Jeff's Junk

Build an RSS feed using LINQ to XML

Jeff — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:28:00 GMT

Every once in awhile, gosh, once a year at this rate, I crank out something simple to write for my ancient ASP.NET site. This year...

Build an RSS feed using LINQ to XML

I haven't done a lot of writing since my book, and I kind of miss it. I just can't find the time to do it.

Career: Ninja or super multi-functional

Jeff — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:37:00 GMT

In my self-employed "summer vacation" without a standard day job, I find myself working on things that I'm interested, a luxury you obviously don't get whilst working for The Man. Some of it is naturally for the now five-years-old CoasterBuzz, which is an embarrassment of a site for me to look at (despite its continued financial success). What I've been into is AJAX stuff, building controls of all things. Every control I build is easier than the previous, and I find myself feeling ninja-like around the AJAX framework. I really enjoy working on this stuff.

I'm wondering though, as I now think about going back to work full time, if being a ninja is valuable these days. It's hard to be a ninja at all things (or at least, it is for me), but I find that really getting deep into something is rewarding personally. But is it valuable to employers? While I'm all giddy about ASP.NET AJAX, I've done little more than give MVC a casual glance.

There is always something new to learn, and I find that few developers, unfortunately, endeavor to keep up on it (which exlpains why there are so many COBOL-only devs out there). If you had the time on your hands the way I do, what would you be doing? Girls love guys with computer hacking skills (gosh!).

Microsoft documentation fail

Jeff — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:16:00 GMT

Before it sounds like all I do is complain, let me first say that the advances in C# 3.0, along with LINQ and ASP.NET AJAX, have made programming more fun than ever. I've spent a lot of time lately using all of this stuff on my own projects, and I'm having a great time. I'm going to make some lucky employer very happy (or annoyed because they're still using v1.1).

That said, the documentation situation is bad. It's better than it was circa 2004, but all of the rapid shipping and fragments of the .NET world are leaving the docs a mess. It starts with the MSDN site itself, which has much better search than it used to, but is still heavy and slow because of the treeviews. It also doesn't look right in Firefox, and doesn't retain your preference for programming languages.

The ASP.NET site (which, by the way, also beachballs Firefox on the Mac with every page load making it unusable) has the outline of the new features in v3.5 SP1, and presents you up front with video. Video is not particularly useful when you want to just get to the examples. I go to the link for the browser history feature, and, after the five second beachball, see nothing but a video. OK, so where is the link to the docs? I had to watch the video (which is painful because it's VB.NET, and the presenter is "rusty" on his VB), and then see that it involves using ScriptManager, so I finally can go to MSDN and look up the right methods. I get there and find no examples of how to use the history point related stuff. Lots of wasted time. I end up having to rely on Googling third parties for a decent reference.

About a year ago, maybe more, I recall looking at the mapping stuff for maps.live.com, and how you could integrate maps to your site. I remember it being a lot easier than what Google had at the time. So I go to the site, and start clicking around from the developer link and I can't find anything. All I get is stuff for the "Live Search API." So what is that, and what does it have to do with maps? Why is there a download link for an SDK? I just wanted to call your Javascript like I did last year and get a map in a div. Compare this non-obviousness with Google's page. You're two clicks from a simple HTML file that makes a map.

I'm a huge fanboy of Microsoft's, but this kind of thing frustrates me. I think the company needs a new role: Barrier Detection Monitor. This is a person who, in their product group, would look for things that make it harder for people to use the product. Too often there's something brilliant coming out of Redmond and it doesn't get the use or attention it deserves because of some kind of silly barrier.

ASP.NET AJAX: Moving target

Jeff — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:49:00 GMT

Working with the ASP.NET AJAX framework has been fun. I think the basics are well covered for the most part, and beyond that, your imagination can likely come up with some really interesting UI.

What's frustrating, however, is the way it has become a moving target. There's the original release, 1.0, as an extension to ASP.NET v2. Then there's v3.5, which comes in .NET v3.5, which includes ASP.NET v2. In the background, we had the "futures" package, and now the forthcoming v3.5 SP1, which has better a version of the history control, so don't use futures. Oh, and the roadmap for v4 was more or less recently released. It's madness. (Oh, and the documentation on MSDN, linked to from the old v1.0 docs, is poorly organized compared to the old stuff.)

