Josh Holmes

The Lost Art of Simplicity

Josh Holmes — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:22:14 GMT

View more presentations from Josh Holmes.

I recently did a keynote at the Central Ohio Day of .NET and a session at Kalamazoo X called “The Lost Art of Simplicity. I have to say that I’ve not been as excited about a specific talk in quite a while.

I posted the slides to SlideShare and I’ve signed up for speaker rate for this session. I would love some feedback.

Slides on SlideShare - http://www.slideshare.net/joshholmes/the-lost-art-of-simplicity

Speaker Rate - http://www.speakerrate.com/talks/773-the-lost-art-of-simplicity

The Lost Art of Simplicity - Presentation Transcript

The Lost Art of Simplicity Josh Holmes joshholmes.com josh.holmes@microsoft.com
sim·plic·i·ty (sm-pls-t) n.
1. The property, condition, or quality of being simple or uncombined.
2. Absence of luxury or showiness; plainness.
3. Absence of affectation or pretense.
4. a. Lack of sophistication or subtlety; naiveté.
b. Lack of good sense or intelligence; foolishness.
5. a. Clarity of expression.
b. Austerity in embellishment.
Let’s start off by talking about what simplicity is. The official dictionary definition has 5 parts. We are going to focus in on the first definition. Simplicity is the property, condition or quality of being simple or uncombined. This is a beautiful statement that is unfortunately missing in much of our current application development.
When we talk about something being simple, often people just right to the fourth definition assuming that it’s lacking sophistication or good sense and intelligence. That it’s foolish. As technologists, our tendency when we see something that’s simple is to say “Oh, I could write it in a weekend”. There’s a fair amount of NIH (Not Invented Here) tendencies that are just part of our culture. This is a dangerous concept.
The last definition is the one that I really like. To have a something that has “Clarity of Expression” is awesome. Put that with the first definition and we really have something. I’m striving to solve problems in ways that are “Simple and uncombined” with “Clarity of Expression”.
http://hikingartist.com/Peopletypes_g54-King_type_p124.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/simplicity
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life - Katherine F. Gerould

One of the great things about the human race is that we are a race of problem solvers. And we take great pride in our solutions. The issue is that the solutions that we are most proud of are the ones that only we can understand.
The best ideas, however, are the ideas that are immediately obvious once someone shows it to you. It’s that head smack “Duh” moment that accompanies those great ideas that I really like.
http://hikingartist.com/animals_g58-evolution_p60.html
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. - Oscar Wilde
Let’s use the example of this guy dreaming about having that apple for lunch… It’s a fairly simple problem on it’s face. We, as IT folks, get the IT equivalent of this issue day in a day out.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3010374978/
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! - Henry David Thoreau

Can I get report of sales by geography? How about splitting that by demographics such as age or gender? What’s the effect of our current marketing efforts on sales of our latest line and how does that differ by geography or demographic? Could I enter a contact I met at the picnic into our CRM? Could that be blue?
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Still_want_that_apple__p262.html
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. - Albert Einstein
Our biggest fear is that the user is going to go get a copy of Access or something equally destructive and try to solve the problem themselves. Often they can effectively solve the short term problem and in the process bring down the enterprise…
And this is a dangerous thing because as they open up the simple tools such as access and solve just their problem, they are potentially causing other issues like data redundancy throughout the company or duplicating efforts with another group. Often these solutions are even done with ignorance to larger concerns such as privacy laws.
Even so, they are solving their problem in the short term and that was their goal.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3010374978/
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. - Albert Einstein
To head that off, we just, we start throwing our favorite technologies and designs at the problem to solve it in the most “elegant” way. This quickly results in over engineering the task at hand.
One immediate and obvious danger is that we take that simple request and roll it into the next version of the application that’s going to be 18-36 months down the road ignoring the fact that it’s a pain that the user is feeling today. What happens when, 18 months down the road, the user that has requested that feature has solved the problem some other way? Or if that user is not even employed by the company anymore?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3010375012/sizes/o/
It takes a long time to make something complicated simple, but if you do, it will work w/o problems for a long time. - F. Andy Seidle, http://faseidl.com/

