Jesse Ezell Blog

My Aggregator Is Cooler Than Yours

Ok... only one dev day in during the trip back from the ISV tour, but lots of cool stuff coming down the pipes...

ISV Tour

Down in Austin at Microsoft's ISV Tour event. Pretty cool deal, I'm suprised that there aren't more people down here. Mike Amundsen is down here with a few other trainers and we are having a blast. Lots of great info on the Windows Server 2003, security, and ADAM today. Tomorrow, I think we should be going over Windows Sharepoint Services (which is actually included with 2003, and doesn't rely on Sharepoint) and the EIF (which is probably the most poorly documented piece of the framework). If you can spare a few days, you should definately catch this tour when it comes to your area... Well worth the price.

I am not giving away free shirts!

This is one of the strangest things. A while back, Sam mentioned he wished MS gave out free shirts still. I responded that they still do (to which he responded, "those aren't the kind of shirts I mean). Anyway, that post has about 22 referal links from various google searches that have been run for "Free Shirts". Maybe this is because google ranks the post 11th on the list for "Free Shirts," which itself is strange enough. But, what is even stranger is that people keep emailing me and asking me to send them these free shirts and posting comments like this:

• re: Free Shirts
  kishore
  Posted @ 6/1/2003 11:07 AM
  #1029,krishna hostel iitmadras,chennai,india
• re: Free Shirts
  Josh S.A
  Posted @ 6/1/2003 8:43 PM
  Will be great if u send me the Shirt at
  
  9- Lee Street , St Albans , Victoria , Australia 3021
• re: Free Shirts
  zeeshan
  Posted @ 6/20/2003 12:30 PM
  a-1547 gulshan-e-hadeed phase 1 bin qasim 49 dist malir sindh karachi pakistan plz give me free t shirts thankyou

Do these people even know how to read? I don't see how anyone could get the impression from the text of the actual post that I am giving away free shirts...

 

while(Coder.LOC < LOC.Max)

"The idea is that it’s not so much a good idea to measure how many lines of code a developer is producing (e.g. 7 per day), but rather how many lines of code they are responsible for. And that there’s an absolute maximum. In other words, once I’ve got 50KLOC, I’m done – all my time is going to be spent in maintenance.

I’m not saying 50K is the number – in fact the number will be different for different developers – but the idea that a single developer has a capacity resonates with me. I know how hard it is to go back to things I haven’t looked at for even a week when I’ve got a lot of stuff going. And forget about supporting code that I wrote two years ago."
[Craig Andera]

An interesting suggestion; however, as the codebase matures, it makes sense that the LOC per dev would grow (it is far easier to maintain 50K than to hand code / test / and debug 50K). If anything, you would need to at least have a shift in the location of your LOC. For instance, you have a method called DoSomethingFairlySimple, which does something that is fairly simple, in fact, simple enough that the 20 lines of code in there can be 99.999% certified bug free. As this is a simple method, the implementation isn't going to change, so should I let it eat into my LOC? Additionally, what happens when my RssZeroDotNineOneParser class matures to a point where it is extremely stable and can parse any feed I throw at it? The RSS 0.91 spec isn't going to change, so can I remove this from my LOC, or do I spend time maintaining a piece of code that doesn't need refactoring / matinence. It is entirely possible to refactor something too much, just as it is entirely possible to overdesign the solution in the first place. As has been pointed out before, the entire point of refactoring is to make upcoming changes to your codebase easier, so if there are not going to be any modifications, why do the extra refactoring in the first place?

But, we must always keep in mind that if our code is self-documenting where things are clean, and manually documented where things are sticky, then we should be able to take just about any member of our dev team, plop them down, and have them add functionality or perform fixes on old code when the need arises--regardless of whether their max LOC is 100 or 100K.

OpenSource vs. Microsoft: The Marathon Begins

Yet another group warns people to hold off on open source software purchases (or should I say downloads?). There seems to be a trend developing where companies are warning people to abstain from Linux while saying it is OK to embrace Microsoft. Quite the opposite of a year and a half ago. I have to hand it to MS, they are really turning things around.

PHP BB

Paschal Frans mentioned PHP BB as being one of the few open source projects that has graphic designers. I have to say, the design is pretty slick.

