Keith Pleas Blog

INETA Speakers Bureau - New Additions

What with all the pressures leading up to TechEd next week, the INETA Speaker Committee still found time to evaluate all of the candidates proposed for addition to the Speakers Bureau. After careful consideration by, actually, quite a few people, we are pleased to announce that we are now adding a "baker's dozen" new speakers:

Congratulations!

".NET Designers"

I'm working on a series of small pieces for an area of MSDN online called ".NET Designers". The first one is about looking at the Microsoft sample applications through the lens of the Patterns and Practices security model. We have a few ideas about where to go from there, but I'm particularly interested in what design issues .NET developers are currently struggling with.

So...I'd like to hear what topics you'd like to see covered. Ideally, you'll add a comment to this post but it's OK to send me something in mail (keithp@guideddesign). If I end up using your idea, I'll send you a copy of either Microsoft's book "Building Secure Miscrosoft ASP.NET Applications" or its soon-to-be-released companion volume.

VB gets a little respect. Very little. Tiny, even.

Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent piece about software prototypes entitled "The Iceberg Secret, Revealed" back in February, and I just ran across it. As I mentioned last month, I did some contracting for Joel circa 1992.

[krp: I originally identified Joel as a Mac-head, then as a Java-head (see comments)] Imagine my surprise when - in his piece on prototypes - he actually referred to VB! Specifically, he said "...mockups, created in Photoshop, not even VB." So, hey, VB's a better mockup tool than...Photoshop? Well, I guess we have to take our victories where we can.

Anyway, I did dozens of VB prototypes for Microsoft in the 90s. I did a bunch for the "Cairo" UI, the original demos for handheld devices back when Microsoft was trying to interest Japanese manufacturers (I think some of the lessons learned have been forgotten in the interim), all of the prototypes for the Microsoft At Work (or "MAW", over my loud objections) devices, and even a cool little consumer app for subscribing to and reading comics online (which required lots of, um, research ). Probably my favorite was a visual programming tool for gradeschoolers that Bill himself was supposed to be excited about. Ironically, while he actually presented a bunch of my demos, sometimes in public keynotes, it was always someone else who showed him how it worked. I also tested a lot of these things in the usability labs, which was always a humbling experience. You've got the most obvious feature, and the "user" can't find it to save their lives. Even with someone sitting there saying "this feature is on the screen you are looking at" they say "no, it isn't".

Often I worked with designers, translating their ideas into something that could be demo'ed and tested. Of course, they used Macromedia Director, not Photoshop. And sometimes things got lost between the prototype and the final product. Tabbed dialogs are a great example: The designer (and I) build in smooth animation showing the selected tab coming forward. The developer says, screw that, I'll just blit the thing and save a bunch of cpu cycles. And the designers overcomensate, so we get crap like the flying folder animations. At least Microsoft at that time had a central design vision and a chief UI designer, Virginia Howlett. She even wrote a book about UI design for Windows (I was the tech editor).

Of course, I also wrote important, production code using VB. Let's see, there was the MindMaze game in the first version of Encarta. And the "Tour" that shipped with Windows 95 (and the reason it came with the VB3 runtime). OK, maybe that stuff wasn't really so important after all. But at least it wasn't Microsoft "Profit", that best forgotten accounting package that was developed by Great Plains. May it rest in peace.

So...much of what Joel said in his prototyping piece rang true for me. In particular, his admonition to do what you think is best rather than to always give the customer what they said they wanted. Frank Lloyd Wright did exactly that, and look where he ended up. Which reminds me of the time I put zooming and panning into the MAW fax prototype, even though the PM told me to delete it. Then Brad Silverberg accidentally demonstrated it to a meeting of the entire Windows 95 team and everybody went "wow"! Sometimes you win, and other times...well, as Keynes said, "in the long run we're all dead anyway".

"The Dullest Blog in the World"

My girlfriend - who reads my blog regularly, even though she's not at all technical - just sent me a link to a story in today's Seattle PI about the "Dullest Blog in the World". I'm not sure if she's trying to tell me something - like maybe mine is duller? - but, what it all comes down to is context and perspective.

