WebLog of Ken Cox

Are Software Development and IT Careers Doomed in North America?

2013-04-14T01:29:00Z

In the Internet age, a developer can work from anywhere. I do off-site consulting work from my lakefront home in Canada’s near North.

However, as Canadians have learned this week, North American programming and support is increasingly done in India. Well-paid corporate IT jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate as companies look to low-wage outsourcing centres.

Given the alarming Canadian experience this week, a North American college student should think twice about pursuing a career in software development, especially in mid- to large-scale companies. A promising career and a comfortable living could come to an abrupt end.

The raging controversy and boycott campaign this week swirled around Canada’s biggest, richest bank – The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).

An RBC whistleblower complained to CBC News that RBC was using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to bring in workers to take over 45 IT jobs, including his. To add insult, the soon-to-be-fired worker, Dave Moreau, was required to train his replacement. Canadians were outraged that a respected and extremely profitable bank would be this callous to employees and work against the economic interests of Canada.

RBC started out by denying that it has hired temporary foreign workers at all – ever. That turned out to be a half-truth because it was working closely with a huge outsourcing supplier named iGate that obtains and manages the ‘global resources’, mostly from India.

People in the software development industry were mystified as to how a replacement worker from India could get approval for a work visa here in the current economic climate. Is there really a shortage of programmers in Canada? (It’s patently ridiculous to say there’s a shortage in this instance because the guy who wrote the code is standing there showing you how it works and doesn’t want to give up his job.) It turns out the Canadian government is pretty, er, flexible on who is allowed to work here.

In reality, RBC was letting go Toronto IT staff and outsourcing their jobs to save money. To their dismay, Canadians learned that this has been going on for a long time, is accelerating, and most of the biggest Canadian companies are heavily into outsourcing IT to India. If the work were done by employees in Canada, the low salaries and working conditions would violate our labour law. But what happens offshore is not the bank’s concern. These aren’t employees but “suppliers”.

Experts say that even if the Canadian government tightens up the TFWP to close the loopholes, the general offshoring of IT projects is unstoppable. The cost savings are so significant (Canadian salaries + benefits vs cheap contractors in India) that a company that doesn’t outsource to India is at a competitive disadvantage.

This isn’t a xenophobic issue – it’s social, economic, and political. When a North American corporation outsources projects and support functions they’re not looking at where you were born - many of Canada’s top paid programmers are immigrants - but how much you cost. Immigrant or native-born, the job is gone and so are you.

Just like your Nike running shoes… once the manufacturing goes overseas nobody expects them to be made in North America again.

Fix: Orchard Error ‘The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController.

2012-11-29T19:40:46Z

Suddenly, in a local Orchard 1.6 project, I started getting this error in ShellRoute.cs:

The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController.

Obviously I had changed something, but the error wasn’t helping much. After losing far too much time, I copied over the original Orchard source code and was back in business. Shortly thereafter, I further flattened my forehead by applying a sudden, solid blow with the lower portion of my palm!

You see, in testing the importing of comments via blogML, I had set the added blog as the Orchard site’s Start page. Then, I deleted the blog so I could test another import batch.

The upshot was that by deleting the blog, Orchard no longer had a default (home) page at the root of the site. The site’s default content was missing.

The fix was to go to the Admin subdirectory (http://localhost:30320/OrchardLocal/admin) . add a new page, and check Set as homepage.

Once again, the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. I hope this helps someone else.

Ken

Free Team Foundation Service a Boon for Play Projects

2012-11-02T02:02:53Z

My ‘jump in and sink or swim’ learning style leads me to create dozens of unbillable ‘play’ projects in Visual Studio 2012. For example, I’m currently learning to customize the powerful auction/fixed price/classifieds software called AuctionWorx Enterprise. I make stupid mistakes as I grasp a new API and configure projects. It’s frustrating to go down a rat hole and discover the VS IDE’s Undo doesn’t reach back to a working build from the previous weekend.

Enter Visual Studio’s Free Team Foundation Service. Put your play projects into the free source control and check in (or shelve) a snapshot before embarking on something risky. (I already use Discount ASP.NET’s Team Foundation Server hosting for client projects so there’s zero TFS/VS learning curve for me and first class GUI support.)