And the solution that results is not only over engineered but it’s reminiscent of a certain coyote with all of the possible ways that it can fail. The reality is that the more complex a problem is, the more ways that it can fail.
As a solution ramps up in complexity and “cleverness” it quickly becomes more fragile because there are more moving parts and more possible points of failure. Just because something is using the latest or coolest technology, doesn’t mean that it’s the best idea. If that latest or cool technology reduce complexity in some way, such as reducing the number of tools, streamlining process or raising the bar on the usability then there is a good argument to leverage it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3009540065/
The Innovator’s Dilemma that disruptive innovations are almost never the result of technological breakthroughs but are instead recombination's of existing and often inexpensive technology in forms the former market leaders don’t pursue. - Clayton Christensen
In all of this, we are missing the obvious. There are known simple solutions to a lot of the requests that we get on a day to day basis.
The first thing that we have to get over is the NIH complex that we all have. When you get a new request is your first thought, I can build that… Or is your first thought, I bet that’s been built…
The second thing that we have to recognize is that the simple solution is probably the right one. If the solution that we have come up with is a so complicated that we are amazed with ourselves and proud of it, it’s probably the wrong direction.
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Want_an_apple_p261.html
Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple. - Edward de Bono
We can’t keep down this destructive path of building more and more complex solutions that take eons to develop when the users have needs that we are not addressing in the short term.
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Want_an_apple_p258.html
I’m Fine
We are living in denial that we are the problem. It’s our insistence that we are the technical gods and know everything that is driving this as a problem in the industry in the first place.
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Not_to_be_disturbed_p398.html
We need to be very careful about the lure of complexity. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that if it’s hard to design, it must be good; that if it’s using the latest technology, it must be good; that if all our friends think it’s really cool, it must be good. - Gerry McGovern
We, as the IT world, tend to go rampant with technology with little to no thought to the consequences. Even though we are trying to make people’s lives easier, at best we do no harm. At worst, we cause a lot of pain and anguish for our users.
The answer that a lot of us, and I’m guilty of this too, turn to is to vet our ideas and our UI designs with our peers. The issue is that our peers are also technologists who are just as geeked as we are about X new technology. This just perpetuates the problem.
http://hikingartist.com/Peopletypes_g54-The_akward_type_p86.html
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_11_22_complexity.htm
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. - Albert Einstein
Let’s take a short step back and examine how complexity comes to our applications in the first place.
Often complexity sneaks in under different names. One of my favorite is “Enterprise” which almost automatically means a complexity multiplier of 10. The idea here is that we have to be “Enterprise Quality”. This implies a certain engineering rigor, stability and scalability. One huge issue that I have with this term is that if you look at a mid to large sized enterprise with 10k, 20k or even 50K users you are still looking at a user base that would be considered a rounding error on some of the larger consumer facing applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and the like.
http://hikingartist.com/animals_g58-Trojan_trap_p106.html
The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity - Don Norman
Often the complexity is as simple as not understanding our users.
I was recently in a long envisioning session with a customer about the next version of their client facing applications. We spent a lot of time hashing through their current application and came up with a number of ways that we might be able to save time or give a better experience. But at some point I backed up and asked the question, what are the top three things that your customers do with the application? If we knew that, we could focus on surfacing those to three tasks in the UI to help cut complexity and time out of the user’s day. The reality is that they couldn’t answer that question. There were some guesses and opinions thrown out but nothing definitive that they could throw out. Their homework assignment was to go back and find that out.
I find this as an issue in a lot of customer engagements. Very few companies actually know how many of their users are using Windows 98 or IE5 but there is an assumption that it’s an issue so a lot of complexity is built into the system in order to accommodate what might very well be a small portion of their audience.
The other side of this issue is that there’s what the users say that they want and what they actually need. There are some simple examples. “Could you Web 2.0ify my site?” “I need a X (where X is some buzzword that they just read in some article) technology application” Or any other place where technology enters requirements. This is where we need to redirect the user’s requirements by asking them about their goals and aspirations and then start figuring out what they need from that. “Oh, you want to cut down on the amount of text that your users have to type while increasing the accuracy of their reporting? How about we replace that block of text by allowing them to select a picture of what they are looking for? Yeah, we can do that without requiring them to wait on the page to reload.”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3208741909/sizes/o/
I apologize for the length of this letter, but I didn't have time to make it shorter. - Mark Twain
An unfortunately common problem that I see in the industry is that given group of developers knows one or two technologies and approach every problem with that technology as the solution. The reality is that that there are tremendous number of technologies at their disposal from web applications to desktop applications to mobile applications to hybrid solutions of all of those. You need to approach each problem with an open mind as to what is the best solution for that problem. Sometimes you’ll find that the solution is not actually a technical solution at all.
The real solution here is to take the time to explore all of the possible solutions, technology based or not.
http://hikingartist.com/meetings_g55-hammer_management_p129.html
Ok. now what?
Where are we now and what can we, as mere cogs in the wheels, do to tackle this problem?
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Short_term_solution_p408.html
\"Think simple\" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles. - Frank Lloyd Wright
There’s, unfortunately, not a magic solution to the issue of complexity. Simple is hard.
Often you have to come up with several complex solutions that you can boil down to the simple solution. Often, in an effort to find the right solution, I will solve or at least map out solutions to a given problem in several different ways with a number of technologies ranging from desktop to web to mobile to non-technology solutions. Kind of like going to a shoe store and trying on a ton of different styles and sizes of shoes, you can get a lot of interesting ideas from checking out all of the different solutions. You might be surprised by the solutions that make the most sense at the end of the day.
http://hikingartist.com/Cartoon_illustration_g29-Wizard_type_3_p111.html
Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations. - Paul Rand
All of that said though and as much as I’m talking about Simplicity in this talk, the reality is that Paul Rand has it right. “Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations”.
http://hikingartist.com/Motivation_g56-The_just_enough_Type_p116.html
Never again will I make the simple into the complex. Something of true value does not become more valuable because it becomes complicated. - Donald Curtis
One of the biggest problems is that we try to, for a large number of reasons, try to boil the ocean with our applications. When we build out our project plan and it’s going to be an 18 month cycle before the users get a new version, they are going to go to battle tooth and nail to get their feature request on the docket because they know that if they are not able to get it in this release, it’s going to be at least 36 months out. All of these features crammed into a release adds not only a lot of complexity but a lot of risk to the endeavor.
We have to get past the misperception that features equal value. Features do not equal value. Solving people’s problems equals value. The amount of complexity and risk that we add with these massive project plans hurt out ability to solve someone’s problem in a reasonable time frame.
http://hikingartist.com/animals_g58-Fishing_type_p112.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hofmann
You need to start small. Even if you know that the end game is far bigger, what’s that first step? What’s the minimal set of features that you need to get started? This is a struggle for a lot of people as we all want to go for the big vision. The natural tendency is to think that more is better but in a lot of cases, more just gets in the way of success.
This is a core concepts that groups like 37 Signals have held. Their motto is that the first order of business is to get running and start building a customer base. You can worry about scaling later. But if you spend too much time worrying about scaling up front, you’ll never get out there to build the customer base in the first place.
http://hikingartist.com/meetings_g55-Fools_can_t_you_see_the_bird..._p12.html
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity - Charles Mingus
On the other side of the coin, you need to have a clear concept of the future as you are getting started. I often see applications that are built with no concept future requirements and accidentally build in roadblocks to success. There are a lot of simple things that you can do that will future proof your application to some degree. It’s not hard to build in, if you start from the beginning with a tiered and separated architecture so that you can replace bottle necks if they start to pose a problem.
This is sometimes a hard balance to hit but it’s an important one to tackle.
There are a lot of straight forward things you can do such as adopting some of the great architectural patterns such as MVC (Model View Controller) or MVP (Model View Presenter) combined with great practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is more than just building regression tests. It forces you to design and build your application in a modular fashion that allow you to make changes and modifications to your application quickly and with confidence. MVC and MVP are architectural patterns that work well with TDD and provide for great separation of concerns to further provide the agility that you need to grow and scale your application over time.
http://hikingartist.com/meetings_g55-Not_quite_ready_p7.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Hofmann
When thought is too weak to be simply expressed, it's clear proof that it should be rejected - Luc De Clapiers
http://hikingartist.com/Peopletypes_g54-The_engineer_p121.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_de_Clapiers,_marquis_de_Vauvenargues
The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts. - Willard Gibbs
None of this means that I’m not solving complex problems. It just means that I’m layering simple solution on top of simple solution to solve those complex problems.
http://hikingartist.com/Free_print_versions_g79-Building_bridges_p747.html
The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. - Nielsen Norman Group
So where to from here?
As I look into the future, I see a world where we are working hand in hand with our users to solve their real needs rather than reacting to what they say that they want and confusing checklists of features with value. I dream of the day when we are able to respond to the users needs as quickly as we can get them to express those needs to us to the point of being able to forecast and proactively provide exactly the functionality that the user needs, nothing more, when they need and not a moment before they do.
To do that, we need to forgo our egos, our love of complexity and our die hard grip on our favorite technologies and focus on the user.
http://hikingartist.com/meetings_g55-The_observer_type_p135.html
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler. - Henry David Thoreau
You call to action is to go to war against complexity. Stand up for simplicity.
Take the extra time that it is going to take to build the uncombined solution that has clarity of expression. Don’t confuse simple with lack of sophistication.
Focus on your user and their needs.

As you do this. As you take on this challenge and “as you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler”.
http://hikingartist.com/Motivation_g56-The_gatekeeper_type_p48.html
All artwork used in this presentation is licensed under Creative Commons by Frits Ahlefeldt, aka hikingartist Support his amazing craft at http://hikingartist.com
Before I finish, I need to say a quick thank you to Fritz Ahlefeldt. He’s a Danish artist with obvious talent. He publishes a large amount of his work under creative commons. If you like this art, you can see much more at http://www.hikingartist.com and support him and his amazing craft.
The Lost Art of Simplicity Josh Holmes joshholmes.com josh.holmes@microsoft.com

I’m looking forward to evolving this talk as I move towards CodeStock and DevLink. I know that there was a really nice progression in just a week between Central Ohio Day of .NET and Kalamazoo X as my message got a lot crisper and more direct based on a lot of great constructive advice I got from Michael Eaton, Michael Wood, Jim Homes and more.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Glimmer – A jQuery Designer

Josh Holmes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:46:40 GMT

I had heard about this effort a few weeks back but I’m thrilled that it’s public and I can talk about it now. Karsten Januszewski and some of the other whiz kids on the MIX team have put together a visual designer for jQuery called Glimmer.

Right now, they’ve got a number of design wizards that you can leverage but they’ve built a great plug-in model so that you can write your own for your favorite jQuery UI plug-in.

Check out their video on how to leverage Glimmer and how it all came to be.

I’m really geeked and am looking forward to using this in my next web dev projects…

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge

Josh Holmes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:37:24 GMT

I’m going to be speaking at RIAPalooza in about two weeks, well more specifically at the time of this writing it’s 10 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. :)

I’m going to be tag teaming with Mike Labriola again talking about “10 questions about RIA you haven’t had the courage to ask”. We’ve got a short list of questions but are hoping to get some questions from the crowd as well. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to shoot them to me in the comments section on this post.

Anyways, we were discussing different ways to get the word out about RIAPalooza and someone mentioned that we didn’t have have a blog badge so I decided to create one.

I started by grabbing some art from the RIAPalooza web site. I started out in Expression Blend with a simple Silverlight project. Here are the steps that I took.