In the dullest blog, the blogger is "meticulously chronicling mundane events in his life". Dull? Not to a behavioral scientist! If it were truly comprehensive, it might be a goldmine of information.

Software conferences are typically held in conference venues, adjacent to - and sometimes mixed with - conferences in radically different industries. I recall the VBITS show in SF a while back that overlapped an Elvira convention. While some of the developers took notice of all the Elviras (Elvirae? Not sure how to pluralize that) running around, I'm fairly confident we were well under their radar.

And at an Internet developer show in San Diego in '97, we were thoroughly mixed in with a show by the AATB (American Association of Tissue Banks). There was a fair amount of confusion, particularly when I started my presentation on programming Windows Sockets with a slide taken from the other show for a talk entitled "Characterization of an Athymic Rat Bioassay for the Determination of Osteoinductivity of Demineralized Bone Matrix", which was actually happening next door:

Now that sets some kind of benchmark for dullness, don't you think?

My dinner with Scoble

I had dinner with Robert last night. Our central topic was, where's the smart client going?

We talked about how lousy the Web interface really is. I've lost a number of partially complete blog posts to browser nagivation behavior, which is extremely irritating. And then, today, I run across a private rant about how poor the online purchasing experience is for such everyday things as airline tickets (I always call the United Premier desk and talk to a real person) and car rental (ditto with Hertz). Amen. The only Web site I visit regularly is EBay, but that's only because Google hasn't figured out how to reference all that material.

So we also talked about Google. He uses the Google toolbar, I am working my way through the book "Google Hacks", and Don says it's the only thing he uses a browser for. And then - just now - I get an email about Peter Coffee's piece on Google as an OS.

What does this have to do with the smart client? Well, I also just ran across a piece saying that Windows XP is the dominent OS for accessing the Web. Followed by a Reuters piece about Longhorn.

Putting it all together, I think that the next big battle is going to be between Google and Microsoft.

This is progress?

Everybody's raving about it: Don, MSDN Mag, even Steve Gilmore said that "What Bosworth soon will know, and Ozzie already does, is that RSS is nothing less than a new platform for development and deployment." The war of the aggregators is heating up! Threaded navigation! Content push! Right to your desktop! .NET Source code available! The dawn of a new era! Yeah, right...

I've got nothing against this stuff - in fact I'm using SharpReader right now - but all of this is oh-so-familiar. And I'm not talking about the curious fact that nobody got paid to create content, then or now. <g>

Climb into the way-back machine and travel back to 1991 when a number of user / programmers banded together to create Lurker, a (gasp) threaded, customizable, open source, readwriteable front end to CompuServe. The "team roster" in January 1992 showed 58 members (more on that in a subsequent post) who, working together, managed to get about a .8 release together of a program that was actually quite a bit more comprehensive in scope than the aggregators being used today. It had a built-in phonebook, an extensive UI customization including fonts and colors, support for files and libraries (a CompuServe feature similar to a moderated FTP server), rather sophisticated communications code (CompuServe at that time used a proprietary protocol and made it difficult for outside developers to build tools). It even had a pretty cool icon:

Ah, those were the days.

So...in the course of a dozen years, we've moved from tree-navigable, threaded view of content of interest to..the same thing? From a 200K redistributable to something closer to 20MB (times 3 on disk)? A complete develoment environment came on three floppies to one that ships on 6 CDs? From an (ASCII) character stream to an (XML) character stream. From VB to ... C#? And this is supposed to be earth-shaking progress? I'm underwhelmed.

Connectix

ScottGu was on my plane down to the Connections show in NOLA last week. Of course, being who he is, he was banging away on a laptop up until the last second to board the plane. When he went to put his laptop away, I noticed another one in his bag and said "Two machines"? He said, no, he's actually carrying three laptops. Ugh. Sounds like a job for Connectix Virtual PC for Windows, a competitor to VMWare that Microsoft liked so much, they bought the company.

