Fabrice's weblog : Opinions

Modern censorship you shouldn't ignore

Fabrice Marguerie — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Should I need a reason to hate Apple, it would be censorship.

This is not the first time Apple censors an application on the iPhone, but this time it's scarier.
They censor software, and they censor books. Are users of iPhones and Apple products fully aware of such things? As consumers, you have the power to react.

This is also ridiculous. As wondered in the original blog post, how is that different from using the built-in browser of the iPhone to access the same public content?

New York Times abandons WPF and Silverlight in favor of AIR

Fabrice Marguerie — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:25:00 GMT

The first version of the New York Times Reader was showcased in 2006 as one of the first and major WPF applications. Then, the Times Reader was ported to Silverlight, so it can work on non-Windows platforms such as Mac OS and Linux. The fact that WPF runs only on Windows was indeed a major concern for such a product.

The move to Silverlight was not a big success. The Silverlight version of the Times Reader suffered from technical issues and political rejection from Apple users.
There were hundreds of comments on the homepage of the Silverlight version. Roughtly half of them where related to technical problems, half to rejection. Many Apple users don't want to use Microsoft products.
Technical issues can be solved (over time), but solving rejection is another story (and I don't think it can be solved).

Version 2.0 of the Times Reader has been released recently, and what is interesting is that WPF and Silverlight have been dropped in favor of Adobe AIR.
No more political issues, a single code base, and less technical issues it seems.

This is a very interesting move. In fact, when I had to choose a technology for a new product a couple of months ago, I chose AIR too. As a .NET expert, I have of course considered WPF and Silverlight, but I had the same concerns as the New York Times.
A requirement was that the product should run on major platforms (Windows AND Mac at least), and even if Silverlight works on Macs, it was not a good choice for the same technical and political issues that the Times Reader faced. One big showstopper was the inability to create standalone desktop applications with Silverlight. It should be noted that Silverlight 3's out-of-browser mode won't be an answer to this because of its intrinsic limitations. AIR is much more powerful, with deeper desktop integration (such as file system access).

It will be interesting to follow what will happen over time, but in my book, Flash/Flex and AIR have a lot of advantages right now compared to WPF and Silverlight.
I believe also that the battle is not only on the Web and the desktop, but also on mobile devices. Something tells me that we'll see Flash on Android, iPhone and Pre before Silverlight. And that will make a big difference.

More about the new version of the Times Reader here, here and here.

Update: Here is the post that announced the original version for the Mac, based on Silverlight. I read a few months ago the comments made on this post. Have a look, it's very instructive. Oh of course, silly people posted comments there too...

ForEach debate continued

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:04:00 GMT

Eric Lippert, whose blog you shouldn't miss, adds his own arguments to the debate about whether using a ForEach extension method instead of foreach is a good idea or a bad one.

I don't see a definitive answer to the question. All the arguments given here and elsewhere are good, but in the end, it's up to you to decide what you prefer to do.
Read the posts and the comments to make up your own mind.

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

To var or not to var

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:24:00 GMT

C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 introduced implicit typing. When you use anonymous types, it's required. The rest of the time, it's mostly a judgment call to decide whether to use implicitly-typed local variables or not.
An interesting discussion is going on about this on Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo's blog. See all the comments.

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

Goodbye Acropolis, I hardly knew you

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:35:00 GMT

Ok, well, this is a catchy title, but this is the way I feel right now. When Acropolis was announced, it was supposed to become the industrialized replacement for the CAB (Composite UI Application Block) and the SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory). Unfortunately, the design focus seems to have shifted a bit. When I see the announcement of the second preview of Acropolis (July 2007 CTP), I'm very disappointed to see that the main new "features" revolve around the "fun" aspects of software applications more than around "enteprise" features. If Acropolis is here to help you create bling-bling applications, well it's not the application framework we need.

In the new preview, the major improvements are related to the support for transitions (fancy animations when switching views - rotations, 3D effects and the like...), and the support for theming (custom themes and styles). Of course there are also improvements on the design-time support, but when I see "for instance, you can now use the Application Designer to select your themes.", this does not look like something critical.
It's very disappointing to see that Microsoft is focusing on the eye-candy features at this stage of the development...