Resize the Page.xaml user control to 100x200 to fit the blog badge size.
Add the wood background that I grabbed from the RIAPalooza web site trimmed down to the blog badge size.
Paste in the two other images, one for the logo (referred to as i and one for a a free t-shirt offer.
Animate the two images to wiggle, spin, wiggle, wait, wiggle, spin, wiggle, wait, reverse.
- To do this, I opened a timeline and started by rotating the first image -6 degrees and then a frame later rotating it to 6 degrees and then a frame later back to 0. This gives the images a nice little wiggle and catches the viewer’s eye without being too annoying. Well, I don’t think it’s too annoying but you can tell me…
- Then I kicked forward 2 seconds and did the wiggle again in preparation of swapping to two images. The wiggle makes a nice little transition before the action starts.
- At the end of the wiggle, I spun the image on it’s X axis over the span of half a second. That’s accomplished by setting the X Skew to zero.
- On the same frame that the first logo hits an X Skew of zero, I make the other image visible with it’s X Skew to zero an proceed to transform it’s skew to 1 (normal) over the course of a half second.
- Then I wiggled the t-shirt offer image in the same manner that I did the first logo.
- Now, back in the code, I set a few properties and started the animation.
```
AnimateLogos.AutoReverse = true;
AnimateLogos.RepeatBehavior = new RepeatBehavior(1000);
AnimateLogos.Begin();
```
Now that the logos are moving, I needed a link to the site. Simple enough using a HyperLinkButton.

Last thing I needed was to provide some type of count down. At first I just used a couple of labels and set the text.

First, I used a timer set to go every second and set the time
_timer = newTimer(newTimerCallback(Timer_Tick), null, 0, 1000);

Next I used the dispatch object to work on the UI thread as follows:

public
void Timer_Tick(object state) { Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(()
=> { try { DateTime launchDate
= new DateTime(2009,
5, 8, 8, 0, 0).ToUniversalTime(); TimeSpan span
= launchDate.Subtract(DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime());
txtDays.Text = string.Format("{0}
Days", span.Days); ... } catch { //Eat
all errors. We'll get another chance in a second... } } ); }

There are a couple of things to notice about the code above. First, I just used everything as UniversalTime. I thought about trying to do the whole timezone thing but realized that it didn’t matter for a countdown because as long as everything was in the same timezone the math would be right.

Second, notice that I’m eating all of the errors in the timer. The basic error that I can get from this code is a threading issue and since this is low priority code, I didn’t care about the threading issue. It’s not like there’s a real recovery path other than trying again in a second.

Now that I had the simple countdown and badge done, I decided that I didn’t like the flat labels and wanted a real clock style count down. To accomplish this I started a Silverlight FlipClock project to build a reusable clock face.

Since I was creating a flipping clock with a separate top and bottom, it made sense to create a control to encapsulate those bits in user controls that I could reuse. There were two interesting parts here. First, how to get the text to cut off at the top and second, how to get the text to scale correctly with the number if we resized it.

The first issue was solved by using a brush that cut off to an opacity of zero just under halfway. I did that on both the background and the textbox. The whole gradient is actually made up of three stop points. Two set to be the same color and opacity of 100% and a third that is set to the same color but opacity of zero. This third stop is just a hair further down than the second. The purpose of the second stop is to keep it from fading from top to bottom rather than having the hard like that I desired.

<LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0">
<GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="0"/>
<GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="0.48"/>
<GradientStop Color="#00FFFFFF" Offset="0.49"/>
</LinearGradientBrush>

The second issue was solved thanks to Laurent Bugnion. He pointed out that although Silverlight doesn’t have a scalable font, there is a VIewbox in the Silverlight Control Toolkit on Codeplex that will scale anything inside itself correctly.

<controls:Viewbox Height="Auto" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="0,0,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Width="Auto" Content="Viewbox" Stretch="Fill">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{x:Null}"> .
. . </Grid>
</controls:Viewbox>

I added a simple property to set the value in the textbox.

public int Value { get { return
int.Parse(txtNumber.Text); } set { txtNumber.Text
= value.ToString(); } }

Then I just played with the styling a little with a slight highlight on the top and the like.

Next, I created a FlippingNumber control that would be the base for the various numbers on the clock. To make it look right, I actually needed 4 sections to the control. Two to show the current number and two to show the next number and we flip between them. I simply put two of the top and two of the bottom number controls one the page. The flip was just an animation similar to the flipping of the two images in the top of the badge. The only difference is that I skewed the controls a little to give it a slight 3d effect.

Once that was done, the rest of the number was built in code.

public FlippingNumber() { InitializeComponent();
FlipDown.Completed += new EventHandler(FlipDown_Completed);
} void FlipDown_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e)
{ numBottomBack.Value = _val; numTopFlip.Value = _val; } int _val
= -9999; public int Value { get { return _val;
} set { if (value !=
_val) { _val = value; numBottomFlip.Value = _val;
numTopBack.Value = _val; FlipDown.Begin(); } } }

The other property that I added was so that the clock could adjust the speed at which the number flipped.

public double SpeedRatio { get { return FlipDown.SpeedRatio;
} set { FlipDown.SpeedRatio = value;
} }

Finally, I was ready to piece together the clock. That was a simple matter of placing 6 of the flipping number controls on the clock face. All that was left was set the time on the clock based on a value in the passed in TimeSpan.

TimeSpan _timeSpan; public TimeSpan TimeSpan
{ get { return _timeSpan;
} set { _timeSpan = value;
numSecondOne.Value = FirstCharacter(_timeSpan.Seconds); numSecondTwo.Value = SecondCharacter(_timeSpan.Seconds);
numMinuteOne.Value = FirstCharacter(_timeSpan.Minutes); numMinuteTwo.Value = SecondCharacter(_timeSpan.Minutes);
numHourOne.Value = FirstCharacter(_timeSpan.Hours); numHourTwo.Value = SecondCharacter(_timeSpan.Hours);
} } private int FirstCharacter(int num)
{ string s = string.Format("{0:00}",
num); return int.Parse(s.Substring(1, 1)); } private
int SecondCharacter(int num) { string s
= string.Format("{0:00}",
num); return int.Parse(s.Substring(0, 1)); }

The last thing on the badge that I did was change the timer control code on the overall blog badge to pass the time span into the clock face rather than parsing it into textboxes.

Now I wanted people to be able to use it from their own blog. To allow that to happen, I needed a put together a cross domain policy via the clientaccesspolicy.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
<cross-domain-access>
<policy>
<allow-from http-request-headers="*">
<domain uri="*"/>
</allow-from>
<grant-to>
<resource path="/resources/SilverCountDown.xap" include-subpaths="true"/>
</grant-to>
</policy>
</cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Notice that I’m allowing access from any domain but restricting access to only load the specific xap file.

Anyone who wants to put it on their blog can do so simply by leveraging the following object tag.

<div id="silverlightControlHost">
<object data="data:application/x-silverlight," 

type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100px" height="200px">
<param name="source" value="http://www.joshholmes.com/resources/SilverCountDown.xap"/>
<param name="background" value="white"
/> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="2.0.31005.0"
/> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true"
/> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=124807" style="text-decoration: none;">
<img src=http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181
 alt="Get Microsoft
Silverlight" style="border-style: none"/>
</a> </object>
<iframe style='visibility:hidden;height:0;width:0;border:0px'></iframe>
</div>

Feel free to place the badge on your own blog to help promote RIAPalooza – When this year finishes, I’ll update the counter with next years dates as soon as we know it… :)

Also – I put the code up at http://www.joshholmes.com/resources/silvercountdown.zip. Feel free to take it and play with it.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Antidotal info on JavaScript Library Ext JS

Josh Holmes — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:47:57 GMT

I’m in conversation with a group that’s using Ext JS for their RIA. As I haven’t used it, I thought I’d go ask at the international water fountain that is twitter about it.

