Platform wars are like monkey knife fights: amusing at first, but regrettable and messy in the end.

You don’t see this very often, and it’s a shame: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-creator of Django, the Python-based MVC web application framework, wrote a great article titled Thank You, Rails. From the article’s opening paragraph:

It’s fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition…We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art.

The most important point in his essay is a few paragraphs down. He points out that while having a competitor often lends focus to a developer community and that a rivalry can often bring about excellence among all parties concerned, it can also bring bitterness and nastiness. He wants to counter those latter things, and so he writes:

I think it’s important to recognize that we in the web development community do in fact owe Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. Rails helped reframe the way we think about web development, and even those who’ve never touched Rails nevertheless are probably reaping indirect benefits right now.

So I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly say thank you, Rails, for all that you’ve done to move the state of web development forward.

Rails was a wake-up call to the web development world in so many ways. In the short time – a mere five years — that it’s been around, it’s been responsible for many changes in the world of web applications:

• Popularizing MVC amongst web developers. Yes, it had been done before, but never quite as elegantly or explained so clearly.
• Bringing concepts like DRY and Convention Over Configuration into the developer vernacular.
• Proving that simplicity is a feature, whether it’s from the developer’s or end user’s point of view.
• Pointing the spotlight at the Ruby programming language.
• Driving a movement towards web applications with both beautiful and usable interfaces.
• Reminding us that programming should be fun.
• Reinforcing an important idea that we often forget: community matters. (If you’ve been to a RailsConf or better still, RubyFringe and FutureRuby, which takes the Ruby/Rails community camaraderie and turns the dials up to 11, you know what I mean.)

Speaking as a Microsoft guy, I too would like to say “Thank you, Rails”. While I can’t honestly classify myself as ever having been a serious Rails developer – it’s mostly noodling on personal projects and one major cancelled project at Toronto’s worst-run startup – I come from the periphery of the Rails community, having been an unofficial evangelist and occasional court jester, as evidenced in this performance from the evening keynotes at RailsConf 2007:

I take a lot of what I’ve learned from the community-building effort that made Rails what it is today and have applied it to my work at Microsoft. From what I’ve been hearing, it seems to be helping.

It’s not just the community aspects of Rails for which both Microsoft and I owe Rails a debt of gratitude — there are the technical aspects as well. I’m sure the event-driven desktop-style development metaphor behind ASP.NET makes a lot of developers happy, but it drove me bonkers – and also to PHP (and eventually, Rails) — back in 2002. The drive to create an MVC web application framework that treated the web like a first-class citizen instead of “like the desktop, but lamer” led to the creation of my preferred Microsoft web framework, ASP.NET MVC, and I cannot begin to convey how grateful I am for that. I love ASP.NET MVC, and a good chunk of the reasons why stem from the Rails-isms that found their way into it. I think ASP.NET MVC developers would benefit from getting to know Rails and taking it out for a spin – and I think the Rails developers would also gain something from giving ASP.NET MVC a try.

I once read a saying that has stuck with me all these years: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe.” Yeah, it’s a pretty drama-queeny way of saying that everything is interconnected, but it’s true in many respects, including human endeavour, which in turn includes software development. It’s an ecosystem, and different parts of it influence each other all the time. I think that the best participants in that ecosystem learn from other parts, and acknowledge those efforts that make the ecosystem a better place in which to live.

So to echo a Django guy’s sentiment, here’s a Microsoft guy saying it: Thank you, Rails.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!

(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)

There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover

I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:

Here’s a closeup:

(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)

The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WinMoDevCamp

Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th  from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.

• For more information about WinMoDevCamp, see my earlier WinMoDevCamp article.
• To register for WinMoDevCamp (remember, it’s free!), visit the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Yes, you probably went here as soon as you saw the phrase “One-Handed Computing”:

But in this case, I’m talking about what Jason Kottke is talking about — those times when you use mobile technology while your other hand isn’t free because you’re:

• Eating
• Drinking
• Carrying or feeding a baby
• Walking the dog
• Carrying groceries
• “Straphanging” on a train or bus
• Getting by with a broken arm

In the cases above – and I’m sure you can think of many more – you’re accessing computing resources in a very undesktop-like way: with only one hand, and even then, a limited portion of that hand since most of your fingers are busy holding that phone. You’re likely using only your thumb, as shown below:

There are lots of times when users are stuck in “one-thumb mode”. If you’re building mobile applications, you should keep that in mind and make sure you design your user interfaces accordingly. You might need to consider things like:

• The size of touchscreen controls: make them too small and they’re not thumb-friendly.
• The number of controls on the screen; the maximum number is dictated by their size.
• Navigation in your app. Hierarchical arrangements make sense to developers, but lots of user experience people will tell you that ordinary people don’t get hierarchies.
• Which functions will your users use most often? You should make those very easily accessible. Which functions will your users use less often? You might be able to put them on a secondary or tertiary screen.
• Can you get information without making the user enter it? For example, can you infer information based on the user’s location, which you can grab from GPS instead of asking for him/her to enter it? Can your application remember your user’s most often-used data?
• Can you get other kinds of one-handed input, such as from the camera, accelerometer, magnetometer or other sensors?