At my client - a major bank - we need to create modular applications because all the software pieces created in-house have to work together and with the current growth we need to foster reuse through the creation of components. We also need to speed up the development of new applications and provide guidance for the developers. This is why we developed an application framework using the CAB and a custom guidance package. We provide the developers with a custom shell and templates for their projects. The modules developers create are hosted in a common shell that provides a standard set of services. Considering that my post in the Acropolis forum didn't receive any answer, it looks like this is not the way Acropolis is heading.
Also, in the user interface we build, we tend to rely on Visual Studio-like docking. This allows us to create integrated business environments, similar to the IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) we all know. Again this does not seem to be part of the Acropolis plan.

I've just noticed that someone has already raised concern about this in the Acropolis forum. Brad Abrams's reply to the concern aims to be reassuring, but I'm not fully convinced. "Keep in mind, we are still very, very early in the acropolis project...there is time to develop the core ideas more fully." Personally, I'd like to see the the "core ideas" developed first, before the decorative features.

We'll wait to see where Acropolis goes next, because it's to early to throw it away like I appear to do with the title of this post. However, if it doesn't move in the right direction, we may have to create our own tool to build composite and standardized applications. Maybe we'll stick to CAB and improve it, or start from scratch after all.

Change tracking, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and DataSets

Fabrice Marguerie — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:58:00 GMT

Andres Aguiar started an interesting discussion about disconnected operation and change tracking in the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Andres regrets that the Entity Framework doesn't provide change tracking information:

This basically means that if you plan to build a multi-tier application with ADO.NET Orcas in the middle tier, you will need to hack your own change tracking mechanism in the client, send the whole changeset, and apply it in the middle tier. From this point of view, it's a huge step backwards, as that's something we already have with DataSets today.

In a reply to Andres' post, Udi Dahan states that an application should not rely on change tracking information.

I believe that there are several kinds of applications and I don't think everybody must move to a unique kind of application. Some application don't require change tracking, others do. I've worked on applications that require it and Andres describes very well how they work in a subsequent post. One additional advantage of having state information is that you can display a collection of items (often details in a master-details relationship) in a grid, with changed items in italic, new items in bold and deleted items with strike-through text.
I don't understand why an SOA architecture wouldn't allow an UpdateOrder kind of command, but if it's the case, then a lot of applications are not compatible with SOA. If the ADO.NET Entity Framework or other mapping frameworks do not provide change information, then I'd say that DataSets are here to stay for a while...
I don't think there can be only one architecture for all applications. Both approaches described by Andres and Udi should coexist. If the ADO.NET Entity Framework doesn't provide support for change tracking, then another tool is need for some applications. If the the Entity Framework is open enough, then maybe extensions to it can add the support for change tracking?

My experience writing the LINQ in Action book

Fabrice Marguerie — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:49:00 GMT

As we are about to reach an important step with the LINQ in Action book that will make the first bits public, we start to look back at what we did and how it happened.

Steve, who is working on the book with me, says that writing a book is hard. Roy, who is working on his own book for the same publisher, says that writing a book is like developing software. I agree with both of them!

Let me try to expand on what Steve and Roy wrote and throw in my own experience:

As with any other activity you're serious about, including programming, dedicated time and a quiet environment are required.
You need to get in the flow and preserve the bubble so can actually produce something.
Writing is like a full time job.
As with software, if you are passionate about your work, you are always thinking about what you are writing or going to write, and how to improve it. If you are not a professional writer, you have to share your time with other projects. I'm used to this because I'm always juggling with several projects at the same time, but I guess it can become difficult to handle if your mind is not prepared to this.
Defining the table of content (ToC) is the first step. It can take a while, but it's crucial for the rest of the project.
The ToC should reflect all you want to tell to the reader, and how you want to communicate it. It's all about content, structure, and your book's story. As a writer, the ToC is your roadmap all along the way. A ToC is not perfect on the first shots. For LINQ in Action, we did more than 20 rewrites of the ToC before it reaches its current state. And it can still evolve a bit... We got what we wanted to tell defined pretty quickly, but finding the best way to organize it took some time.
To get you started on a chapter, collect all the ideas you want to include in it, and throw them in. Don't worry if it looks like a bunch of wild ideas that don't seem to play well together. As you make progress on a chapter these ideas may fit in the flow. You can always decide as you go if you want to keep a topic, move it to another chapter or throw it away.
Writing a book is not a linear task.
Writing a book, even a technical one, is a creative work. It requires inspiration and this does not come all at once and in a continuous flow. Sometimes you'll be productive, other times you'll feel like you have wasted a lot of time writing just one page. At times, it's important to just let ideas come and what you want to write will end up emerging. Keep pushing to get things done, but allow some time for creativity.
A book is not just a collection of chapters put together.
A chapter is not a standalone piece of work. If it was, you'd be writing articles, not a book. A book's chapters are linked together and build one onto another. When you create the table of content, you define where chapters go because there is a logical order between them. But when actually writing a chapter, you'll find that you should refer the user to some previous chapter and expand an example that was introduced before. You should also let the reader know in advance if you'll get back to a subject later in the book.
Not all chapters are the same.
The kind of work can be very different from one chapter to another. Some chapters are about introducing a topic, some mainly provide code samples, some are more about theory, others are more about best practices, etc. Each chapter is a different story. Of course it's better if your chapters can mix all this together because it's better for digestion :-) Some chapters (most in fact) are very difficult to write because you need to find the right way to explain a specific topic and of course almost no information is available yet about it to help you out.
A chapter does not represent a bounded unit of work.
You can't start one chapter and write it from start to finish. A chapter requires several passes. You write a first draft; you start working on another chapter; your editor reviews your first chapter; you take the edits and comments into account; you resubmit your chapter for review; you get new ideas for your other chapter; you need to update your first chapter because Microsoft finally decided to release a new preview that breaks everything you have written so far; and so on.
Refactor, refine, improve, rinse and repeat.
When you finish (or so you think) your first chapter and you are happy with it, you are eager to send it out for review. You are confident that the content is great, the style better than anything else you have ever written so far, and you get ready to receive positive comments. Maybe someone will find some glitches here or there and suggestions for ways to improve a paragraph or a title, but it should be ok... After all, you spent a month on this chapter! What a disappointment when you have to realize that in fact it's not so great and you have more work to do on it than what you have done so far! A chapter is never finished in one shot, nor in two. A book requires a lot of work, a chapter requires a lot of work, a paragraph, a line, a caption all require work and work and work.
Nothing is perfect in this world. Your book won't be either.
As I wrote, you have to get back to each chapter again and again. But if you are perfectionist or if you listen to all the feedback you can get from all the reviewers, you can quickly feel overwhelmed and get crazy. Everything people will tell you is true and can be used to improve you book in wonderful ways. But this is your book. You write it. Reviewers review and can only make suggestions. You have to make choices, and at some point you have to stop working on a chapter and move on to the next one.
You need to find the right examples, the best sentence. This is what can make a difference between a good book and a great book, but you can easily become a prisoner of your book. You may want to give as much information as possible, but you have to accept that it's not possible to cover all the details. Throw away some of what you wanted to cover. Keep what's essential and focus on it.
Involving friends and other external reviewers in the process is good for your mental health.
Working on a chapter is a lot of work and can be stressful because there are some deadlines to meet. If you can show to someone what you have so far, even if it's a draft, it can help you actually feel that you do have something done. Feedback helps you make progress in terms of quality of course because your reviewers can tell you what they think of your work, but it also keeps you going on.
The reader is king.
Never forget that you are not writing a book for yourself, but for the reader. Try to think like your reader. What does he know? What does he want to read? Would he be bored by your prose? Have you lost him in your convoluted explanations? Step back a bit and rewrite as if your reader was in front of you and he's reading above your shoulder. Stop once HE/SHE is ok with what you wrote :-)
It always takes more time that you expected.
It's just like with software projects. You think you can finish in time. You tend to ignore the difficulties ahead. Writing a book is hard, but more than that it's very time consuming! Of course it gets harder if you don't have time allocated to this activity. I have the luck to be able to keep time for writing. It's not as rewarding as doing consulting as far as money is concerned, of course. This is something you need to consider seriously if you plan to write a book. All in all it's an interesting challenge, but far too much time consuming.
Things are lot harder if you are after a moving target.
Writing a book is hard and takes time. But if that's not a big enough challenge for you, choose to write about an unreleased product or technology. LINQ is constantly evolving and the shape it will have in the end has started stabilizing only a few weeks ago. We started working on the book several months ago and information was missing on a lot of topics. We had to dig by ourself to understand the technology and investigate to find how things work. I guess that this almost always happens with technological books. Our work as authors is in part to find the information for the readers. It's hard work that adds to the actual writing work.
The work varies a lot depending on your publisher.
Each publisher has it's own processes and quality standards. I don't have experience with other publishers, but I find that Manning is very involved. They don't just take an author or a book and publish it. They guide you and make sure that your book is in good shape. They are also supportive and they are always available if you have questions and need advice. I can see that it's quite different with other publishers, some of which just expect you to deliver on time.

