Archives
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Edit and Continue Leads to Bad Programming Habits?
One of the things MS is returning to VB with the Whidbey release is Edit and Continue Debugging feature. I for one do not see why this is such a great thing, and I was a VB 3-6 programmer. I never used this feature, and don’t encourage its use. I talked to a couple developers last night about this, and they were all in favor of it. They were trying to say that it saves them time coding and debugging, but if it takes you that long to build and step thru code to get to the area of code you are trying to debug, maybe the problem is your architecture, not the debugging tools. I break my apps into logical and physical components, and create test harnesses for each component. This way I get true unit testing, and only have to concentrate on debugging one component at a time. Once I get the component working correctly, I rarely have to step thru it while debugging another component. It makes my life so much easier, and eliminates the crazy spaghetti code that can occur if you try to put everything in one project. If I have to go too deep into a component, I trying to see if I really need it all in one component. Sometimes I do, but more than likely, I didn’t, I was just lazy, and didn’t split it out. Without Edit and Continue, it forces me to evaluate if I really need that code in the same project. Just my opinion.
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Don't Forget About Becky Dias
I’d like to add to the group of blog entries on Women Speakers at tech conferences, and along with the others mentioned, I’d like to add Becky Dias to the list. She helped Chris Sells with the XMLDevCon, did some impromptu presentations, and participated in the speaker panel. I was really impressed, and during the conference I was thinking that I’d like for my two daughters to see Becky do a presentation or two. She would be a great role model for girls that are interested in IT.
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JCL
During drinks and hanging out with the other .Net bloggers in NYC, the strangest of topics came up, JCL. Anyone under 30 probably has no idea what JCL is/was (not my quote), but it stands for Job Control Language, and it is used on IBM Mainframes to control batch job processing. There were only two of us there that had any idea of what it was, the rest were baffled. JCL had to be one of the funkiest “languages” I’ve ever learned (and one of the first). Any language that uses reverse logic should buried and forgotten. JCL if statement equivalent has no associated else, and the statements within the if only run when test is NOT true. How wacked is that?
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Async Invocation App Block
If you ever need to create a batch processing subsystem, I’d highly recommend checking out the Async Invocation App Block. If you are willing to adjust your architecture to match its design (requires SQL Server and adding a specific interface to your batch components) you can easily add it to your system. Otherwise, you can do as I did and modify it to meet your architecture. I had to remove the SQL Server sections, and replace it with business objects and an Oracle backend. My only compliant is the lack of a business layer. The data access layer us used directly by the thread processing, but considering all the other good things it is well worth using. It also makes us of the Exception Management Block.
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NYC .Net Blogger Meeting Tomorrow
Just a reminder, if you live in the NYC area, we are all getting together at the NYC.Net User Group Meeting @VSLive. Tim, Rob, Samer and I will all be there, and will be going out for dinner afterwards, and everyone is invited to hang out as long as you want.
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Rory Says “XML is the Rogaine of the developer world”
Finally got some time to delve deeper into Rory’s web site, and came across this hysterical quote in the The Neopoleon Guide to XML For Non-Tech Types section. If you read all the way to the bottom (trust me it is worth it), he has the quote to end all quotes:
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RSS for Charity
XMLDevCon was great, but one of the unexpected highlights of the conference was Rory Blyth’s blog entries, and his skewed perception of life. Rory has really out done himself with his latest idea, RSS for Charity. What it is? A very unique use for Amazon’s Web Service (presented at the XMLDevCon by Jeff Barr) that can generate some money for charity. You definitely got to stop by Rory’s site and check it out. Expect to see this button all over the web:
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MS Looking for a Graphics Software Architect
A great way to see into the inside of a company is to check out their public job postings. With all the rumored work being done on the Longhorn UI, I was surprised to see this posting on the MS job site. It is one hell of a job req, and this person will be critical in developing the future architecture of Graphics on the MS platforms. Here’s a section that would be of most interest to the general developer:
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PDC Session List Revisited
Brad Abrams put up a post a while back asking for feedback on the initial PDC Session list, and I added my comments, but never posted them here.