The recent (and ongoing) Windows / VS 2003 launch event utilized the Connectix product for several of the demos, which was the first time I've gotten a chance to use this kind of product. I also used Virtual PC to set up the ASP.NET hands-on-labs for TechEd, and I'm pretty impressed. Of course, it's not perfect: It won't run the PocketPC Emulator so the mobile labs had to go on to a VMWare machine. But it's amazing how painless it is to use.

In fact, a friend of mine who's a developer on the next generation of stuff built around the next version of the .NET Framework (how's that for obfuscation!) is using the Connectix product to develop production code. Rather than repaving his machine when he gets new daily builds, he merely copies an image that he's already built with the base stuff. Now getting up to speed on a new build is a matter of a few minutes.

Another downside to the Connectix product? Well...you can't use TermServe (or Remote Desktop Connection) to get to an image.

But for demos, it's hard to beat. There's even an option that allows you to discard changes at the end of a "session", which guarantees you can get back to a "known good" state before doing the demo the next time.

"Ask The Experts"

I'm managing the "Ask The Experts" booth at Connections this week in NOLA, after an all-day INETA board meeting on Monday. This area at the show floor entrance is put together by Microsoft's Eric Ewing (the guy behind the CodeWise Community) and when we did it at VSLive in February, there were usually a half-dozen speakers hanging out there at any given time. Tons of fun!

Here's a picture from today when things slowed down a bit in the afternoon: (l to r) Steven Smith (from ASPAlliance), Brian Loesgen (INETA board member), Ken Getz, Carl Franklin (who does the .NET Rocks show), Marcie Robillard (the DataGrid Girl), and a 'Softie (forget his name) who supports ASP.NET and deals with the ASP.NET MVPs.

The questions we get are the best part: a truly random selection of everything related to developing for the Microsoft platform. Lots of questions about SQL Server since there's a SQL track here. Thankfully Fernando Guerrero was around in the morning since all the Microsoft SQL guys bailed yesterday, leaving not a single SQL person at the show (or, more importanly, at their booth).

My favorite discussion was yesterday when a guy who develops gaming software for Las Vegas casinos described some of the systems they've been putting in place to monitor all of the games on the floor. Did you know that entire card decks are marked on their edges with barcodes so the monitoring software knows the entire layout of the deck before play even begins?

Another long conversation I had today was with a fellow who's responsible for an airline ticket application that aggregates information to/from web services provided by multiple airlines. We spent 45 minutes diagraming out his application architecture and talking about the design tradeoffs involved at the major functional areas. Fortunately we were next to the Microsoft booth and I was able to co-opt one of their connected PCs to show him all the design guidance available on the Patterns and Practices site.

A surprising number of people are still doing "legacy" Windows development using VB and C++, though they are starting to do new work in .NET. So lots of InterOp questions.

And questions about side-by-side versioning of the runtime. And, of course, tons of tweaky ASP.NET questions. Fortunately, there was always at least one ASP.NET "expert" around to field those (not my strongest suit). Scott Guthrie even came by a  couple of times, but he wasn't there when somebody asked about the next version of Web Matrix, which Scott posted about last month and I just now remembered seeing.

Lurker in Las Vegas

Bill Beeem commented on my second blast post and tossed in Las Vegas. Wow, that's another memory jolt. What he's referring to was Comdex, cira 1994 or so, when I put together a room block for 20+ VB developers at the Golden Nugget. Why the Nugget and not a hotel on the Strip? Well, it turns out that Kenny Wynn (brother of Steve Wynn, who was clearly the model for the hotel owner in "Ocean's Eleven") was (still is?) a VB programmer! So we got a great deal and Kenny even showed up and picked up our breakfast one morning. Anyway, I rented a large passenger van to ferry people to the show.

But the other memory that this triggered was the Lurker project. Anybody out there remember that?

A Ritz-y launch event

Scott mentioned doing launch events in the PNW. I was fortunate enough last week to have the opportunity to do the Architecture track for the Puerto Rico launch event. Which was held at the Ritz-Carlton. On the beach. Very arduous duty. <g>