July 2003 - Posts
Tomorrow night at 7pm there will be a special NYC .NET Developers Group meeting at VSLive. Billy Hollis will be giving a talk on Advanced Windows Forms Techniques.
Afterwards, Tim, Don, Rob, Josh, and I (sorry if I missed anyone) will be going out for dinner and some drinks. Stephen Forte, one of the moderators of the NYC .NET Developers Group and a Regional Director, may be coming as well but he also strongly recommended that we attend Midnight Madness at VSLive for some free give aways.
That's all I have for now.....
INETA is pleased to announce the first "Volunteer of the Year Award". Julie Lerman, founder and leader of the Vermont .NET Users Group (www.vtdotnet.org ) received the 2002 award during a meeting of INETA User Group Leaders held in Orlando Florida at the ASP Connections conference.
Julie earned the award through her work with the User Group Relations Committee where she has enthusiastically met newsletter deadlines, been an active participant in the INETA forums and has had interaction with many user groups around the USA and the world.
The INETA board of directors appreciates the time, intelligence and effort Julie has contributed to INETA and wanted to make sure she knew that we noticed!
[INETA]
I don't know if this was mentioned before or if it's old news but I just saw it for the first time and it deserves mentioning again. Congrats Julie!!!!
Today, I had a long discussion with one of my co-workers about naming conventions for WebForms in a project we are both working on. The discussion revolved around the question of whether forms should be named Noun+Action or Action+Noun. For example, let's say you are writing a contact relationship management WebApp where you have clients who own accounts. The question is do you name the form where you do the editing of account information EditAccount.aspx or AccountEdit.aspx?
My co-worker argued the side of the former while I was advocating the latter. I might not do it justice, however, the basic premise of his argument was that it's linguistically more natural and intuitive to call the form ActionNoun than NounAction. And while I fully agree that it's more linguistically natural, I think from an organizational and maintenance stand point it's structurally unnatural.
My reasoning is based on the fact that after maintaining our classic ASP app I soon realized that the noun part is what you are usually updating and maintain when new specs are drawn up. For example, a new field is added to your account object say for instance inception date which must show up on every account form. With the ActionNoun convention, I have to go hunting for the EditAccount form which may be surrounded by a half a million other EditNoun forms, such as EditClient. Next, I have to go hunting for every other form that does any other operations on accounts.
How do I know how many there are or what they might be called? The answer is I don't. It's error prone because a form can easily be missed especially if you aren't simply look for the "Edit-" and "View-" forms. If a form existed to transfer accounts for example it's extremely specific and I might not think to look for a form beginning with the word "Transfer". Also, people use alternative verbs whereas usually the noun is defined by the business. An account will always be an account but I might "edit" an account while you might "update" one (same thing different words). On the other hand, if the convention is NounAction, I know that all my account forms will be right next to each other and therefore not so easily overlooked.
I try to use this convention with my forms/controls whether in both web projects and windows projects and also with my stored procs. Stored procs I try to use the convention Tablename+Operation. So for example the name of a stored proc to retrieve an account from the Accounts table would look like AccountRetrieve. Personally, I recommend it because it's easy to find related procs this way using a statement like
select * from sysobjects where name like 'Account%' and type = 'P'
or even
select * from sysobjects where type = 'P' order by name
Someone starting in the middle of the development cycle can easily get used to this rather than looking threw a million and one proc that begin "Get".
Ok, well that's enough of that discussion for one day but if you have a better way let me know.
Recently, I made some drastic changes to my homepage. I never really kept up my homepage since I created it way back when I was first learning HTML so I thought it was about time. I'm going to start making a concerted effort to keep it a little more interesting and try to update it at least quarterly. So.... I was hoping to get some feedback about the content and design of the site. I, also, finally updated my resume, which is posted on the site, so if you have any comments about that too send them my way. You can reach the site (it's a bit slow) via the link in my "News" section any of the following URLs:
http://www.amunra.us
http://www.SamerIWarrior.com
http://www.SamerEyeWarrior.com
(I apologize for not blogging in a long time however I've been both extremely busy at work and at home. We have been short-handed at work but the number of business unit we support and amount of work requested/deadlines has increased. Also, when you live in the Northeast you have to take advantage of any nice weather you can get and we just started getting some.)
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