Rockford Lhotka

Careers at Magenic

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:13:52 GMT

Every now and then I do a blog post about working at Magenic. About YOU maybe working at Magenic.

With luck, the current upturn in the US economy will continue. Certainly we are seeing robust business opportunities across all of our regional offices (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco) and at a national level in places like New York, Charlotte, LA, and elsewhere.

As a result, Magenic is actively seeking to hire consultants with several key skill sets, including:

.NET development
iOS development
Android development
SQL Server
Business Intelligence
SharePoint Server
Project management
Program management

You can see more details about career opportunities and information about Magenic on our Careers web page.

I want to make two broad observations.

First, Magenic provides broad career opportunities. We hire people right out of university to work in our Minneapolis-based Delivery Center. And we hire experts with many years of experience in our areas of focus, with the expectation that they’ll provide great service to our customers, as well as mentoring and coaching for Magenicons with less experience. As you can imagine, we also look for people anywhere between college graduate and amazing expertise.

If you want to work with some impressive experts in an open and sharing environment that supports learning and growing, this is the place to be. That’s true if you are just getting started, are well into your career, or have experience and expertise to share with others. In short, this is good place to work if you want to build your career.

Second, our industry is in the middle of an exciting and turbulent time. The rise of numerous incompatible client devices and technologies, coupled with major changes in back-end server capabilities around public/private cloud computing, noSQL, and big data make for a very unpredictable future. Such turbulence provides great opportunity for personal and professional growth.

This idea of growth is particularly true for people who are passionate about technology and providing great solutions for hard problems. Even better is the opportunity to work with a whole group of people with this kind of passion, supported by a culture of sharing knowledge and supporting learning and growth of expertise. It is hard to imagine a better place to be during this period of major industry change than at Magenic.

CSLA 4 version 4.3.0 alpha available

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:15:02 GMT

I have posted an alpha version of CSLA 4 version 4.3.0 for download from the CSLA download page.

Although Jonny has been extremely busy with a number of bug fixes and some feature changes, I think the biggest change in this alpha release is a major optimization of the MobileFormatter.

MobileFormatter is used to serialize object graphs on Silverlight and Windows Phone. It is used by the data portal, and n-level undo (if you use that feature).

Until now, I have recommended that you use compression on the byte stream that flows over the data portal, because the XML created by the MobileFormatter is often quite large. It compresses efficiently, and we’re quite efficient about what we put into the byte stream, but it is just plain big.

Sergey did some really nice work for version 4.3, allowing the use of alternate reader/writer objects so the data can be serialized into something other than XML. Specifically, he created binary reader and writer objects that are around 70% more efficient in terms of byte stream size. That’s about as much as you could expect to get with compression!

The result is that you can probably avoid the CPU intensive overhead of compression and still get a small byte stream to transfer over the network.

The CSLA 4 version 4.3.0 change log includes a discussion of the configuration settings you need to change to use the new reader/writer objects.

This is a non-breaking change, because the default is the same behavior as in 4.2. But this is a big change and we really appreciate your help in testing the new reader/writer objects to ensure they work across a wide range of applications.

Using CSLA 4: Windows Phone ebook available

Rockford Lhotka — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:35:03 GMT

I am pleased to announce that the Using CSLA 4: Windows Phone ebook is now available for purchase.

If you purchased the Using CSLA 4 ebook series you already own the book, and can download it now.

This ebook (in PDF format) demonstrates how to create a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application that uses a business layer created using CSLA 4. This ebook also demonstrates the use of the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern in a way that is very complementary to the capabilities provided by CSLA .NET business objects, resulting in an application that is easy to build and maintain with clear separation of concerns between the XAML-based view, the interface control code in the viewmodel and the model composed of CSLA-based business objects. This ebook also makes use of the open-source Bxf MVVM UI framework.

The ebook includes a sample application demonstrating the concepts and techniques discussed in the book.