So if you're a developer trying to get up to speed, where do you start? What's really important? For me it's easy, because I do independent stuff that interests me, and I happen to be between regular day jobs. I've been pretty focused on v3.5 and doing useful things with it, like a Facebook-esque auto-complete list (puts a "token" representing a data item in the box that you chose via auto-complete).

In the corporate world, adoption of anything new is slow. This makes me wonder... who are the people using the latest bleeding edge stuff, and why? Sure, they're the bloggers and authors and such, and the new open Microsoft is getting their feedback, but are they the right people? There are a whole lot of smart people involved, but I wonder if the chaos of versions and service packs and futures and community driven stuff are well connected. (The ControlToolKit's ReorderList control throws script errors in IE of all things for me, which doesn't instill confidence.)

Sometimes it's hard to just focus on what you have in front of you. I guess with all of the excitement over various pieces of the framework, the latest being the MVC piece, I worry that there is so much going on that there is risk for ASP.NET to become a convoluted mess, and that would suck.

GUI tools are not the enemy

Jeff — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:11:00 GMT

Joe Stump, the lead architect for Digg, makes a comment that really bugs me, while another is positive, in a recent "my life as a programmer post" (that's the Google cached version... ironically Digg has overwhelmed his own server):

More practical advice is that you should learn to know and love design patterns and avoid GUI’s. I have a real problem with people who say they know SQL because they’re well versed with an ORM or a DB’s GUI. Go back and read up on relational algebra and SQL92 before you say you know SQL okay?I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I think people should learn a single environment in and out and stick with it. This might mean you learn Microsoft’s technologies in and out or Cocoa or LAMP. You simply can’t be an expert in an area of computers without picking a single environment and sticking with it.

On one hand, I give him credit for his comment that you should get to know a particular platform inside and out. Extra +1 for not flaming Microsoft's platform.

I do not, on the other hand, agree with the notion that GUI tools are bad. I thought this stigma went away with VB6 (which I suppose is largely responsible for it), but come on man... there are some tight tools out there and they make it a lot more fun and efficient to write code. Using them does not equate to not understanding what's going on under the covers.

The book that started it all

Jeff — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:41:00 GMT

In order to make some room for my own, more current books, and try to free up more space for Diana, I've been going through my old books and making a stack to ditch or give away. Computer books get so hopelessly useless over time. I came across one book, though, that I've decided to keep, just for nostalgia...

This is arguably the book that started it all. I got it in 1999, when I was ready to up the game for Guide to The Point (now PointBuzz). I wanted to write my own forum app and do some database driven news stuff. And that's what I did, with a combination of Microsoft FrontPage, an Access database and a Web hosting account that cost nearly fifty bucks a month.

The edges of the book are all frayed, the laminate on the cover is peeling off, the side is just dirty and the spine is well worn. There were PostIt notes on the pages for the recordset object and for stored procedures.

That book was the genesis for the entire lot of professional change for me. ASP was an absolutely horrible platform, but it was fairly easy to learn. It seems like the dark ages, but it was entirely new to me. Those were exciting times.

Any bets on whether or not JavaScriptSerializer will really be obsolete?

Jeff — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Anyone who does a bit AJAXy goodness knows that it's nice and easy to transport simple objects and arrays back and forth to your server as JSON pieces. And hey, if you're doing it right, trying not to be uber chatty and keep it all zippy, you probably aren't doing anything that complex in terms of the objects you're shuttling around.

So why, oh why, would Microsoft mark JavaScriptSerializer as obsolete? The suggested "replacement" is a lot more convoluted: DataContractJsonSerializer. It doesn't even have a good name. What do contracts have to do with me wanting to just turn an array of strings into, well, an array of strings?

Scott Guthrie mentioned in a comment to a blog post of his last year that he was going to try and find out why, and petition for it not to be made obsolete, but I couldn't find any resolution beyond that. All I can say is that two lines that do something productive make a lot more sense than creating stream objects and doing a bunch of other work, and I'd rather not have to add such a thing to my own library code.

When Apple fanboy developers attack!

Jeff — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:42:00 GMT

Yikes, check out the comments following Jesse Ezell's post about tinkering with the iPhone SDK. That's a little tough to read. I'm happy to admit I'm an Apple fan, with a Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, two iPods, an iPhone and an AppleTV. They've got me. Heck, my two-year-old MBP is randomly shutting off and I find myself apologizing for Apple.