Anyone using Ext JS? Thoughts compared to jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous?about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

This is what I got back (I love twitter):

parkerkrhoyt@joshholmes IMHO, Ext is more about traditional applications. jQuery is a Swiss Army knife. Ext can do that, but rarely is used that way.about 1 hour ago from TwitterFon in reply to joshholmes

ntschutta@joshholmes friend of mine loves ext but the learning curve can be steep and leads to lots of js config rather then HTML. I like proto a tonabout 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to joshholmes

objo@joshholmes we have tried all three and much prefer jquery. but ext is in a very different space with diff objectivesabout 2 hours ago from Nambu in reply to joshholmes

ksmarshall@joshholmes I use extjs and jquery together. I just use extjs for some of the nice ui controls it creates and jquery for the rest of the jsabout 2 hours ago from twitterrific

dmeeker@joshholmes We've looked at it extensively. It seems to be a mishmosh of those other libraries, no? I can put you in touch with someone hereabout 3 hours ago from web in reply to joshholmes

jblankenburg@joshholmes My limited experience suggests it's much more a RIA development framework than jquery, etc.about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to joshholmes

nkohari@joshholmes ExtJS is nice if you're looking for a full control toolkit. If you just want a low-level JS library, jQuery is the best imo.about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to joshholmes

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Kalamazoo X conference

Josh Holmes — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:15:19 GMT

On the heels of the announcement by Michael Eaton, I thought I should post about how excited I am about the upcoming Kalamazoo X Conference…

The Kalamazoo X conference, while being put on by the technical community, is a very different sort of conference. You’re not going to hear “technical” talks. All of talks pertain to technical folk but it’s a step back from the nuts and bolts that we usually deal with day in and day out and focusing on the topics that are really important.

Jeff Blankenburg will be giving Six Tips for Improving User Experience. Jeff is one of those amazing people that cross easily between the designer and developer world and can talk to either group with complete credibility. Again, he's bringing great experience to the table as his roots in development are in the digital marketing arena.

Leon Gersing will lead a discussion about Change. Leon is a great software craftsman who has worked in all types of development shops from large consulting shops and independent software vendors to the small and nimble consulting shops working in technology ranging from his much loved Sharepoint to Ruby on Rails. His deep passion and experience combine to make him a dynamic and engaging speaker.

We have the great fortune to hear from Jim Holmes twice speaking on 3 Tips to Improve Your Development Process and Leadership 101. The first talk is a great talk that is important to anyone doing development regardless of their current process, tooling or any other variables.

Jim's second talk on Leadership 101 couldn't be given by a more perfect guy. Jim is a born leader in the truest sense of the word. Management, as a role on a team, can be given to someone regardless of their qualifications. Leadership is proven and earned over time. Jim's led the CodeMash conference, which he downplays but he is the head cat herder. He doesn't play a "management" role but rather leads through great thought leadership, influence and enablement of the people around him. But he knows when the buck has come to his desk and he has the ability to make those hard decisions that are required of a true leader.
I've heard Jim speak on similar topics in the past and I can attest that he's bringing real world hard fought battle proven experience to the table. You can get some of his thoughts on the topic reading his blog post about Leadership 101.

Brian Prince will be reprising his Soft Skills talk. This is a great talk that speaks to the non-technical side of our jobs that we all need to work on. I’ve seen, and actually delivered once when Brian came down with the plague the night before the Grand Rapids Day of .NET, this talk before. It strikes to the heart of how you, as a technical person, need to work on and grow your soft skills. It’s not fuzzy feel good bits, it’s things that will actually help you in your career.

And I'll be speaking on the Lost Art of Simplicity. I've decided to go to war with complexity. Simplicity is a lost art in the application development space.

The Wikipedia definition of Simplicity is “Simplicity is the property, condition, or quality of being simple or un-combined. It often denotes beauty, purity or clarity. Simple things are usually easier to explain and understand than complicated ones. Simplicity can mean freedom from hardship, effort or confusion.”

This is a beautiful statement that we often lose sight of when we are building our applications. Instead we are on a never ending quest to fill out a checklist of features or to build something clever forgetting about the actual needs of our users to get a specific task done. This session takes complexity to task and challenges you to bring simplicity to the center of your development with some straightforward ideas and guidance.

I’ve not even touched on the sessions by Tim Wingfield, Chris Woodruff, Michael Wood, Phil Japikse, Sarah Dutkiewicz, James Bender, Dave Giard, Andy van Solkema or Clovis Bordeaux! I know most of these speakers and have seen them speak on a variety of topics. I guarantee that they are great speakers and that you’ll learn something from each and every one of them…

Best of all, you don't have to choose between the all of these great sessions. I was terrified that I’d be in a time slot opposite of Jim Holmes and A: miss his talk and B: have to compete with him for audience.

As per the announcement by Michael Eaton, the conference format has been radically altered to be a single track conference with 20-30 minute sessions rather than the typical 4 track conference with 70 minute sessions. This will let me catch all of the sessions and it gives a new energy to all of the sessions as the speakers have to stay very tight to their topic and come with high energy to hit the time limit. I’ll be working with Mike to make sure that we have the hook ready to go for people that go over. That might include me…

As you can tell, the Kalamazoo X Conference will be a very different conference than you’re used to. Now, it does cost $20.00 for professionals and $10.00 for students. That’s a VERY reasonable price for the quality of the speakers, topics and format that the organizing committee has been able to assemble.

Hopefully I’ll see you in Kalamazoo on Sat. April 25th.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Congratulations, you've installed dasBlog with Web Deploy!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

After logging in, be sure to visit all the options under Configuration in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 26 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Interesting Web Development Related Resources

Josh Holmes — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:19:19 GMT

Like so many thing that we do in our daily development, there’s a high probability that someone has already solved the problem if you know where to look. This is just a collection of resources that I’ve found useful over time. Honestly, I’m posting these here because I need them in one place so that I can find them easily…

JavaScript Resources

Like a lot of you, I’ve been doing JavaScript since 1996. I’ve been pretty geeked, however, with the recent (well, last 2-4 years) emergence of a ton of JavaScript frameworks that are making this work a lot easier.

The first one to talk about it dojo. It’s one of the more mature ones that’s out there. I’ll be honest and say that it’s been a little while since I’ve used it because I’ve started using jQuery or Prototype more often. That said, dojo is one of the most complete frameworks out there. I do love it’s drag and drop support. It includes offline support and a whole lot more. Check out and play with some of it’s cool features at http://dojocampus.org/explorer.

Of course, any group that has a conference called dojo.beer() is a winner in my book.

The second toolkit is MochiKit. I love it’s tag line of “Making JavaScript Suck Less”. I first worked with MochiKit when I was playing around with TurboGears – a Python web application stack. What it’s really outstanding at is doing async work which is particularly useful in doing AJAX and other service based work. It’s interesting to note that Kevin Dangoor started Turbo Gears and then at some point later ended up working for SitePen who paid him to work on dojo. Check out demos of it in action at http://www.mochikit.com/demos.html.

Prototype is a slick relatively low level framework. What it does is extend the HTML DOM to include a lot of really useful features like element, class and css selectors. One of the useful things that it does is add a number of manipulations to the built in string class. This gives us startsWith, stripScripts, stripTags, isJSON, strip and a whole lot of other really useful functions. By itself, Prototype’s useful but I have a hard time talking about it without mentioning script.aculo.us and some of the other plugins. script.aculo.us brings drag and drop support, animation frameworks a number of controls and makes it all really easy.

Check out demos of Prototype and script.aculo.us working together at http://wiki.github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/demos.

jQuery is a fantastic and relatively light-weight framework that’s garnering a lot of new supporters recently. Honestly, I was happy with dojo and Prototype until I saw the Visual Studio Support for jQuery at which point I started playing with it.

I’m a convert. :) Now, because it’s not as low level as Prototype, jQuery doesn’t have some things like the string manipulation, but overall I’m really pleased. I find that I have to write a lot less code to accomplish the same results. And very importantly, the jQuery Documentation is really good. Another really useful thing is that jQuery, being a really nice citizen, has built in support to make sure that it’s compatible with other JavaScript frameworks. Throw all of that in with intellisense in Visual Studio and it makes life easy.

