTech Clerk wiki.

The Clerk wiki offers new training and support resources for ward and stake clerks, including membership clerks, finance clerks, stake technology specialists, stake auditors, and other record keepers, helping them to better understand how to magnify their callings. The Clerk wiki offers more than 250 searchable pages of content. There’s even information to help bishops and stake presidents understand their record-keeping responsibilities.

The wiki is built in MediaWiki, the same application that powers Wikipedia. For now, the LDS Tech Projects wiki is sharing space with the Clerk wiki, but at some point the Clerk wiki will get its own home.

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I used to enjoy attending professional conferences: the inside scoop, the buzz of product announcements, tips and tricks, and the general enthusiasm of the crowd. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of it all. I couldn’t wait to get back home and try out all the new things I’d picked up.

But back in the office, I began to wonder how much of the conference really applied to my work. While I found great benefit in hearing somebody’s experience (positive or negative) in tackling a problem or learning the best techniques for doing something, the other information was more of a distraction.

Technology enthusiasts by nature tend to gravitate toward the cutting edge. We get excited about the latest product, language, platform, or standard that is going to make life oh-so-much better. There are many times, however, when the “tried and true” approach is a better path for our customers.

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In June 2009, Nathan Dickamore wrote an article on this site entitled “Participate in Community Development”. He wrote about open-source advocate Michael Tiemann's theories concerning "exonovation" and how community-driven (and supported) projects yield better products. Similarly, by using the community's time and talents, the Church can better tackle the monumental task of maintaining its legacy data systems, free up developer resources, and utilize the broad range of technical skills available in the larger community.

As an open-source advocate, Tiemann posits that more project contributors lead to fewer outstanding issues. As a software engineer for the LDS Church, I lead the maintenance efforts for a large number of applications within the Supply Chain portfolio. These applications use a diverse set of technologies and require a relatively broad skill set in order to maintain them. Resources are sometimes limited, and we find ourselves supporting and maintaining more products than a few developers can handle. Indeed, often a project’s needs are put on hold as other issues take priority. In addition, it seems that for every issue we resolve, the customer uncovers one or two bugs or makes enhancement requests. As maintenance developers, we sometimes find ourselves sinking as we do our best to keep maintenance applications happy while at the same time developing new software to meet additional needs.

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