But what is with these asshole zealots? I didn't find anything particularly lazy or wrong with Jesse's post at all. I'm a .NET dev too, and have been since the beta days, which makes it the bulk of my career as a code monkey. Learning anything but Java would be a bit of an adjustment for me. So if I were to make a similar endeavor, I'd probably have many of the same concerns. And if the people in the know would call me names and tell I'm stupid, well, that doesn't exactly make me want to jump in and take hold.

I mean, you've got some guy going on about how Intellisense is a trademark. Yeah, no kidding, but who cares? It's a good idea, and one that has been immitated on other platforms. Anyone used to it knows that it makes coding faster and saves trips to the documentation, and sometimes even leads you to class library features you didn't know about. Responding with, "just learn it" is not the way to advocate the platform.

I love this big shiny aluminum quad box next to my monitor, but why is it that the developer "community" associated with it is so toxic? Help the brother out, don't kick him in the nuts.

The .NET Developer Job and the stack of Wired magazines

Jeff — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

As of today, I'm officially not employed. The last two and a half years have been an interesting time for me in terms of my professional development, and it's a very appropriate time to close that chapter.

I know that I've told the story before, but here's a recap. Back in 2005, I was having a very strange year in terms of my personal life. My ASP.NET book was released, I was doing consulting work, coaching high school volleyball, and feeling as though I was hitting a plateau in terms of my own programming skills. More to the point, I was bored.

So in 2006, I went back to work on a full-time basis. What sold me was the interview itself. I could tell that the guys I'd work with were a lot smarter than me, and there was a lot to learn. Unlike the consulting work I had been doing, there were plenty of people to turn to when you didn't feel confident that you had good solutions to the problems you faced. That's the kind of mentoring you wish for.

Culturally, I did have a hard time fitting in at times, in retrospect because there are only so many people you need attacking the bigger issues and being responsible for bigger solutions. I was OK with that most of the time, provided I was still learning and getting better at what I did. I have a strong need to feel as though I'm a part of the bigger picture, I guess because it's what I'm used to in my earlier jobs and my personal projects.

It was just in the last two weeks that I think really started to understand that. Several things happened that made me realize it was time to move on (even though ultimately the choice was made for me). The first thing was my trip to interview with Microsoft in Redmond. It doesn't matter that they didn't offer me a job, because it was a wake up call that reminded me I had options. The second thing was the assignment to a project where I'd be batting clean up, because it was the kind of project I'd endeavored in countless times before in my own work or other jobs. That led me to believe that perhaps my opportunities for learning were decreasing in number. And the third thing that happened, was an e-mail message from a co-worker, who thanked me for helping him on one of his projects. He thanked me for beign patient and working through his issues. As much as I think I try to not rely on external validation, I can't deny that made me feel good.

Collectively, I've come to understand that it was time for something else. I have no idea what that else is, and honestly, this being Jeff Putz week (tomorrow is my birthday), I don't even care to think about it at the moment. For now I want to relax and reflect on the great experiences I had, the friendships, the 1337 code I wrote and the fact that I can get up whenever I feel like it tomorrow!

When I started the job, I got into the habit of bringing my Wired magazines to work, to take to read at lunch or whatever. Over time, they started to stack up. The stack got to 30 issues high. It was a pretty good run.

Bill Gates era coming to a close

Jeff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Bill Gates is just about done at Microsoft. I feel very fortunate just have been in the same room when he did the keynote at Mix06. I don't think the guy is evil in any way. I think he's f'ing brilliant, and he deserves every bit of his success. He's not always right, but he's a smart guy.

I really dig this quote from this interview:

I mean, that's the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career is that you find people who are so good at one thing, and where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, very similar, and yet they're very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other.

I've seen this very phenomenon countless times, and in terms of technology, I think it's the thing that at the root of so much technological failure. I would even theorize that it's the reason some of the "best" people I've worked with were not academically rooted in computer science, but came from a broader set of experiences. It's staggering how many brilliant code monkeys don't get even the most basic marketing principles.

It'll be interesting to see how the culture at Microsoft evolves post-Gates. I think it has already been changing for the better, just in the last five years that I've had exposure to the company. Regardless, you have to admire someone who started by taking a serious risk like dropping out of school and going on to lead one of the biggest, and arguably most influential, companies in the world.