That’s a fair bit to think about, and I might have to present some ideas at the upcoming Toronto WinMoDevCamp (and yes, I’ll also blog them).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax!

I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week:

• We’ll be around on the weekend doing setup and rehearsals for the TechDays conference
• The TechDays conference itself will take place on Monday, November 2nd and Tuesday, November 3rd at the World Trade Convention Centre Halifax.
• On Wednesday, November 4th, I’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event at the Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington Street) from 2 to 6 p.m.. That means I’ll be working from that cafe – drop by and chat!

And don’t forget that TechDays Canada is also visiting these cities:

• Calgary: November 17th and 18th
• Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th

Tickets are a still available for these cities.

In case you’ve forgotten the TechDays formula, here it is again:

See you in Halifax!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

WinMoDevCamp, the worldwide series of development workshops for Windows-based mobile phones, is coming to Toronto on Wednesday, November 11th! If you want to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone (the mobile operating system formerly known as Windows Mobile), this full-day workshop will give you the opportunity to get some hands-on training and experience. We’ll have all kinds of people speaking and attending, including:

• Mobile developers
• Web developers
• .NET developers
• UI/WX specialists
• Software testers
• Device manufacturers
• Canadian mobile carriers

…all at this workshop, all working – either solo or in teams – on a Windows Phone project. (While you can choose to work solo, you’ll miss out on the brainpower, business and social opportunities that teaming up will provide).

At the event, you will:

• Create a new application for the Windows Phone platform and mobile apps that support Windows enterprise applications
• Meet and work side-by-side team members from the Microsoft Mobile Developer Experience team
• Get help porting your existing iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre apps to the Windows platform
• Interact with reps from a number of Canadian mobile carriers, including Bell, Telus, Rogers and WIND

This free event will take place on Wednesday, November 11th at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, just off Mississauga Road north of the 401) from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.. We’ll serve snacks and dinner, so you won’t starve while you create mobile apps. And yes, I’ll be there, helping out and even writing code.

If you’d like to attend WinMoDevCamp Toronto, all you have to do is register! (And if you need a lift out to Mississauga, drop me a line and I can give you a lift from High Park subway station to Microsoft and back.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Archetype have put together a cute little Hallowe’en pumpkin-carving application built with Silverlight and hosted on Azure. It lets you “carve” a pumpkin, complete with backlit glow from the candle, and send the resulting image to a friend. Give it a try!

• To get started with Silverlight, visit the Silverlight site’ “Get Started” page.
• To get started with Azure, visit Windows Azure’s “Get Started” page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges, jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”:

(Regarding the photo in the right column, second one from the bottom – the piece of paper attached to the pencil sticking out of the computer says “Pull to turn on”. It’s a jury-rigged replacement for the power switch.)

Sloppy work like this isn’t limited to the physical world. I’ve seen (and okay, sometimes I’ve written) code that could’ve been a candidate for There, I Fixed It, and chances are you have too:

• Some of my hacks were a little more elegant and useful in the long-term, as long as you weren’t going to be too fussy about aesthetics. They were the software equivalent of the CD-ROM drive installed below the car radio and attached to it with a cable with 1/8” stereo jacks. They weren’t pretty, but they were solid, reasonably maintainable and viable in the long term.
• Others were terrible kludges that were originally intended to be temporary solutions that forgotten and lived much longer than they should have. They were like fixes shown in the two photos on the bottom (the hasty bridge repair and the car exhaust held together with zip-ties).
• I’ve also copped out by glossing over bad user interface design with some explanatory text or dialog box instead of actually correcting the design. This is not unlike labelling a doorknob “hard to open” or a hastily-improvised switch “pull to turn on”.

Be sure to check out There, I Fixed It. They’ve had some pretty hilarious pictures lately, and perhaps it’ll inspire (or shame) you to eschew the quick fix or kludge in favour of putting some time and thought into writing better code and building better user interfaces.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically “overbooks volunteers in anticipation of a drop-off, but every volunteer who signed up showed up!).

It was a fun conference, and I was honoured to be selected as a speaker for the event. It was good meeting Joel again (it’s been a number of years now) and speaking on the same stage with some good local friends (Reg Braithwaite and Greg Wilson) as well as some new ones (Jordan Baker and Ralph Whitbeck).

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

For the benefit of all, I’ve posted the slides from all the presentations below:

ASP.NET MVC: Barry Gervin and Joey deVilla

Our presentation followed Joel’s opening keynote and was centred around a live-coding demo in which we built a quick-and-dirty ASP.NET MVC-based clone of RunPee.com, a site that lets you know at what times you can take a bathroom break from a movie in a theatre and not miss any crucial plot points.

I’ll admit it right now: this presentation could’ve been much better, and as the one who gets paid to promote Microsoft’s tools and technologies, I assume full responsibility for this one (Barry’s a great presenter who volunteered and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do this). Watch this space for a "lessons learned" post, as well as some ASP.NET MVC posts that take the material from the presentation and explain it a little better.