All this ends up a lot longer than I expected, but hopefully it will be useful for someone. It's time for me to get back to the chapter I need to finish...
Feel free to comment I you have a similar or a different experience.

Cross-posted from http://LinqInAction.net

"Java succumbing to .NET in my organization", a Java developer

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:20:00 GMT

A Java developer reports that the management of the group he works for inside a contractor company has decided to move from Java to .NET. The developer gives the reasons he sees behind this decision.
I guess we could sum up what he writes like this: "Too much choice is bad". Probably not much you don't know already, but it's an interesting read. Is this a trend you've noticed?

Of course choice is good, and I hate to see everyone wait for Microsoft to provide a solution to all their problems. But having too much options seems to be a problem, especially for managers who prefer not having to make choices...

Read "Java Succumbing to .NET in my Organization"

PS: of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of choice in .NET considering that we have close to 900 tools and libraries in the SharpToolbox!

Sun is really funny

Fabrice Marguerie — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:57:00 GMT

Two months ago, I've been contacted by a lawyer who asked me, on behalf of his client - SUN Microsystems, to change the name of my site http://JavaToolbox.com.
As you can tell from the name, this site references the development tools and libraries, like SharpToolbox does for .NET, but for the Java world.
Now, tell me, is this site a blatant counterfeit of the Java trademark, as they say? Isn't my site about Java? Isn't it clear for everyone that this site is not related to Sun?

Have they even looked at the site? I don't think so. You know what? I believe that they don't care. They don't want to support people helping them doing business.

It's really funny to see how Sun behaves, compared to what Microsoft does to help us, the community, to promote and use their technologies. There are several links from Microsoft sites to mine, I've been named an MVP, I've had direct contacts with Microsoft employees, etc. The only contact I had with Sun: a lawyer!

On more thing: they spend a lot of money attacking individuals who are not able to defend themselves. But wait, isn't it strange that they do not attack big sites like JavaWorld, Javalobby, JavaBoutique, OnJava, O'Reilly Java, who do not even mention the Java trademark?...

Update: see also the discussion on TheServerSide.com et sur Application-Servers en français.

Post-Whidbey work for Microsoft

Fabrice Marguerie — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 06:12:00 GMT

Microsoft's developer division is now engaging on MQ, a milestone that is post-Whidbey and pre-Orcas that will focus on quality.
This sounds good. A focus on quality is always good.

But Eric, are some of you working on the upcoming VS 2005 service pack? It's good to focus on quality at a high level, but a lot of small quick fixes are needed too, and much sooner than Orcas, please.
It would be good news to see Microsoft really commit on delivering patches for Visual Studio... this time. It's not good to delay fixes to major releases of the products. In the meantime, people are working with your products, and there are known bugs that could be fixed with intermediate releases or patches.

Microsoft is big. A big follower.

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:34:00 GMT

I've just read an interesting post from Scoble (a Microsoft employee) where he writes that Google has disrupted the businesses of Yahoo and Microsoft.

This got me thinking one thing about Microsoft. For Microsoft employees, everything should be Microsoft and Microsoft should be everywhere.
The problem for them is that the world is moving so fast nowadays that they can't keep up and are lagging behind. Last time I saw Steve Balmer, he was all after Google and Yahoo. It's a real obsession, a blinding one I'd say. And we can now see the results and where Microsoft is heading.

How come Google is so strong nowadays? Did they try to copy something? Well, now they are, on some projects, because they can't stay in there own corner and have no choice but to compete with some other market players. But at the beginning they came with something disruptive (like Scoble says). Something that turned out big.
What is Microsoft doing lately? It is running after Google like crazy, trying to duplicate everything Google does (search, map, portal, etc.). The result: lower quality products, no innovation. Why can't Microsoft come up with something new, something original, instead of trying to be everywhere, and in the end going nowhere? Come on guys, you can do better.

If we look at live.com for example, it does not look good. No Firefox support? You gotta be kidding? Crashing IE? Great!...
Experiences like this will harm Microsoft's image. This company already looks like a follower. Now it will look like a bad one.

I am not a Microsoft employee, so I don't really care. I just find it interesting. It's fascinating to see all this happen from an outside viewpoint.

Update: Scoble has another post about the subject.

Windows everywhere, step 2

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 12:55:00 GMT

Windows Live: Scott Hanselman doesn't get it.
I don't need these products either, we have other products elsewhere.

But my point is that I'm not so sure the new "Windows" branding everywhere will be good for adoption...
This change is already happening for developers, as we noticed already, but I do not think that it's such a bright idea. I think it's even worst for web sites and general consumer products. How do you feel about search sites or webmail sites that are tied to the Windows name?