Lingering thoughts about the Microsoft interview experience

Jeff — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:18:00 GMT

It's strange how a number of different posts on my blog get comments practically every day. The big ones have to do with the failure of US education, my HP laptop from four years ago with the broken power jack, Xbox Live support sucking and the entire app/page/control event cycle based on pre-beta ASP.NET v2. A new one has become my post on my experience interviewing at Microsoft.

The comments on that post were thin, but I'm staggered by the number of e-mail messages I get. They come from random strangers, people who work there now and probably know the people I interviewed with, and surprisingly, a ton of people who had a similar experience, turned off by the company as a whole. As I said in that last post, that's still something I wasn't prepared for.

I also wasn't prepared for the, "Dude, you should come work on our team," messages. Ha! If only it were up to those people, right? The thing is, if I were approached again by someone at Microsoft, I'd make damn sure that the job was right for me. That's a luxury that I think a lot of people don't get used to when they get to a point of more senior experience. I never really realized it until I got my current job and left the consulting nonsense behind. An interview isn't just you being evaluated by the company, you're evaluating the company as well.

So would I work at Microsoft if I had the opportunity? Yes, I think I would, but I've developed a better sense of what I need first. The list starts with having a better opportunity for professional development than I have at Insurance.com. I feel like they're finally getting me into projects and discussions that fit well with my skill and desires. Other companies have to compete with that if they feel I'm worth it.

Second, the position has to be right. My greatest interest remains in the ASP.NET area. It's what I know best, it's what I care about most. I really like the idea of being a PM, especially the opportunity to share your new goodies at conferences. I'm not sure if I'm smart enough to be a programmer, but my opinion may change as I continue to look at the .NET source code.

Third, the people who will interview me need to know what I'm about to some degree before I get there. I could tell that one of the guys I talked to last time had never looked at my resume prior to me sitting down in front of him, and frankly that pissed me off and I thought it was disrespectful (but hey, thanks for the 4,000 free OnePass miles).

I think it was that last part that really irked me when they came back with the stock "different direction" response. It's like, OK, you asked me one of your logic questions, then you guys gave me a bunch of absurdly abstract "what ifs" that were not particularly actionable. I was in a meeting last week talking about some pretty interesting stuff that we were planning, and my mind wandered back to Building 42 where I realized that no one had the slightest idea about the kinds of things I was doing today. That seems like a massive failure on their part.

I'm not the super-utility know-it-all type. I realize that, and I'm OK with it. But I do learn what I need to when the gig is something I'm interested in. The hard part about working for other people is that there is a certain level of burden placed on them to best utilize your skills, and you have only so much control in helping them connect the dots.

I don't know if this kind of brain dump is good for me professionally, or if it burns bridges, but I believe that honesty and a willingness to be open are essential to all relationships, even professional, as they facilitate expectation management. Let's face it, that's the foundation for successful software development too.

XNA Creators Club sucks too

Jeff — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:21:00 GMT

It's bad enough that I can't use my real name on Xbox Live, but I can't even do it trying to sign up for the XNA Creators Club. And I'm sure there's no human being who would respond to, and act, to fix it. Believe me, I've tried.

You'd think my last name wouldn't be banned now that there is a baseball player, in Seattle no less, who shares the cursed name.

Understanding the benefit of a good IDE

Jeff — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:01:00 GMT

Tyler posted a link to a blog post about someone preferring a text editor over an integrated development environment (IDE). Naturally, my first thought is, wow, who thinks like this?

My first real exposure to development work was with the old ASP, which was frankly a shitty scripting language. You could use Notepad, FrontPage or a stone tablet to "develop" scripts. And why the heck not? You ran the page and it either worked or it didn't.

In 2001 I got into the .NET beta thing pretty early, along with the new Visual Studio. I think the visual stuff in the app to this day came along to pacify the old VB6 crowd, but I don't know of anyone doing serious development using the visual tools. I've always been one to peck out the markup and C# in text.

And boy, that Intellisense is worth the price of admission. Type "<asp:h" and then tab and you've got yourself a Hyperlink control. Type "i" then tab and you've got ID=". In the C# side of things, "pub-tab-vo-tab" gets you to public void.