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Networking to Stay Employed
Here’s the last in my series of non-coding blogs. As someone who has done some hiring of programmers over the last couple months, I can say from experience that it is not just a case of too many programmers and not enough jobs, or outsourcing causing the problems in the current tech job market. It's a multilevel problem that starts with lots and lots of inexperienced programmers (who flocked to IT during the dot com boom) looking for jobs. These inexperienced programmers are flooding the market with resumes, just trying to make something stick. These resumes are making it impossible to try to find the good quality programmers' resumes. To make matters worse, you can't even go thru a recruiting agency or a consulting firm, because any recruiter that was worth anything got out of that field when the jobs got scarce. So the recruiters aren't doing their jobs and just push the bad resumes along.
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Business Analyst – The Lost Art Form
Continuing my trend of business related blog entries, I thought I’d comment on Martin Spedding’s latest blog entry, “Outsource Coding, When Not If”. Some of what he is saying I agree with, but outsourcing has been around forever, and has had limited success. I can’t see the outsourcing success rate increasing in the near future. The major reason is due to the lost art form that was the Business Analyst’s role. The way it is suppose to work is the business analyst understands the business process, the system analyst talks to the business analyst and builds those needs into a corporate wide systems approach, and the programmer analyst talks to the system analyst to make sure the program meets the needs of the business users, and the corporate systems needs. During the 90’s the business analyst’s role was slowly diminished to the point that the position is rarely used anymore. The death of the analyst role was also fueled by the mass exodus from these positions to development positions during the Dot Com boom, and once things went bust, out went to developers, along with their analyst role. I have not seen a come back yet, but believe that in order to survive, companies will need to revive these roles. There was a time in the late 90’s where people predicted that a Systems Analyst with an MBA was the career choice of the future, but the future is here, and I still don’t see these positions, and my consulting clients are Fortune 100 companies. If they are ever going to get outsourcing to work, they are going to have to bring back the analyst roles.
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Don Box Cuts His Hair?
Could it be that DB actually cut his hair? He mentions it on his blog, and Scotg has a post, but I haven’t seen a picture yet. Somebody has to get a picture and post it for all to see. Scot has a cool list of DB's Hair FAQ:
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Lack of Appreciation/Understanding for Developers
A couple months back a bunch of us had a cool thread going on feeling like your programming talent is underappreciated. Basically, a few people mentioned that it seemed like the artist got all the praise for a good website design, but no one (but us) seem to be impressed over a fully functional database driven backend.
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Blogshare Listed
Jeff Julian let me know that this blog has been listed on Blogshares. Seems as though I need to post the following on my page to claim it.
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Springsteen Tonight at Giants Stadium
My punk and metal friends will cringe reading this, but I’ll be at the Springsteen show tonight at Giants Stadium (first of 3 shows for me). It’s not so much the music, as it is the opportunity to tailgate with my friends (since elementary school) and our wives. Springsteen is pretty cool live. He hasn’t broke into my top 5 live shows, but he still does pretty well. I’ll make up for seeing Bruce, by going to the Warped Tour in Asbury Park in August.
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SharpVectors Mentioned On XML.Com
Sean Gerety let me know about this. It seems that SharpVectors was (barely) mentioned in Paul Prescod’s SVG Open key note speech “SVG: A Sure Bet”, and it was published on XML.com.
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W3C Releases Third Working Draft of SVG 1.2
There wasn’t an official announcement, but it seems that the W3C has released the third version of the 1.2 working draft. Most folks wouldn’t even notice this, but if you check out the details, they added support for Rendering Custom Content (RCC), which happens to look a lot like the stuff in my XMLDevCon presentation. What it does is allow you to create your own custom UI Widgets (like element behaviors does) or XForms element, and bind them to transformations. This way you have code reuse, but everything is rendered down to pure SVG.
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Scoble and Today’s Dilbert
I’m beginning to think that Scott Adams has been reading Scoble’s Blog lately. Check out today’s (July 17, 2003) Dilbert. I wouldn’t be surprised if the recent Seattle Post Intelligencer article on corporate blogging (with quotes from Scoble) had something to do with today’s Dilbert.
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XML and SuperString Theory???