There are also a ton of different plugins for jQuery that do everything from menus to rude string manipulation (not as good as Prototype but it’s a start).

Some of my favorite jQuery plugins in no particular order are:

AJAX History
Mousewheel
JSON
Curvy Corners
jCarousel
xWin

ASP.NET AJAX is the last framework I’m going to talk about here not because there aren’t other frameworks but I haven’t used the others so I don’t really want to comment on them.

First, as the name does imply, what it does really well is AJAX stuff. One of the really powerful features is the JavaScript proxy generation.

<asp:ScriptManagerID="ScriptManager1"runat="server"><Services><asp:ServiceReferencePath="~/CustomersService.asmx"/></Services></asp:ScriptManager>

That allows you to call web services as if they were methods on an object.

function GetCustomerByCountry()
{ var country = $get("txtCountry").value;
InterfaceTraining.CustomersService.GetCustomersByCountry(country, OnWSRequestComplete);
} function OnWSRequestComplete(results) { if (results
!= null) { CreateCustomersTable(results); GetMap(results);
} }

Second, despite the name, ASP.NET AJAX can work with more than just ASP.NET. There’s a project on CodePlex to generate the service proxies for PHP called PHP MS AJAX (which is a whole lot of capital letters…).

How do you choose?

There are a ton of different tests out there some of which you can look at the results, others of which you can actually run yourself…

Dojo vs JQuery vs MooTools vs Prototype Performance Comparison | Peter Velichkov's Blog - Jan 19, 2009

Mootools Slickspeed Test

I like to see if there’s broad support so the project won’t go away, see if it’s actively being developed, what tooling is available, how easy the syntax is, how well it plays with others, what it brings to the table from a functionality standpoint and a whole lot more.

Really though, it comes down to your preferences. The good news is that it’s not the end of the world if you decide to switch frameworks.

My current JavaScript work is being done with a combination of jQuery for most of my client side work with ASP.NET AJAX doing my communications (and some of the controls) with a little bit of Prototype thrown in when I need to go lower level.

CSS Resources

I used to spend days getting exactly the right alignment in my HTML/CSS work. But as time has gone on, I’ve gotten more mature and realized that I don’t have to work that hard. Instead of me figuring out how to do the exact right layout should be, I’m starting to leverage the various CSS Frameworks that are out there – especially since there are so many new browsers and form factors out there from IE8 to Safari 4 to iPhone. I want a framework to

One really simple CSS Framework is the 960 Grid System. It’s simple and gives you a lot of flexibility. The idea is that it breaks up the page into either 12 or 16 different columns and then lets you put in areas that spread across any number of those columns. This is a direct nod to the print industry which does exactly the same thing on paper. This gives you a tremendous number of possibilities from a simple two column layout to a really complicated layouts with multiple width columns and variety. Check it out, it’s simple and it works.

The downside of it is that it’s a fixed width layout so it’s not always the right choice. The good news, however, is that the project has been extended by Fluid 960 Grid System. This adds JavaScript to the 960 Grid System to give is a much more dynamic layout that resized to your screen size. It also brings dynamic menus to the table. It’s JavaScript it based off of a project called MooTools.

If the you really don’t want to think that hard and the others don’t give you what you need tied up in a neat enough package, check out Layouts.IronMyers.com. It’s simple to use web site gives you a preview of exactly the layout that you’re looking for and lets you download a zip file with a sample HTML and CSS inside.

And if that’s not enough and you really just need the design and all of the layout handed to you – check out FreeCSSTemplates.org. It’s got a large number of Creative Commons licensed CSS templates and layouts.

Conclusion

I hope these resources are as useful to you as they are to me. I’ve banged my head against the wall a ton of times until I realized that someone else had already solved the problem and I can leverage their solution.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Measuring ROI – Moving from Cost Center To Strategic Partner

Josh Holmes — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:17:52 GMT

I ran across this article on ZDNet (Wanted: ROI for internal app development) that really worried me. My friends at PreEmptive Solutions ran a survey across a wide number of developers that included people from 21 different industry segments in 33 countries asking about how the company measure the ROI of an application that they are building. The terrifying part is that the survey found that 58% of companies don't bother measuring ROI on their internal applications and the majority of the ones that do measure don't do so in a consistent and proven way.

This means that you are almost positively throwing away time and effort and therefore money. For some crazy reason, companies don't like that.

Of all of the companies surveyed, only 6% have a consistent and reliable approach to measuring ROI. That terrifies me.

What are your Goals?

For a long time I've been preaching that IT needs to become a strategic partner to the business.

The issue is that most IT departments are considered cost centers. This means that they are the first to be cut when times get tough, they are the least invested in, they are the last at the table to be heard and they are pushed around by all of the other departments. This is not a good position to be in. This is why a lot of companies look to outsource IT. Since they don't see it as a strategic asset and partner it doesn't matter if they keep it close.

The way to move from cost center to strategic partner is to start showing value and to start pushing the edge on ideas that will drive a great ROI for the business.

But, if you're not measuring the ROI, how can you talk to the business about the possible ROI?

And every time that someone asks me how to sell their management on usability studies or spending any time on a UI, I tell them to go to the numbers.

And every time someone asks me how to sell their management on buying a given tool, I tell them to go to the numbers.

And every time someone asks me how to sell their management on training, I tell them to go to the numbers.

And every time someone asks me how to sell their management on anything at all, I tell them to go to the numbers.

ROI really it comes down to a simple question. How much money did the business make or save based on their investment in the software that they just paid to have developed?

There are two ways businesses think about investments. ROI, the first, is the percentage of return over a given period of time. Payback, the second, very closely related to ROI but very importantly different, is the length of time that it takes to recoup the investment. The reason that payback is important is because once you hit the payback point everything else is profit.

I borrowed the graphic to the left from Paul Sheriff's article called The Business Value of .NET.

An overly simplistic example is as follows. Let's say a company wants to build a new online e-commerce site. If it takes 4 developers whose salaries are each $100,000.00 working for 3 months on a project with tools that they already own and so on. That means that it cost $100,000.00 to build. If the new site generates an average of an additional $15,000.00 a month for the first year, the gross profit is $180,000.00 with a net of $80,000.00.

We look at that as $80,000.00. That's a good thing. However, there are two ways that the business is going to look at this example. The ROI is 180% and the payback is 6.6 months. Now, if the business sees an investment in another department that could yield a higher percentage or lower payback, that department is more likely to get the investment.

This is not a new problem. Back in 1999, Bill Gates wrote

"When I sit down with developers to review product specifications, or with Microsoft's product divisions to review their three-year business plans, or with our sales groups to review their financial performance, we work through the difficult issues. We discuss feature tradeoffs vs. time to market, marketing spend vs. revenue, head count vs. return and so on. Through human intelligence and collaboration, we transform static sales, customer, and demographic data into the design of a product or a program."
Business @ the Speed of Thought : Using a Digital Nervous System
By: Bill Gates

Whether you are selling software or building internal applications, you need to go through the same process.

There are two basic ways to increase ROI, produce things cheaper or provide more value.

How did it cost to develop the software?

The problem is that this includes more than just the developer's salary. This includes how much were the machines, rent for the building they were in, telecom costs, training costs, their secretaries, management, consultants, tools, components that they bought and more.

You can keep costs down in a tremendous number of different ways.

Understanding what you're building - There are many different types of processes that are out there that are more or less efficient depending on the team, project and a whole lot of different requirements. There are a handful of absolutes.

The first is that you need to know that you're building. You can accomplish this through solid requirements analysis.

Martin Shoemaker makes An Argument for Requirements Analysts where he points out research done by Boehm and published in Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II found that "Excellent requirements analysts can reduce a project’s schedule by almost 30%, while inadequate analysis can increase the schedule by over 40%.".