If you look at the avatars, you will find these characters:

One Two Three Four

Anyone besides me recognize these classics (guess open source graphic artists are good at stealing art too...)?

This is not a Newsgroup

Please! There are so many community resources for getting help with your .NET technical problems. If you don't want to use the Microsoft Newsgroups, then go to CodeWise community and that will lead you to many communites that have forums and newsgroups. www.gotdotnet.com/codewise

Many of the people who blog actually spend a lot of their own personal time hanging out on these newsgroups and forums answering questions. That is where to get help. Not by randomly choosing a blogger and filling out their contact form."
[Julia Lerman]

Please don't blog your tech support questions either. That is what the newsgroups and forums are for. Opening up a question for discussion to your readers is one thing, but "how do I get this select statement to work" makes for very boring reading.

Microsoft to Crush Macromedia?

"It will be interesting to see what happens with Macromedia whose announced there intention to expand Flash into a full platform for rich client software development. (more details)  Don't be mistaken this is a frontal attack and Microsoft has already registered the potential threat to their platform.  If Macromedia gains any traction watch for the sleeping giant to wake and start f*cking thing up.

So how will Microsoft respond?  We'll they could just buy Macromedia (there were rumors about this in the past), or just develop the own vector based UI format and animation apps and it looks like this is what they're doing.  At the last CHI conference Microsoft recruiters were looking for PMs to staff a new app to make it easy to create lick-able interfaces in Visual Studio.  I think they'll do well with the traditional VB/C# developers, but they may find courting the graphic designer audience more elusive.  At CHI they kept talking the technical ceiling in Flash and how they wanted to make it much more powerful.  I hope Microsoft hasn't forgotten about the power that comes from making things easier and more accessible."
[Micah Alpern]

Will MS Leave C# Behind?

Keith thinks VB developers are making a mistake if they switch to C#:

"What seems clear to me, though, is that any particular developer can't optimize for both ends of the spectrum at the same time. What's has been sacrificed so far is the focus on the end-user's needs. Microsoft has talked about re-enabling RAD - and has indicated that the emphasis will be on VB - yet C# developers seem to believe that they'll get all the RAD stuff as well. Can that really be true? Can Microsoft really optimize a programming language & toolset for both solutions builders and platform builders? In my opinion, VB developers transitioning to C# are betting the answer to that question is "yes". And I don't think that - in the long run - that is going to be a good bet to make, particularly if your strength lies in building end-user solutions."

First off, I would like to point out that there is no "official" comments from MS on this yet, so everything here is speculation. However, I have heard the message too, and I think you are missing the point. Both C# devs and VB devs are going to get the productivity benefits of future versions of the .NET framework (ie. DataSpaces, ASP.NET 2.0, Cool WebService Tools and Extensions, etc.), which significantly outweigh the benefits of some UI enhancements that might appear in only one of the code editors.

A substantial portion of the design time functionality is built into .NET as well, and is NOT language centric (see the System.ComponentModel namespace and all the Designer classes in the framework). So that ain't going away any time soon either.

However, it is correct to say that VB.NET is going to return to its "RAD roots" (By RAD, we mean it will be quick and easy to create slick little mom and pop apps with it again). But serious development and serious productivity has little to do with your code editor and little to do with which .NET language you are using. Yah, maybe you can code faster with auto-complete, but if your application is designed properly, you are going to need that auto-complete a hell of a lot less, because you won't be rewriting it every 6 months.

To that extent, we will be seeing a lot more tools focusing on "non-coding" time that are built into / integrated with VS.NET (think support for patterns within the IDE and within the .NET Framework, refactoring support, automated testing tools, etc.). These types of things, once again, are NOT language centric, so no matter what language you are using, you are going to be able to use them.

In any case, there are numerous reasons to transition to C# from VB and numerous reasons not to transition from C# to VB. These have all been hashed and rehashed, so there is no need to mull over them again; however, I am very sure of one thing: if you have a valid reason to make the switch, don't delay it because you are afraid that 5 years from now you will miss out on some hypothetical VB.NET code editor with a cool new version of auto-complete that does your coding for you.

.NET Show

You can find out all about the Architecture Summit on MSDN's latest .NET Show:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/episode033/default.asp

Great quote:

"I don't care if it runs on YOUR machine. We're not shipping YOUR machine."