TFS is free right now for teams of five or fewer. I’m not naive enough to expect ‘free’ to last forever. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much Microsoft intends to charge in 2013 for TFS. In the meantime, why not grab some free source code storage?

BTW, it’s weird to realize that Microsoft is backing up my junky little playtime code on three physically-distinct servers every day - and taking incremental backups every hour.

Tell Visual Studio 2012 UI Designers What to Fix

2012-10-16T16:44:18Z

If you hate the default interface themes in Visual Studio 2012 as much as I do, you have another outlet to vent.

The UI designers have posted a survey where you can tell them how distracting and annoying you find the gray themes and black icons. You even get to comment on the (fixable) all-caps issue.

The UI people didn’t listen much to the (largely hostile) developer feedback during the product design – or more likely were constrained by some edict from on high - but seem more willing now to create decent themes for updates.

Here’s the Visual Studio 2012 Visual Theme survey URL

https://illumeweb.smdisp.net/collector/Survey.ashx?Name=VS2012ThemeSurvey

VS 2012 is a great product hampered by a lousy UI. If I could have a Visual Studio 2010 theme (with its coloured icons) I’d be more than satisfied with the 2012 release.

Web Development Goes Pre-Visual InterDev

2012-09-15T05:23:04Z

As a longtime and hardcore ASP.NET webforms developer, I’m finding the new client-side development world a bit of a grind. I love learning new technologies, but I can’t help feeling we’ve regressed and lost our old RAD advantage as we move heavy lifting to the client.

For my latest project, I’m using Telerik’s KendoUI in Visual Studio 2012. To say I feel clumsy writing this much JavaScript is an understatement. It seems like the only safe way to ‘write’ this code is by copying a working snippet from someone else and pasting it into my HTML page. For me, JavaScript has largely been for small UI tasks like client-side validation and a bit of AJAX – and often emitted by a server-side control.

I find myself today lost in nests of curly braces that Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D doesn’t seem to understand that well either. IntelliSense, my old syntax saviour, doesn’t seem to have kept up with this cobweb of code either. Code completion? Not seeing it.

As I fumbled about this evening, I thought about how web development rocketed forward when Microsoft introduced Visual InterDev. Its Design-Time Controls (DTCs) changed the way we created sites. All the iterations of Visual Studio have enhanced that server-side experience where you let a tool write the bulk of the code and manually finesse it from there.

What happened? Why am I typing properties and values (especially default values!) into VS 2012 to get a client-side grid on a page? Where are the drag and drop objects that traditionally provided 70 percent of the mark-up and configuration? Did we forget how to write Property Pages where you enter a value and the correct syntax appears magically in the source code?

To me, the tooling was looking the other way as the scene shifted from server-side code to nimble client-side script. It’ll have to catch up.

Although JavaScript is the lingua franca of web browsers, the language is unwieldy, tough to maintain, and messy to debug. If a .NET JIT compiler can turn our VB, F#, and C# source code into an Intermediate Language that executes on a computer, I don’t see why there can’t be a client-side compiler that turns a .NET language into JavaScript that browsers can consume.

Hate That Gray? Wash It Away! Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor

2012-09-06T14:35:49Z

Microsoft’s Matthew Johnson has updated his excellent free tool.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05

Once we repair the cosmetics, Visual Studio 2012 is going to be very good indeed.

Is there an icon editor for VS 2012?

An, Er, ‘Interesting’ Visual Studio 2012 Colour Theme

2012-08-19T05:16:00Z

After confronting the pathetic, grayed-out appearance of Visual Studio 2012 RTM for a few hours, I craved my relaxing VS2010 themes. I recalled Matthew Johnson’s excellent Visual Studio Color Theme Editor and wondered if it might install on VS2012. No go.

While probing inside his VS Studio Extension (.vsix is actually a .zip), I found a manifest file.

Could it be that simple to change the SupportedProducts node to

and the versioning to

To my surprise, the package installed with those changes!

However, my elation was short-lived and turned to horror. Microsoft’s UX team is double-over in hysterics right now knowing that they got me real good.

I can hear them chortling, “You don’t like our ‘Light’ theme? Then try our colour palette you ignorant b#$^%!”