Here’s the high level content outline:

Introduction
Windows Phone
1. About Silverlight
2. Windows Phone Application Model
3. Silverlight Navigation
4. ApplicationBar Control
5. Overview of XAML
MVVM Design Pattern and CSLA 4
1. MVVM Design Pattern overview
2. Bxf MVVM Framework
3. Main Shell Implementation
4. CSLA .NET Windows Phone features
Business and Data Access Layers
1. Responsibility-driven design
2. Domain overview and implementation
Application Implementation
1. Windows Phone project setup
2. Main shell implementation
3. User scenarios

The Morning Brew turns 1000

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:27:50 GMT

One of my primary news sources is The Morning Brew blog. I have it in my RSS reader, and I at least skim through every post.

It amazes me how Chris is able to pull together the key information every day – his dedication and the quality of his work are commendable.

If you are looking for an easy way to keep up on what’s going on in the Microsoft developer world, this is your source!

Magenic Holiday Tech Gift 2011

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:31:37 GMT

One of the perks of working for Magenic is that Greg and Paul (the owners) give all employees a tech gift at the end of each year.

Past gifts have included Tivo units, Xbox consoles (with and without Kinect over time), GPS units, Kindle readers, you get the idea.

This year’s tech gift: a Kindle Fire with a one year Amazon Prime subscription.

Magenicons work hard to do great work for our customers, and this is one way the company shows its appreciation for that dedication. Thank you Greg and Paul, and thanks to all the Magenic employees that make the company a great place to work!

VS10 and SQL Express frustration

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:56:07 GMT

I try not to vent all that often, but this just seems deserving…

It seems like every time I install Visual Studio 2010, SQL Express doesn’t work.

I just repaved my laptop – new Win7 install, the whole works.

My previous install didn’t have working SQL Express – as in Visual Studio couldn’t create or open SQL Express files as part of a project. I’d spent a few hours trying to get it working – installing and uninstalling VS/SQL in various combinations to no avail.

The OS reinstall was, in part, because I figured I’d screwed something up so bad it just need a total restart.

Sadly, after installing Win7, Office, VS10, and then VS10 SP1 I still don’t have a working SQL Express – basically out of the box.

My conclusion? The VS10 installer is broken. What else could be wrong here?

At no point, on this new OS install, have I installed SQL Server by hand. The SQL Server install on the machine is directly from the VS10 install – and it doesn’t work.

The SQLEXPRESS service is running, but VS10 can’t talk to it.

I’m surely not looking forward to spending another ton of hours troubleshooting this problem – again. And presumably without success – again.

In short: WTF!?!

CSLA 4 version 4.2 released

Rockford Lhotka — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:30:06 GMT

CSLA 4 version 4.2 is now released and available for download.

The primary focus of this release is the introduction of support for mono (Mac, Linux), monotouch (iPhone, iPad), and mono for Android.

This version also supports Windows Phone “Mango” (SDK version 7.1).

You can now reuse your business code across .NET, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and these newly supported platforms as well. As demand grows to build applications that must work on various mobile devices, the ability to directly reuse your business classes is compelling!

Version 4.2 also includes a number of enhancements to the existing CSLA 4 rule engine, along with various other features and bug fixes. Check out the change log for more information.

Our next step is to provide support for Silverlight 5 in CSLA 4 version 4.3, followed by support for WinRT (Windows 8) in version 4.5. The expectation is that your existing CSLA-based business classes will continue to work in Silverlight 5 and WinRT, providing even more long-term reuse, maintainability, and cost-effective development.

Windows 8 and WinRT development whitepaper

Rockford Lhotka — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:33:35 GMT

I have been working with some of my colleagues at Magenic to write a whitepaper that summarizes our view on how “Windows 8” and WinRT affect existing Microsoft developers.

http://magenic.com/Portfolio/WhitePaperWindows8DevelopmentPlatform.aspx

If you’ve read my previous WinRT related blog posts you’ll see that the whitepaper is similar, but provides more formal analysis and information in a presentable format.