As you can tell, the XMLDevCon is still affecting my brain. On the flight home, while watching the movie “Bringing Down the House”, my mind started to drift. The XMLDevCon experience was starting to mix with the Discover and Scientific America magazines I was reading and I remembered a post I made a while back on XML and the SuperString Theory. I didn’t come up with any new insights, but maybe someone out there is willing to lend a hand. Here’s the original post:
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Ideas, Not Beliefs
During the XMLDevCon I noticed that you could divide the people into two groups: those with ideas, and those with beliefs. Whatâ€s the difference between them? To borrow from Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, People are comfortable changing ideas, but usually don't change beliefs.
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XMLDevCon Summary
I’m writing this as I’m flying back home. Which is a couple days ahead of schedule. I had to change plans due to some family matters, and miss the SVG Open. Don’t worry, nothing life threatening, just something that required me back home. Here’s my summary of the XMLDevCon.
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Missing the SVG Open
Unfortunately, I had to fly back home early from the West Coast to attend to a family matter. This meant I had to cancel my 2 presentations on SharpVectors at the SVG Open. Now I consider SharpVectors to be one of my most important projects, and only family could have dragged me away from doing these presentations.
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Adobe Announces ASV6 Tech Preview Release
Just got an announcement from Adobe on the svg-developers Yahoo Group, that they just released a Tech Preview of Version 6 (skipped a couple release numbers) of their SVG Viewer. You can download it here.
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Link To My Presentation Code
Here's the link to my presentation code. It's a quick and dirty index page of some of the examples, and the presentation.
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Major VS.Net and SVG Annoucement At XMLDevCon
I'm currently in the middle of the Whidbey XML Tools Demo at the XMLDevCon, and the biggest thing for me was the
announce of SVG support in the next version of VS.Net.That includes an editor and a rendering engine. This is the first time MS has offically released anything that could render SVG. -
One Presentation Down, Two to Go
Well, the more prestigious of the presentations is done, now for the debrief. I thought the presentation was going to be short, but I wound up running over, and was not able to show the Bar Codes Web Service. Shows you how much I know. Lots and lots of questions, which is usually a very good sign. I didn’t think that many people would be interested in a presentation on Declarative UI using SVG, so I was surprised about the number of questions. I guess that I’ve been doing this stuff for so long without much interest from the outside world, that I’ve accepted that most folks don’t get it. Obviously I was wrong. Lots of folks get it, and are interested in it. Then why don’t SVG books sell? Hmmm. Maybe the SVG books are missing the target audience.
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Quote of the Day at XMLDevCon
Don Box gets the quote of the day from the XMLDevCon (and more than likely, the conference):
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Blogging From XML DevCon
Just wanted to stop in an say hi from the DevCon. I'll give updates as the come in. My presentation is at 1:00PM PDT. Introduced myself to Don Box, and we didn't destroy each other, so we must be different people.
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The Cagle Principles
If you don’t subscribe to Kurt Cagle’s Metaphorical Newsletter, you might want to stop by and read his latest entry. The section on Event Loops, XSLT, and XForms is a must read for anyone playing on the fringe of XML development and functional programming. It reaffirms my ideas of SVG as a meta language for GUIs.
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Re: Browser of the Future
I just ran across this blog entry from Richard Tallent’s Randomize Blog about his predications on the future of the browser. I agree with a lot of his predictions, just not so sure about his ideas on SVG and XHTML. He seems to think that we don’t need to re-invent to wheel. I’m starting to think that although we may not need to re-invent the wheel, we sure need to swap our old wooden wheel for a nice new one made of rubber and steel.
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WordML And OLE Documents
Although there are lots and lots to like about WordML, my one big problem with it is when it comes to Object Linking and Embedding Documents (aka Ole Documents, or formerly compound documents). Since in Office 2K3 beta 2 both Word and Excel can be saved as pure XML, I assumed (and you know what happens when you do that) that if you embedded an Excel Spreadsheet within a Word Document, and then tried to save it as XML you would get a multi-namespace document that had the Excel XML embedded within the WordML. Well I finally got around to testing it out, and to my dismay, the Excel document is not XML but a binary stream within the WordML document. It is embedded within a docOleData element, which is where I would have expected the XML to go. Hopefully this will be fixed by the RTM release, but I don’t hold out hope. The reason, when I try to do the opposite, a Word Document within Excel, and save it as XML, you get a warning that Excel “Cannot export XML data. The XML maps in this workbook are not exportable.”.