David Platt has been talking about this same problem for years as "Why Software Sucks". He's been on ArCast twice, once with Ron Jacobs and once again with Bob Familiar. And he's got a book on the topic called Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It

Before you freak out, this does not mean Waterfall. This means that you understand what you're going to be building and have a good grasp on the requirements. You're going to make different web framework decisions if you have to scale to 10 users verses scaling to a million users. You're going to make different input type decisions if your users are working outside and likely to be wearing gloves. You're going to make different data locale choices if your user is going to be sitting in the corporate office next to the data center verses sitting in India or somewhere.

With the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which can be leveraged with almost any process, requirements are captured in Use Case Diagrams. Check out Martin Shoemaker's UML Applied for a light weight process he calls 5 step UML.

In Extreme Programming, one of the Agile methodologies, these requirements are captured in User Stories. Regardless of your process, there is a way to do requirements analysis and it's absolute that you have to do it.

Another absolute when it comes to process is that you need to have some form of user acceptance. A huge issue with most waterfall methodologies is that they push this user acceptance to the end of the project. At this point in time, the cost of fixing issues that the user finds with the software is prohibitively expensive. This is why Agile methodologies have the user involved in the project the whole way through and get smaller bits of functionality in front of the user earlier and more often. Course corrections along the way are a lot less costly than reversing and undoing months of work.

Buying a component or application - Building software is expensive. Most of the time, it's cheaper to acquire something than to write it yourself. The question is, how close is the component or application to what you needed and how much customization do you need? Many people have heard me talk about "Buy, Rent or Generate". If it's not adding to your business' bottom line, why are you spending the time and energy to build up the intellectual property yourself?

Think about a control suite such as NetAdvantage for WPF from Infragistics. It's a $995.00 price tag. At first glance that's a lot of money but how long would it take for you to write a control such as their xamChart that does 2D and 3D charting? A month? Two? Let's be overly optimistic and confident like all of us technical folk are and say a week. If you're making $50,000.00 a year, you just broke even if you actually hit the ridiculously tight deadline (technically you still lost because of all of the other factors that go into the cost of supporting you as a developer but for the moment, let's pretend that you broke even...). What about support or feature enhancements?

The question you have to answer is does building the control, component, application yourself worth more to the company than buying it? What's the (you should have seen this coming) Return on Investment?

With any of type of components or applications, you have to look at the full cost however. Often you'll find that the licensing cost is a small part of the overall acquisition. How long does it take to integrate with the rest of your application? How much modification does it require? How much maintenance does it require? Whether it's free (as in beer - i.e. no licensing fees) or not, there's a cost associated. People who charge money for their software, open source or not, are betting on the fact that the cost of acquisition is going to be lower than you building it yourself. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong.

More efficient tools - The more efficient you are with your tools, the less time it will take for you to get features and functionality in front of the business.

For example, if you start leveraging CodeRush and/Or Resharper on top of Visual Studio, it will save you a lot of time. Or if you are leveraging tools that cut down on the amount of time you spend reporting or anything else you are saving time.

Again, pull out the numbers. If you can prove that you'll have a 5 minute a day savings in time by leveraging CodeRush for example you might have a good case. At $50,000.00 a year / 2080 paid hours per year = about $24 an hour and a savings of 5 minutes * work days (with two weeks of vacation) is a savings of 900 minutes or 15 hour which equals $360.00. This means that at a price tag of $249.00, the ROI is 144% with a payback of 8.3 months.

The same type exercise applies if you are looking at buying a source control management system, bug tracking system or any other set of tools such as VSTS and Team System. In fact, there's a whole lot of case studies that lay out the ROI of VSTS and Team Suite.

Not building a feature - The cheapest feature is the one that you don't build in the first place. The question is, how do you know which features you need to build in the first place? First and foremost, you need to understand the user. This is accomplished by doing user research. Next you need to, going back to my first point, do solid requirements analysis so that you know what you are supposed to build. And most importantly, you need to look at partnering with the business to build out the application. This is a core tenet all of the Agile methodologies. This means that you're going to be building only the features that the folks on the business side want, not the features that you think that they need.

The second question here is after you build a feature, do you measure to see if the users are actually using a given feature? In other words, if you spent X amount of time and energy building out a specific set of functionality, how do you know that the business is actually realizing the potential return? It's a simple matter of logging when a given menu item or button is clicked or code path is executed. There are tools that will automate setting all of this up. PreEmptive Solutions, for example, can build this functionality into your application without you having to write any code with their 2010 Dotfuscator application.

How much does it cost to run the software?

There's a lot that goes into calculating the cost of running the software. It includes not only the cost of running the data center, hardware that the users use, the electricity to run the machines and the like but it also includes training to user to use the software, the user's salary while they wait on latency issues and a whole lot more.

Again, there's a tremendous amount of ways that you can save money in this arena.

Deploy in the cloud - The idea of utility computing is that you only pay for the service that you use just like the electric bill. In a recent conversation with a friend whose company maintains MASSIVE data centers, he said that the servers were averaging less than 15% utilization. This is nuts but smart at the same time. On the one hand, you've got 6-7 times the data center that you need. On the other hand, you're ready to handle spike traffic. The issue is that you're still paying for that unused 85%.

This is where Windows Azure and other cloud computing platforms comes in. By deploying to the cloud you are cutting the costs of the data center down to what you are utilizing rather than what you anticipate as the possible high water marks.

This comes back to the question, however, what's more valuable to the company? Keeping the data and processing in-house or saving the cost of the data center. A key architectural decision that you need to make here is what's business critical to keep in house and how can you architect to keep that in house while rolling other parts out to rented data centers?

Build a better UX - If done correctly, this can make you user more efficient, cut down on the training costs and reduce support costs.

A great book that talks about UX is The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper. I can recommend reading not only any book that Alan Cooper has written but also can recommend reading his blog. In this book, Alan makes the analogy that most technology is like the dancing bear at the circus. The reality is that the bear is not a great dancer but people still flock to the circus to see the bear dance because, well, it's a dancing bear. Many (maybe even most) of our technology solutions are really not that great for the user but the fact that it does anything at all is a novelty.

In Principles Of Software Engineering Management, Tom Gilb wrote that "The rule of thumb in many usability-aware organizations is that the cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100."

This cost benefit ratio is realized in several ways. Users will often call support to figure out how accomplish a given task. These calls can be eliminated by careful building of the user experience so that it's "intuitive". To figure out what's "intuitive" to your users, you need to understand who they are and how they work. You can attract new users to your application. As mentioned before, you cut down on the number of features that you build that don't get used and more.

Reduce the cost to maintain the software - This includes support calls, time and effort finding and fixing bugs, adding new features and the like. Dealing with legacy systems is what a very high percentage of developers do in their day to day jobs. The cost of maintenance can be mitigated on the front end in a number of ways.

There are a ton of books out there that cover this topic in great detail.

First, you have to have sound architectural principles and rigor. The larger the application is, the more important this is. If you can separate out your business logic from your data tier from your UI cleanly and absolutely, you have a much better chance of being able to do maintenance on one piece without devastating the rest of the pile of spaghetti.

Second, you have to write maintainable code. The definition of "Maintainable" varies but my go to book in this topic is Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. I had the great fortune to have the first edition of Code Complete. It taught me things from properly named variables to building high performance data structures. I highly recommend anything that McConnell writes.

Third, find a good way to do a given task and make it the standard. For example, if you've got 3 different logging mechanisms, that's probably 2 too many. If you're doing one off security mechanisms in every application or even different parts of the same application, you've got huge headaches. If you have many different mechanisms for hitting the database you need to simplify and standardize.

There are lots of other techniques that will cut down on the amount of time and effort that it takes to maintain the software. However, there is a tipping point where it makes a lot more sense to do a rewrite than it does to keep maintaining the existing code base. This tipping point depends on the function of the application, state of the code, state of the architecture, practices used to build the application in the first place, availability of tools, availability of talent who understand the technologies used to write it in the first place and the requirements for new features. Determine whether it's going to be more cost effective, given all of those variables, to do a rewrite or to keep maintaining.