Improving CSLA 4 MobileFormatter behavior

Rockford Lhotka — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 18:41:27 GMT

One of the primary goals for CSLA 4 version 4.3 (the next version we’ll be creating) is to improve the performance of the MobileFormattter that is used for Silverlight and Windows Phone applications. This is made all the more important, because it will also be used in WinRT applications in the future.

Sergey (a CSLA dev team member, and Magenic colleague) has been doing some heavy research into this area, and we’d originally thought to do the changes as part of the 4.2 release. It turns out that doing a really great job of optimization will require some breaking changes – at least for people who aren’t using managed backing fields. So we are deferring the bigger changes until 4.3.

In the meantime, Sergey has blogged about how to improve performance of MobileFormatter in 3.8 and 4 (4.0, 4.1, or 4.2). These are changes you can make to your CSLA codebase now if you want some of the performance benefits without waiting for the “big change” that’ll come in 4.3.

VS Live Orlando in December

Rockford Lhotka — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:02:47 GMT

I’m speaking at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando, the week of December 5.

Billy Hollis and I are teaching a full-day workshop on Monday, covering XAML app design and development. This is a great workshop. Billy covers user experience design, and I cover distributed application architecture. Between the two of us, we cover what you need to know to build Silverlight and WPF applications that are usable, scalable and just plain awesome!

I also have two talks during the show, covering XAML binding, and how to use CSLA .NET to build applications for the web, Windows client, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android.

http://www.vslive.com

I hope to see you there!

Web sites vs Web apps

Rockford Lhotka — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:10:01 GMT

Joe writes a nice summary of why a web app is not a web page – it is something different, and in important ways.

http://www.misfitgeek.com/2011/11/html5-app-versus-html5-page/

This distinction becomes very important when considering building H5/js apps on WinRT in Windows 8, or if you believe (in general) that H5/js will replace existing dev platforms like Java and .NET. For that to happen, we have to stop thinking about HTML and js as web technologies – they must be thought of as general purpose technologies that sometimes happen to be used on the web too.

Silverlight 6 doesn’t matter

Rockford Lhotka — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:51:12 GMT

Disclaimer: I know nothing. The following is (hopefully) well educated speculation on my part. Time will tell whether I’m right.

I really like Silverlight. I’ve been a strong proponent of Silverlight since 2007 when I rushed to port CSLA .NET to the new platform.

In fact, Magenic provided me with a dev and test team to make that transition happen, because we all saw the amazing potential of Silverlight.

And it has been a good few years.

But let’s face reality. Microsoft has invested who-knows-how-much money to build WinRT, and no matter how you look at it, WinRT is the replacement for Win32. That means all the stuff that runs on Win32 is “dead”. This includes Silverlight, Windows Forms, WPF, console apps – everything.

(this is partially in answer to Mary-Jo’s article on Silverlight 5)

I wouldn’t be surprised if Silverlight 5 was the last version. I also wouldn’t be surprised if .NET 4.5 was the last version for the Win32 client, and that future versions of .NET were released for servers and Azure only.

Before you panic though, remember that VB6 has been “dead” for well over a decade. It died at the PDC in 1999, along with COM. But you still use VB6 and/or COM? Or at least you know organizations who do? How can that be when it is dead??

That’s my point. “dead” isn’t really dead.

Just how long do you think people (like me and you) will continue to run Win32-based operating systems and applications? At least 10 years, and many will probably run 15-20 years into the future. This is the rate of change that exists in the corporate world. At least that’s been my observation for the past couple decades.

Microsoft supports their technologies for 10 years after a final release. So even if SL5 is the end (and they haven’t said it is), that gives us 10 years of supported Silverlight usage. The same for the other various .NET and Win32 technologies.

That’s plenty of time for Microsoft to get WinRT mature, and to allow us to migrate to that platform over a period of years.

I don’t expect WinRT 1.0 (the Windows 8 version) to be capable of replacing Win32 or .NET. I rather expect it to be pretty crippled in many respects. Much like VB 1.0 (and 2.0), .NET 1.0 and 1.1, Silverlight 1 and 2, etc.

