Archives
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Pair programming in consulting
I have to admit I am a solo programmer: as a lot of my coding is trial-and-error I don't really like people watching me make mistakes or mumbling :-) More on the practical side, I think it is more efective if once the code is working *and* polished I explain the what's, why's and how's (something, ahem, I'm good at, ahem). But, as a consultant, many times I have to help my customers with their coding chores. Currently, for example, I'm helping a very experienced team to get up to speed with .NET distributed development. First all, we defined our architecture (security, layers, logging, etc., etc.) and then we prioritized the use cases. What is left to do every day now is to select a task, we discuss our options, do some drawings, and start to program (somebody from the team and me). I have to admit that I take the keyboard kind of reluctantly (remember my first line) but most of the times it works pretty well: after some stumbling, the job gets done; furthermore and to my amazement, my fellow programmer finds the experience *enlightning*, which to me is kind of funny (remember, these are pretty smart and skillful people, it only happens that they don't know .NET). As I said, given the choice I'd rather programmer alone and explain what I did later but if I am forced to do pair programming I have to admit the technique works really well.
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Looking inventory data from Excel
My brother Alex is one hell of a business apps developer. He's been for years using C/S tools and just a few months ago I convinced him of using ASP.NET, after some reticence he started to program in the .NET platform and it amazes me the various (somewhat small but certainly real life) apps he has crafted in this short period. Yet, Alex being mostly an alien to our O-O, XML, etc. hoopla, there is a number of things he hasn't been acquainted with. Last week, a customer asked Alex to create a tool that helped the customer salespeople to create proposals with Excel, mostly, the salesman didn't want to switch from Excel to a green terminal window to check product prices and stocks, I talked Alex about the Office 2003 Research Services and he (reluctantly again) agreed to give it a try, so we used the best part of yesterday and today afternoons discussing the architecture of the research pane (he knows a little about web services but nothing about XML) and then creating a couple of research services that do most of what his customer wants, Alex is impressed and even I am impressed with what we accomplished: it looks like we worked far longer than what we actually did. One point to note though, the Research Services SDK is indispensable to do this kind of job but it is somewhat awkward to use for me, moreover, it was completely irritating for Alex (who's a talented programmer who just doesn't know XML), besides creating the long XML response document is tedious: one could use a higher order API. All in all, my bro is starting to like Office 2003 and web services but still don't get what's the fuss about XML.
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And Shadowfax alpha...
As many of you probably now, Shadowfax is (or will be) an application block for writing distributed application around remoting, web services, Biztalk, etc. Just a couple of days ago a new alpha release was uploaded to gotdotnet and, as most of my consulting time nowadays goes around distributed applications in .NET, I have no other option than downloading Shadowfax and checking what Ron Jacobs and his mates are doing. Now, I really won't sleep this weekend!
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DataWindow.NET available for download
As I mentioned in a previous post, Sybase was about to release a public beta of their datawindow. It should be clear from my previous post that I used to be a fan (kind of small time expert, ahem) of PowerBuilder and of the datawindow object of course (but that was a long time ago :-(, nowadays a lot of people in Ecuador still use PB and know far more about it than I do). Anyway, today is the day: DataWindow Public Beta is available so, as we speak, I am downloading it (silly me, I thought I was going to have a good sleep this weekend).
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I missed the Channel9 presentation...
Christian was at the webcast but I couldn't make, too bad... but at least I was able to download the PPTs. Seems like we programmers will have a nice place to hang around, can't wait to see the details.
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PowerBuilder's DataWindows in .NET
I just received an e-mail from Sybase inviting me to the Beta Program of its DataWindow for .NET, I don't know in the rest of the world, but in Ecuador PowerBuilder created a significant amount of followers in the years of C/S applications, mainly due to the power and flexibility of its DataWindow object. To this days in Ecuador, there is a lot of people using PB (or "Power" as it's usual called down here); when we show them our datagrid they react with diverse degrees and flavors of "but the DataWindow does it (better) already", so it'll be interesting to see how the .NET implementation comes.