Now add in ReSharper, and I'm doing things like Ctrl-F to format code, optimize using statements and namespace references, ditch redundancies (like using "this" in a class when you don't have to), etc. Or highlight some private members, Ctrl-Ins and get public accessors generated for me. Or select and choose extract method, and just like that I have a logical piece of code broken out into its own method with the right parameters.

Visual Studio doesn't get you off the hook for knowing how to design software, but it does free you of the burden of knowing every class name in the framework or dealing with mundane syntax issues. That's empowering and saves time, and best of all, allows you to concentrate on solving actual problems.

To that extent, I think Microsoft has done a pretty terrible job in marketing that ability outside of the core people who already know. When you read a blog post like that one, you can only wonder what they'd think if they saw you working with VS. It's far from perfect, but it makes my life crazy easier.

ReSharper 4.0 is out!

Jeff — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:10:00 GMT

The best $199 you'll ever spend if you use Visual Studio...

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Microsoft interview fail

Jeff — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:12:00 GMT

Well, I don't have to worry about moving to Seattle, because Microsoft is not making an offer. So now that it's all in the past, I feel like I can talk a little more openly about the experience.

I won't say which group it was that I was approached by, but I will say that it was not one that I expected. My expertise is largely in the ASP.NET space, and this was a PM gig definitely not in that area. It was initially pitched to me as being heavily related to my experience, so I figured, sweet, I could totally do that!

The job was actually posted after that, and the written description was a little different than I expected. But still, this was Microsoft, and there is certainly a lot of opportunity there in the bigger picture. And did I mention they were footing the bill for the visit?

My first interview was actually with one of the .NET PM's, which was cool because I felt like there was more to talk about there, even though I wouldn't be working directly in his group. We talked about how I'd handle a crisis with regard to shipping something, and I gave my best strategy based on my limited knowledge of the organizational structure (it was based on a real problem I'm not allowed to talk about :)). He also gave me a coding problem, which was surprisingly hard to get my head around without Visual Studio. I'm a refactor-until-it-works kind of guy, and boy do I realize that now! But it was still a fun exercise.

The second interview was with a senior PM in the group I was interviewing for, and that's where my impression of things started to change. The conversation was all over the place, which perhaps was a symptom of going out for lunch. I started to also get the feeling he was very disinterested in me. That's kind of intangible, but I kept getting the feeling I was inconveniencing him in some way. That really put me off. Checking e-mail and using his mobile device while chatting put me off even more.

From there, he asked me some very vague and abstract questions, leading me in kind of random directions. I know from reading other interview accounts that there tend to be a lot of complex scenarios thrown at you, but they're defined well enough that you can make actionable responses. This was not one of those. I asked a lot of questions, but I wasn't getting what I needed to make any kind of intelligent response. It's like someone asking you, "How would you make something?" It depends on if you're talking about software or woven baskets!

The third interview was better, but again with the e-mail checking or whatever. Come on, man, I had to come 2,000 miles for this! If you can't do me the courtesy of listening and learning about me, it's really hard to sell myself! I was really put off by that, to the extent that I started to feel like this wasn't the gig for me. Honestly I was so excited about coming to Redmond that I never even synthesized that as a possible outcome. I left the building feeling really let down.

Not surprisingly, I didn't get the gig. I think the position itself was a mismatch for my background, and that was the first issue. The second is that the quality of the interviewing wasn't particularly good (except for the first guy, who I wouldn't be answering to anyway). I've had far more vigorous interviews that did a better job of assessing my capability.

Now that I've had a couple of days to think about it, and have a sort of closure with the non-offering, I think I have some conclusions I can draw. The first is to remember what I learned years ago with meat market recruiters who put me places like Progressive (the worst consulting gig I ever had), in that it's a good idea to understand for yourself if the position is right for you in the first place. Just because it's Microsoft calling doesn't mean that the gig is right. Duh.

Second, while I was disappointed with the experience, it's not a reason to write off Microsoft as a whole. My experience as an author, and as a customer needing a little help, has been awesome. Heck, it has been better than awesome. There are a lot of very smart and passionate people there.

Is there a big job change in my future? I'm not entirely sure. As I said before, I wasn't actively looking as much as I thought it'd just be a good idea to be on the radar in Washington. It helps to understand what your worth is every couple of years and evaluate if you're getting what you want out of your current job.

Bottom line, the experience was worth it. And visiting my future brother-in-law and his family was certainly an awesome perk.