When I selected the ‘Windows Aero’ theme from the freshly mixed case Theme menu, the resulting screen reminded me of a psychedelic Swedish underground movie from the seventies. If you’ve never seen what an IDE looks like in dayglow and blacklight, here it is. Not sure I can work with this either.

Visual Studio 2012 Downloads Start August 15th

2012-08-01T16:41:11Z

I see from Jason Zander’s blog that MSDN subscribers can download Visual Studio 2012 starting August 15th.

We’ll be officially in the Metro UI design era that bans gradients, rounded corners, shadows, and anything that looks rich or has texture. At the same time, it requires ALL CAPS in menus, plain blocks of a restricted set of colours and a drab, flat appearance. You’re seeing the theme on all MS web sites now - including the new Outlook.com. Oh well, styles come and go. Let’s hope this one goes sooner than later.

The Windows Metro UI is clearly a tablet-oriented UI that doesn’t tax the graphics card or use excessive resources. Pushing a boring, stark UI onto the desktop is a strange move. I suspect there’ll be a service pack or third-party utility to restore a traditional desktop look and feel to Windows 8 and boost corporate adoption.

However, as many have pointed out, if people continue to buy Windows 7 over Windows 8, Microsoft is in a win-win situation.

Fix: IIS and This page contains both secure and nonsecure items

2012-07-19T15:32:42Z

After moving a production site to use HTTPS exclusively (using the excellent IIS URL rewrite module), Internet Explorer 9 drove me nuts with the “Security Information” warning:

“This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?”

This was baffling, because the whole site was SSL using a genuine certificate and therefore had nothing nonsecure to send… At least I thought!

(I could get rid of the IE warning on my own machine by dumbing down the security with custom settings. However, I wanted a proper server-side fix.)

What I had missed was a script link in the HTML that someone had inserted:

The fix was to ensure that the link was to Google’s secure CDN:

It would be nice if the Internet Explorer warning included an option to “Show Me What Is Nonsecure On This Page” so we’d know what we’re getting into.

BTW, thanks to Ruslan for his valuable IIS URL rewriter module support blog at http://ruslany.net/2009/04/10-url-rewriting-tips-and-tricks/ .

Ken

Repairing The Visual Studio 2012 UI

2012-06-01T04:47:46Z

I have sympathy for ‘Softies who don’t like the controversial ‘Metro’ UI changes but are afraid to say so. After all, who wants to commit a CLM (Career-Limiting Move) by declaring that the Emperor has no clothes (or gradients) and that ALL CAPS IN MENUS ARE DUMB?

Talk about power! Here’s a higher-up (anyone got a name?) who has enforced a flat, monochrome, uninteresting user interface in Visual Studio 2012 that has been damned with faint praise by consumers. The pushback must have been enormous.

Some ‘Softies disengage from the raging debate with, “It’s not my decision” while others feebly point out that the addition of some colour pixels in the icons is a real improvement over the beta version. True, I guess.

With the UI pretty much locked, its down to repairing the damage. Fortunately, some Empire dissident has leaked the news to a blogger that those SHOUTING CAPs aren’t hardcoded afterall:

How To Prevent Visual Studio 2012 ALL CAPS Menus

And so it goes. By RTM, I’m sure there will be many more add-ons to help us ‘de-Metro’ VS 2012 and recreate our favourite Visual Studio 2010 themes for it.

VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

2012-05-30T01:15:00Z

I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly.

To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service. That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes. (The client didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.)

On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code.

The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version:

“WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$. Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo.

Ken

Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

‘By Design’? BindingFailure - An assembly failed to load while using XMLSerialization

2012-05-10T19:27:00Z

Here’s an issue that cost me several hours and I suspect that there’s something in Visual Studio 2010 – and the size of my solution – that’s to blame.

I was quite happily working in the MsmqToWcf example of the WF_WCF_Samples to learn about MSMQ. So far so good.

However, when I moved to my real project I got an exception in debug mode:

The assembly with display name 'Report.XmlSerializers' failed to load in the 'LoadFrom' binding context of the AppDomain with ID 1. The cause of the failure was: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Report.XmlSerializers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Unable to track down the error in my own project, I went back to the working example and gradually replaced the example code with my own code. Everything worked just fine!