Python: Jordan Baker

Jordan’s presentation was an introduction to Python by way of a walk-through of Peter Norvig’s How to Write a Spelling Corrector exercise, which comprises 21 lines of Python 2.5 but in those few lines, covers a lot of the Python programming language.

jQuery: Ralph Whitbeck

Ralph’s presentation was a walk-through of jQuery’s features, and how it will make your web applications sing. I need to get more familiar with jQuery (I’m far more acquainted with Prototype and Scriptaculous), so Ralph’s was the technology demo that was the most useful to me.

Academic: Greg Wilson

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of "let’s change the world" vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions. This presentation got a lot of applause, and deservedly so — there’s nothing like a great topic delivered by a great presenter.

Ruby: Reg Braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite’s talk — made up of slides consisting entirely of Ruby code (or Ruby pseudocode, where appropriate) — wasn’t so much about Ruby as it was about metaprogramming, with Ruby examples. Following the quip about a man (one account says it was Winston Churchill) who is chastised by a woman for being drunk who then retorts "Yes, but in the morning, I will be sober and you will still be ugly", he encouraged the audience to "turn ugly problems into drunk ones".

Other Writeups

There are a couple of review of the conference:

• at Meta Stack Overflow
• at Geoffrey Wiseman’s blog, Tech Scene

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve got customers wondering if they should upgrade from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 and are looking for testimonials, go to Gizmodo’s article, 27 Takes on Windows 7. It features quotes from 27 reviews of Windows 7, which include the following seven:

• CNET
  "Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still turn out a strong, useful operating system."
• PC Mag
  "It’s far and away the best OS we’ve ever seen from Microsoft."
• Guardian
  "Windows 7 is simply the best version of Windows you can get."
• Slate
  "Indeed, the new Windows is not only the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. It is arguably the fastest, most intuitive, and most useful consumer desktop OS on the market today."
• PC Pro UK
  "We like Windows 7 a lot – so much so, that the disappointment that was Windows Vista has already become a distant memory…"
• Wall Street Journal
  "I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced."
• bit-tech
  "For want of a better way of describing it, Microsoft has essentially fixed Vista and the result is arguably Microsoft’s best operating system to date."

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You can learn about learn about SharePoint 2010 – the upcoming version of Microsoft’s enterprise information portal platform — at the inaugural meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group taking place this Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Microsoft’s Mississauga office. Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp will lead a session covering SharePoint 2010 with a particular focus on what’s new for developers. You’ll learn about the new designers, explorers and templates and overall developer experience. You’ll also see what’s new for your users, including the new ribbon interface, in-place editing and the new page and dialog interface model.

Many details surrounding Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were announced at last week’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. One of SharePoint 2010’s top investments is user experience, from the ribbon UI, which allows users to easily add, modify and interact with content on the site, to mobile device support to its true multilingual user interface. Once you have the language packs installed and you set the appropriate languages on the sites, users will be able to interact with SharePoint in the language of their choice. To find out more, check out Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the Sharepoint conference.

The meeting takes place on Monday, September 26th from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga office (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, at Mississauga Road, just north of the 401). Register for the event – it’s free!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s Linux creator Linus Torvalds, taking a break from the Japan Linux Symposium to pose at a store where Windows 7 was on sale:

[Thanks to Stefan Arentz for pointing me to the picture!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

To celebrate the release of Windows 7, Japanese Burger King franchises are offering a Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties, selling for 777 Yen (CAD$8.92 as of this writing), available only for the next 7 days. I have no idea why they’re not doing this on this side of the Pacific; I’m sure it would be a big hit:

According to Julie from ObjectSharp, the Japanese text after “13cm” says “American-size buns”.

[Thanks to Ian Irving for pointing this to me!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Fo’shizzle my Ballizle: on tonight’s episode of CBC’s news show The Hour, “Strombo”’s interviewing an unlikely pair: the CEO of the company for whom I work, Steve Ballmer, and Snoop Dogg. Alas, they’re taping the segments separately, so there’s no chance of Ballmer and Snoop doing a rap duet called Win and Juice.

The Hour airs on CBC tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’ll be updating this post regularly through the morning, so keep an eye on this article!

Here’s Steve Ballmer doing his keynote:

Photo by Tom Purves. Click to see the original.

Here’s my view from the event’s Twitter Lounge, where I’ll be doing demos and answering questions:

Photo by Yours Truly.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The official launch of Windows 7 doesn’t happen until tomorrow, but we’re having a big launch event with Steve Ballmer today in Toronto! I’ll be blogging and tweeting all day from the launch venue – Toronto’s Harbour Castle Westin Convention Centre.

For the full skinny on the event, follow the #cdnwin7 (short for “Canadian Windows 7”) hashtag on Twitter.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Are there any computers available today that come in that particular shade of blue, with matching chair?

Click the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of retrofuture.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.