Efficiency vs. Effectiveness, the CAB debate continues

There's been two great posts on the CAB debate recently that were interesting. Jeremy Miller had an excellent post over the brouhaha, citing that he really isn't going to be building a better CAB but supports the new project we recently launched, SCSFContrib. I think Jeremy's excellent "Roll your own CAB" series is good, but you need to take it in context and not look at it as "how to replace CAB" but rather "how to learn what it takes to build CAB". Chris Holmes posted a response called Tools Are Not Evil from Oren's blog entry about CAB and EJB (in response to Glenn Block's enty, yeah you really do need a roadmap to follow this series of blog posts).

Oren's response to Chris Holmes post got me to write this entry. In it he made a statement that bugged me:

"you require SCSF to be effective with CAB"

Since this morning, it looks like he might have updated the entry saying he stands corrected on that statement but I wanted to highlight the difference between being efficient with a tool, and being effective with the technology the tool is supporting.

Long before SCSF appeared, I was groking CAB as I wanted to see if it was useful for my application or not and what it was all about. That took some time (as any new API does) and there were some concepts that were alien but after some pain and suffering I got through it. Then SCSF came along and it enabled me to be more efficient with CAB in that I no longer had to write my own controller, or implement an MVP pattern myself. This could be done by running a single recipe. Event the entire solution could be started for me with a short wizard, saving me a few hours I would have taken otherwise. Did it create things I don't need? Probably. There are a lot of services there that I simply don't use however I'm not stoked about it and ignore them (sometimes just deleteting them from the project afterwards).

The point is that SCSF made me more efficient in how I could leveage CAB, just like ReSharper makes me a more efficient developer when I do refactorings. Does it teach me why I need to extract an interface from a class? No, but it does it in less time than it would take manually. When I mentor people on refactoring, I teach them why we do the refactoring  (using the old school manual approach, going step by step much like how the refactorings are documented in Martin Fowlers book). We talk about why we do it and what we're doing each step of the way. After doing a few this way, they're comfortable with what they're doing then we yank out ReSharper and accomplish 10 minutes of coding in 10 seconds and a few keystrokes. Had the person not known why they're doing the refactoring (and what it is) just right-clicking and selecting Refactor from the menu would mean nothing.

ReSharper (and other tools) make me a more efficient developer, but you still need to know the what and why behind the scenes in order to use the tools. I compare it to race car driving. You can give someone the best car on the planet, but if they just floor it they'll burn the engine out and any good driver worth his salt in any vehicle could drive circles around you. Same as development. I can code circles around guys that use wizards when they don't know what the wizard produces or why. Knowing what is happening behind the scenes and the reason behind it, makes using tools like ReSharper that much more value-added.

SCSF does for CAB what ReSharper does for C# in my world and I'll take anyone that knows what they're doing over guys with a big toolbox and no clue why they're using them anyday.