Update: I've just tried live.com... With Firefox: "Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)". Silly. But wait. With Microsoft Internet Explorer: "IEXPLORE.EXE - Application Error - The instruction at "0x63644648" referenced memory at "0x0000001c". The memory could not be "read". - Click OK to terminate"!!! No comment.

Microsoft needs to leave the cargo ship and jump aboard a speedboat

Fabrice Marguerie — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:17:00 GMT

Paschal complains that using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 in real world is not that easy.

I think a lot of teeth grinding is to be expected next year in enterprises when managers wondering why there is a sudden productivity drop will have to hear that people who have been learning .NET for years now need to relearn how to work with .NET and Visual Studio!
Microsoft is moving slowly lately, in the sense that they prefer big bad updates such as the "VS 2005 / .NET 2 / SQL Server 2005 / Biztalk 2006" pack instead of regular and agile improvements. Where are .NET 1.2, .NET 1.5 or Visual Studio 2004? C# 2.0 has been ready for years and we still cannot use it for production! This is just an example.
I'm not even talking about ~~Longhorn~~Windows Vista (you know, the one that looks so small in a telescope).

Apparently Microsoft is aware of the problem and I think we will see some changes next year with the Atlas project or Cω and the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework, which will be delivered as interim releases or upgrade packs... Well, at least I hope so!

Did I already tell you that I hate the new web project model?

Fabrice Marguerie — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 16:52:00 GMT

Let me say it one more time: I hate the new (and improved...) web project model in Visual Studio 2005.
The more I work with it the more I hate it. Microsoft, please reinstate the previous model for the final release!

Here are new complaints for the day.
Because there are no more project files like a .csproj or a .vbproj, you cannot open a web project by double-clicking on the project file. It is also not possible to use drag&drop to open a web project. You have to start Visual Studio first and navigate to the folder you had before your eyes in the Windows Explorer.
It also not possible to know whether a folder is a web project or not by looking at it, because nothing differentiates it from any other folder.

The list of new problems goes on and on. Once again these are things we were able to do with the previous versions of Visual Studio, and things we can still do for other kinds of projects with Visual Studio 2005.

Please let Microsoft know that we'd like the previous model back!

[OT] Is hate commonplace in the USA???

Fabrice Marguerie — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 23:22:00 GMT

Sorry guys, I can't keep this one for me!
How can a country like the USA have people like this notorious hater and terrorist supporter express freely on a nation wide media?!? I know this guys does this for money, but that probably makes things worst.
Do people really watch this channel? I can't believe it!

I purposefully duplicate the text here because I certainly do not want to link to the original site!

Missed Opportunity

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

By John Gibson, Fox News

You may have noticed the news out of Singapore Wednesday:

The host city for the 2012 Olympics was picked. New York was out early and that was a big relief to me, personally. I think New York needs a rest from big events. All that security wears on you.

Then it was down to Paris and London. And the Olympic big wigs picked London.

All day long people have been saying to me, "Wasn't it great they didn't pick Paris?" And I've been saying, "No, no, no."

Paris was exactly the right place to pick and the Olympic committee screwed up.

Why? Simple. It would have been a three-week period where we wouldn't have had to worry about terrorism.

First, the French think they are so good at dealing with the Arab world that they would have gone out and paid every terrorist off. And things would have been calm.

Or another way to look at it is the French are already up to their eyeballs in terrorists. The French hide them in miserable slums, out of sight of the rich people in Paris.

So it would have been a treat, actually, to watch the French dealing with the problem of their own homegrown Islamist terrorists living in France already.

What would the French have done about rounding up their own citizens?

Would they have afforded their own terrorists the rights they insist we give the detainees at Gitmo? Not a chance. They'd throw them in the clink, or ship them off to North Africa pronto.

Would they have blocked terrorists at the border with unreasonable search and seizure — precisely what they say we should not do? Of course they would. Anybody looking faintly Arab would have had the gendarmerie on them in a flash.

It would have been a delight to have Parisians worried about security instead of New Yorkers. It would have been exquisite to watch.

But, alas, they picked London. I like the Brits. I like London. I hate to see them going through all this garbage when it would have been just fine in Paris.

C'est la vie. Goes to show the Olympic committee doesn't recognize the perfect opportunity when it presents itself.

The day after he says:
"The bombings in London: This is why I thought the Brits should let the French have the Olympics — let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while."