This is not an easy decision. You have to fully understand the risks. Legacy code contains often vast amounts of implicit requirements: lessons learned that were never documented anywhere but the code. They should be documented elsewhere, but reality says otherwise. This is especially common when the original developers are no longer around: the new developers, in their hubris, assume all the old code is junk and can be “easily” replaced. Along the way, they lose implicit requirements that they’ll have to relearn the hard way. Additionally, rewrites from the ground up invariably take longer than adding a single small feature. Joel Spolsky is talks about these risks in an article called Things You Should Never Do, Part I.

Even with Joel's wise words of warning, there comes a time when it's cost effective to do a rewrite. In 2004, Rutherford and Associates took their 15 year product and rewrite 80-90% of their existing functionality and enabled a tremendous amount of new functionality with a 6-9 month investment of time from 3 developers. They had gotten to the point where they were not able to respond in an efficient manner to new customer requirements with the existing C code base. Of course, part of that code base was their own database engine because when they started 15 years prior, there was not a database engine for mobile devices.

But again, that's going back to the numbers and understanding the needs of the business.

What's the return?

This is the really difficult part to measure. Most of the time there's a way to measure how much your application costs to develop in the first place but there are many ways to measure return.

Returns come in three basic forms, money saved, time saved or new business enabled which brings in more revenue.

To really bring and measure a great return, you have to understand the current state of the business. This involves studying how the company earns money today and how they spend that money. When you understand this, you can start looking for ways to improve things.

Money Saved is not hard to explain but you can look for it in a lot of different places. One contract that I did before joining Microsoft was building out a specialized survey engine specific to the medical field to replace the paper one that they were currently using. This saved on printing costs, typists to type in the returned results into a spreadsheet but the real savings came in shipping costs. That alone paid for my contract within the first year.

Are you cutting back the costs in the data center or even cutting portions of it by rolling out to the cloud?

Are you cutting the power requirements of the client software by employing green methodologies?

Time Saved is a little more nebulous to measure but possible. Are you cutting down on the amount of time that it takes to process an order? One CTO of a call center told me that if he could save an average of 3 seconds a call, he would save 2 million a year. That's a lot of money. Because of that level of savings, he was willing to spend a lot of time and money researching where users were spending time and what we cut. Latency issues were a killer. Near side caching, GEO location of data and many other relatively simple things shaved seconds and therefore saved time and money.

Are you automating currently manual processes? If so, how long do those tasks take and what's that cost?

Enabling New Business is where you want to be. This is where you start to become that strategic partner to the business and get a first class seat at the table with the rest of the business leadership team.

Are you increasing capacity? This has to be carefully examined. If you are increasing the capacity to take orders but not the capacity to fulfill those orders, this is wasted effort. For benefit from the increased capacity, capacity for ordering, fulfillment and marketing all have to be working in concert. This comes back to understanding the business and asking people "where are the bottlenecks?".

Are you attracting new customers to the business? Is your new online presence ranks higher in the search engines or taping into social media to leverage the "word of mouth" marketing that happens in that arena?

Are you making it simpler for people to buy your products? I recently blogged about Jarod Spool and how he changed the text on a button and created The $300 Million Button. The quick moral of the story was that the old wording was confusing customers and driving them away. The new button brought in $300 Million dollars.

Are you enabling new lines of business? One example of enabling new business is when a wine distributor bought EO Star's distribution management application and realized that they could start managing and distributing many different types of foods with their wine and manage those as easily sold and packaged deals. A counter example is where one restaurant chain couldn't offer a new type of food because they had to rewrite their menu application to handle it.

Conclusion

As technology folk, we have to understand business or we will be at the mercy of the business. The primary motivation for all businesses is making money. This is measured via ROI and payback.

In order to become a strategic partner to the business you have to prove that you are providing a great ROI for the business's investments in you.

You can improve your projects ROI by reducing development costs, runtime costs, maintenance costs and by saving the company time, money and enabling new business.

While this measurement can be a lot of work and a little scary sometimes, it will prove to be absolutely essential because once you have that data, you will be in a great position with the business.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Taking The Polar Plunge

Josh Holmes — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:58:44 GMT

As I talked about in a recent post, I recently participated in a fund raiser for the Special Olympics of Michigan. The end of the fund raiser was that I did a Polar Plunge.

This is a charity that is special to me because of my youngest daughter, Maura, who has a lot of challenges of her own. One day, my hope is to see her compete in the Special Olympics.

To find out more about Maura, see the “About” page at Wonderpuzzle.org. http://www.wonderpuzzle.org/site/About.aspx

Turns out a lot of people wanted to see me jump in a frozen lake… :) In the end, I raised $725.00 + whatever we get through matching funds so probably a little over $1000.00. So, for all of you who paid to see me do it – here’s the video.

Special thanks to all of you who donated – many of who are friends on twitter…

Display Name	Date	Amount	Comment
Omar Greene	2/14/2009	$50.00	Josh is a fine person. Known him since his boyhood.
JSConf 2009	2/13/2009	$100.00
Michael Eaton	2/13/2009	$25.00
David Giard	2/13/2009	$25.00
Aaron Lerch	2/13/2009	$25.00
Carey Payette	2/13/2009	$25.00	Great Cause
tye	2/12/2009	$25.00
Anonymous	2/12/2009	$25.00	good luck!
Dennis Burton	2/12/2009	$25.00
Frank Martin	2/11/2009	$25.00	Happy to help this cause.
Susan Holmes	2/11/2009	$25.00	Because we love you and yours
kellie englund	2/10/2009	$25.00	hope Phoebe gets your new suit done in time!!!
Denny Boynton	2/10/2009	$50.00	Because you're even willing to do it...
Pandamonial	2/10/2009	$40.00	Good luck!
Ryan Stewart	2/10/2009	$50.00
Anonymous	2/9/2009	$20.00	don't freeze your butt off!
Bruce Szabo	2/9/2009	$25.00	Good Luck!
Anonymous	2/9/2009	$40.00	Good luck!
Tim Adams	2/9/2009	$100.00	God Bless!!!



	Grand Total:	$725.00

It was a surreal experience. I watched how far across the water it was and decided that I just needed to make a dive for it. The water was about 8 foot deep where I made the jump. When I hit the water, every last bit of breath left my body. As one person said, that’s God’s way of making sure you don’t yell bad words when you hit the surface. I said something about “Man that’s cold” but it came out “BBBBBRBRRRBBRBBBRBBRBBRBRBRB”. The really bizarre thing was getting out of the water and realizing that I was walking across the snow and my feet didn’t feel cold. The snow actually felt a little warm. I got in and changed the feelings got more bizarre as my skin warmed up but I was still cold inside – exactly the opposite of normal when it’s cold outside your skin is usually the first to get cold.

I just got off the phone with a friend who asked “Would you do it again?”. I answered “Yes”. He rephrased the question with “Would you do it again if there wasn’t a good cause involved?”. I answered “No…”

Look for me to do it again next year but I’m going to go bigger on the fund raising and possibly go with a costume…

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Three Essential Expression Blend Add-ins

Josh Holmes — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:30:33 GMT

Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability, don’t call Microsoft support. However, there are a couple of really cool ones that are out there.

There are three that I think that you have to have – Unify, Colorful Expression and BlendSense: XAML Intellisense for Expression Blend.

Getting a Blend Add-in to run

Because it’s not a supported add-in model, there’s not a built in add-in manager that does the heavy lifting like the Visual Studio Add-In manager.

What you have to do is open up Expression Blend (or Design) passing in your add-in as a command line option. This starts up blend with that add-in enabled. The good news is that you don’t have to do any type of COM registration or anything to get it to work. The bad news is that it’s a hassle for those of us who don’t live on the command line like some people.

Another other option, is to alter your Blend Shortcut to include the –addin parameter. This accomplishes the same task as the command line, it just does so without all the hassle of opening a command line.

There are multiple problems with both of these solutions.