But Windows 9 or Windows 10 (WinRT 2.0 or 3.0) should be quite capable of replacing Win32 and .NET and Silverlight.

If we assume Win8 comes out in 2012, and that Microsoft does a forced march release of 9 and 10 every two years, that means 2016 will give us WinRT 3.0. And if we hold to the basic truism that Microsoft always gets it right on their third release, that’ll be the one to target.

I think it is also reasonable to expect that Win9 and Win10 will probably continue to have the “blue side” (see my Windows 8 dev platform post), meaning Win32, .NET, and Silverlight will continue to be released and therefore supported over that time. They may not change over that time, but they’ll be there, and they’ll be supported – or so goes my theory.

This means that in 2016 the clock might really start for migration from Win32/.NET/Silverlight to WinRT.

Yes, I expect that a lot of us will build things for WinRT sooner than 2016. I certainly hope so, because it looks like a lot of fun!

But from a corporate perspective, where things move so slowly, this is probably good news. Certain apps can be ported sooner, but big and important apps can move slowly over time.

What to do in the meantime? Between now and 2016?

Focus on XAML, and on n-tier or SOA async server access as architectural models.

Or focus on HTML 5 (soon to be HTML 6 fwiw, and possibly HTML 7 by 2016 for all we know).

I’m focusing on XAML, creating a CSLA 4 version 4.5 release that supports .NET 4.5 on servers, Azure, Windows (Win32), and Windows (WinRT). And Silverlight 5 of course.

In fact, the plan is for a version 4.3 release to support Silverlight 5, then version 4.5 with support for .NET 4.5 and WinRT.

I suspect that you can use Silverlight or WPF as a bridge to WinRT. The real key is architecture.

An n-tier architecture is fine, as long as the data access layer is running on a server, and the client uses async calls to interact with the server. WinRT requires a lot of async, at a minimum all server interactions. Silverlight forces you to adopt this architecture already, so it is a natural fit. WPF doesn’t force the issue, but you can choose to do “the right thing”.
You can also build your client applications to be “edge applications” – on the edge of a service-oriented system. This is a less mature technology area, and it is more costly. But it is also a fine architecture for environments composed of many disparate applications that need to interact as a loosely coupled system. Again, all service interactions by the edge applications (the ones running on the clients) must be async.
Or you can build “hybrid solutions”, where individual applications are built using n-tier architectures (with async server calls). And where some of those applications also expose service interfaces so they can participate as part of a broader service-oriented system.

I favor option 3. I don’t like to accept the cost and performance ramifications of SOA when building an application, so I’d prefer to use a faster and cheaper n-tier architecture. At the same time, many applications do need to interact with each other, and the requirement to create “application mashups” through edge applications happens from time to time. So building my n-tier applications to have dual interfaces (XAML and JSON for example) is a perfect compromise.

The direct users of my application get n-tier performance and maintainability. And the broader organization can access my slower-moving, standards-based, contractual service interface. It is the best of both worlds.

So do I care if Silverlight 5 is the last version of Silverlight?

Only if WPF continues to evolve prior to us all moving to WinRT. If WPF continues to evolve, I would expect Silverlight to, at a minimum, keep up. Otherwise Microsoft has led a lot of people down a dead-end path, and that’s a serious betrayal of trust.

But if my suspicions are correct, we won’t see anything but bug fixes for WPF or Silverlight for many years. I rather expect that these two technologies just became the next Windows Forms. You’ll notice that WinForms hasn’t had anything but bug fixes for 6 years right? The precedent is there for a UI technology to be “supported, stable, and stagnant” for a very long time, and this is my expectation for WPF/SL.

And if that’s the case, then I don’t care at all about a Silverlight 6 release. We can use WPF/SL in their current form, right up to the point that WinRT is stable and capable enough to act as a replacement for today’s Win32/.NET applications.