Back I went to my own project and boom! That stupid stopped by debugger again.

A search on the InterWebs shows many people have had this one and it was reproduced in 2005 and filed as a bug in Microsoft Connect. The strangest thing was to see it “Closed as By Design”.

Okay, so Microsoft’s code is probing for a pre-generated assembly and throwing an exception as a binding failure.The debugger sees this and stops.

And this behaviour is ‘By Design’? That’s because if you aren’t debugging it won’t actually fail. How reassuring!

My sense is that since the identical code fails in one big project while working fine in another small one, there’s a timing issue in the code generation. Something behind the scenes isn’t ready on schedule and hundreds of developers have lost valuable time because of it.

Maybe people at Microsoft have such high end equipment (e.g., solid state drives) that they can’t reproduce these types of anomalies?

Anyway, as the guy says on TV, “JUST FIX IT”.

Ken

Visual Studio 11 UI Update - Improvements in RC

2012-05-09T14:42:00Z

I see by the Visual Studio Blog that Microsoft has backed out the worst of the darkness in the default Visual Studio 11 interface. Many of the ALL CAPS headings are gone and they’ve even added some colour to the previously monochrome icons.

This is certainly an improvement that we can live with. However, I still don’t understand why they’re being so stingy with the colour pixels. I call it the Visual Studio “Dungeon” theme.

The most intriguing part is that they’ve retained ALL CAPS for the main menu headings while conceding to mixed case for submenus.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I speculate that someone high up at Microsoft has mandated an unappealing ‘Metro UI Standard’. Obtaining an exemption is tough. Thus, you can negotiate mixed case submenu items where it doesn’t show as much. Hmmm… Is it that ALL CAPS on main menus had to remain so as to be consistent with ALL CAPS on forthcoming Windows apps like OFFICE?

It sounds like somebody in a position of authority declared that icons must now be flat, dull and hard to recognize. If their consumers scream loud enough, a group (like VS) might be allowed to add some colour pixels back into the icons. Not too many, mind you. We need to retain some dungeon-like consistency.

All this is simply conjecture on my part. I really love the development features in Visual Studio. The productivity I get from Intellisense, syntax colouring, and the debugger far outweighs the minor annoyances of someone fiddling with the user interface colours.

Ken

A Small World in ASP.NET–NimblePros Acquired by Telerik

2012-04-26T18:36:00Z

A few weeks ago, fellow ASPInsider Steve Smith of NimblePros passed a client to me. It’s a part-time “tweaks and maintenance” gig for a small startup. I was quite happy to take this on. I’m mostly retired and no longer work fulltime but still want to keep my hand in ASP.NET and Visual Studio - and earn money for toys.

The way I heard it at the time, NimblePros was giving up the smaller client because a bigger customer wanted the Nimble Pros to work fulltime on its projects. To ensure their availability, the big client was buying the whole company.

So, I picked up the development work on the site and have been happily moving it towards the public release. My new client spoke about the need for additional search and filtering functionality on some grids. I said that if they weren’t wedded to a pure Microsoft solution, I’d recommend the impressive Telerik RadGrid that I’ve used in other projects.

To that end, a couple of days ago, I noticed a new item in my TODO list mentioning “Telluric (sp???) as a possible tool”.

Today, I learn that NimblePros is now part of Telerik. More specifically, part of the Telerik Enterprise Services group.

Good luck to Steve and Michelle Smith and their NimblePros crew! It’s a small world, but yours just got bigger!

Ken

Full Disclosure: Telerik gave me a free subscription to its control suite when I was still an ASP.NET MVP.

CSS Float: Visual Studio 11 Beta Still No Help

2012-04-24T00:02:00Z

Despite great strides in ASP.NET Design View, CSS float remains problematic for Visual Studio. A simple two column CSS float can be unintelligible at design time. You often have to scroll way to the right just to see where it went.

Sometimes I think I spend half my day trying to get div boxes to float properly this way or that. It shouldn’t be that hard.

We all know we’re supposed to use CSS instead of table cells. It would be nice if VS 11 beta had provided decent support for this often-used, standards-based Web page feature.