First, it is only able to handle one add-in at a time. Second, that only loads the add-in when you specifically click on that shortcut but doesn’t work from a lot of other places, like launching from Visual Studio.

The great news about the first issue is that it can be solved by another add-in.

Unify Add-in

Unify is an add-in manager. It’s going to do all of the heavy lifting of loading and launch a number of different plug-ins such as the Xaml Intellisense for Blend and Colorful.

When Unify installs it automatically gives you a prompt that starts the Unify add-in. However, that still only solves the first problem of getting the add-in loaded when we deliberately set out to do so.

Launching Blend with Unity from Anywhere

The second problem, as mentioned above, is a little harrier. It’s that the shortcut is not the only way to run Blend. What you have to do is fix all of the different ways that you can run Blend. That includes selecting a project file from Windows Explorer and clicking Edit in Blend in Visual Studio.

This, unfortunately requires some registry hacks and the like but you can get there from here. The first registry hack to fix is the opening a solution from Windows Explorer. To accomplish this, the following code copied into a reg file works on a 64X machine. You’ll have to remove the (86) on a 32X machine.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Expression.Blend.ProjectFile\Shell\Open\Command]
@="\"c:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Expression\\Blend 2\\Blend.exe\" \"%1\" /addin:Unify.dll"

The second registry hack to fix is the launching from Expression Blend by right-clicking on a XAML file in Visual Studio and selecting “Edit in Expression Blend”. To do this requires understanding how the right click in Visual Studio works. The list of available commands comes from the registry. When selected, it passes in two parameter. The first is the path to the actual solution and the second is a /file:filename.extension parameter. It looks as follows:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Blend 2\blend.exe" "C:\Projects\QuickNavigation\QuickNavigation.csproj" /file:"Page.xaml"

What we have to do is redirect this in the registry to a bat file that will pass in our /addin parameter. Personally, I created a BlendWithUnify.bat file in the /Blend directory as follows:

start "Blend" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Blend 2\blend.exe" /addin:Unify.dll %1 %2

Technically, we could have used the .bat file with the first mechanism as well. We need to fix the registry key as follows:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\VS]
"BlendLaunchPath"="\"c:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Expression\\Blend 2\\BlendWithUnify.bat\""

Now we are cooking with gas and are ready to investigate a few more add-ins.

Colorful Expression Add-In

Colorful Expression was directed to me by Jared Bienz after the Expression Design tutorial that I talked about recently. It’s a sweet add-in to Expression Blend (or Design) that gives you access to a ton of different color swatches that are out there on the web. Specifically, it taps into Kulor on the Adobe site. These are mostly swatches put together by pro-designers. These are also rated so you can pick the higher rated groups to be sure. In any case, they are definitely better than the ones that my color-blind self can choose.

Jonas Follesø saw that Kulor has a open restful API and couldn’t resist playing with it. Combine that with the (unfortunately unsupported – see below on how to get it to actually run in Blend…) add-in model for Blend and magic happens.

What it does is that it shows up as a tab in Expression Blend (or Design) and alls you to browse color pallets from Kulor for use in your application. There are a couple of slick ways that you can do that.

First, if you are running Design, you can hit the down arrow looking thing under a swatch and save it as an Expression Design Color Swatch. The next two work in either Blend or Design.

First, you can click the # button or select the swatch and hit Ctrl-C to copy the swatch to the clip board. If you paste that on a Page or UserControl, you get the swatch, but more importantly, you get the colors created as static resource brushes. You can also just go into the XAML in either the UI surface or the app.xaml and paste them that way.

Second, you can use the color picker from the normal color picker to select an individual color. This is pretty cool as well as it allows you to be very selective about your colors.

You can also run it as a standalone application if you want to pick a color swatch for use in something other than Blend or Design. I can see using to figure out color pallets for my CSS style sheets. I’m also going to contact Jonas and see if he has thought about building it for Expression Web. But that’s just me wishing and hoping until I hear back from him.

Check out Colorful Expression and give it a whirl. I’m interested to see how you use it.

BlendSense: XAML Intellisense for Expression Blend Add-in

Just yesterday I was on a call with a guy who was frustrated by the fact that there’s no Intellisense in Blend for XAML. Well, ask and you shall receive. There’s a skunk works project called BlendSense that was put up at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BlendSense but it was only for the Beta versions of Expression Blend 2.5. They haven’t updated it for the release which was actually called Expression Blend 2 SP1. So, the good folks at http://www.rhizohm.net recompiled the code for us and posted it at BlendSense: XAML Intellisense for Expression Blend.

There are a couple of limitations on it’s functionality. right now, it’s using the WPF namespace types and the like for it’s Intellisense. That means that it’s not ideal for Silverlight as the Intellisense might be lie to you – but that would just take me back to my MFC days... The second limitation is that it doesn’t handle custom namespaces and the like so you’re out of luck if you are using a custom control or third party components.

Technically, it’s using an XSD file that is built for Intellisense so you could edit it to fit your needs.

Conclusion

These three add-ins are fantastic and I’m thrilled that they are here. Both of them have already, in the day that I’ve been using them, saved me time and energy in some things that I’m working on. It’s a little bit of a frustrating process to get Unify running for every scenario but it’s worth it and hopefully I’ve done the leg work on figuring it out for for you.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Polar Plunging for the Special Olympics

Josh Holmes — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:11:18 GMT

What I’m doing:

I’m going to be polar plunging to raise money for the Special Olympics Michigan this coming weekend in Belleville.

This is a charity that is special to me because of my youngest daughter, Maura, who has a lot of challenges of her own. One day, my hope is to see her compete in the Special Olympics.

To find out more about Maura, see the “About” page at Wonderpuzzle.org.

http://www.wonderpuzzle.org/site/About.aspx

How you can help:

If you can donate, please check out my donation page at http://www.firstgiving.com/joshholmes.

About the Event:

If you want to watch (video – whatever), come and ‘bear’ the elements at the 2009 Polar Plunge – Belleville at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 at the Belleville Moose Lodge (831 East Huron Dr. Belleville, MI 48111). Registration begins at 10:30 a.m. with the plunge and parade of costumes beginning at 11:30 a.m. with a warm post-plunge party at 12:30 p.m.

The polar plunge is a fun-filled event open to all courageous and community-minded individuals willing to plunge into the cold water and raise critical funds to support the year-round athletic training of more than 16,000 athletes across the state. Be sure to pre-register to receive detailed information.

About the Special Olympic Michigan:

The mission of Special Olympics Michigan is to provide sports training and athletic competition in a variety of Olympic-type sports for the children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Athletes are given continuing opportunities to develop physical fitness; demonstrate courage; experience joy; and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills, and friendship with their families, other Special Olympics athletes and the community. Through Special Olympics, athletes gain self-confidence and prove their own capabilities.

This weblog is sponsored by <a href="http://www.joshholmes.com">Josh Holmes</a>.

Josh Holmes

The Lost Art of Simplicity

The Lost Art of Simplicity - Presentation Transcript

Glimmer – A jQuery Designer

Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge

Antidotal info on JavaScript Library Ext JS

Kalamazoo X conference

Congratulations, you've installed dasBlog with Web Deploy!

Interesting Web Development Related Resources

JavaScript Resources

AJAX HistoryMousewheelJSONCurvy CornersjCarouselxWin

How do you choose?

CSS Resources

Conclusion

Measuring ROI – Moving from Cost Center To Strategic Partner

What are your Goals?

How did it cost to develop the software?

How much does it cost to run the software?

What's the return?

Conclusion

Taking The Polar Plunge

Three Essential Expression Blend Add-ins

Getting a Blend Add-in to run

Unify Add-in

Launching Blend with Unity from Anywhere

Colorful Expression Add-In

BlendSense: XAML Intellisense for Expression Blend Add-in

Conclusion

Polar Plunging for the Special Olympics

AJAX History
Mousewheel
JSON
Curvy Corners
jCarousel
xWin