My guess proved to be well founded. Unfortunately like pretty well every hospital they schedule appointment slots for the time they would take if everything goes according to plan, unfortunately this morning they had had some sort of crisis, and by the time we got there were running almost an hour late. Bearing in mind that we also tend to come early because of the twenty minute adventure of finding a space in the car park made doubly annoying this time thanks to the piles of snow in the car park that fairly obviously hadn’t been taken account of when the barriers counted vehicles in and out.

Anyway, when we got in, thankfully this time the ultra-sound operator didn’t have to chase the baby around to get the required measurements, indeed it was exactly the opposite in that the baby was quite comfortably in one position and really didn’t seem to want to move. However the operator got a good look and was actually able to stop and show us the heart beating away, and we saw bits of rib cage, and arm and leg bones. After trying various ways of having Beth positioned, he resorted to poking in order to get the baby to move, and finally got the last measurements. The still baby also gave him a good clear view (if you know what I mean) to identify that our midwife at Finchampstead still has the touch, as she said from listening to the heartbeat weeks ago that it was a boy, and the operator here also said that it looked like a boy – of course they are never totally sure, so we’re going with probably a boy, and keeping a girls name or two in reserve just in case!

As Beth hasn’t developed Gestational Diabetes this time around, this will probably be the last scan – although there is another diabetes test in a few weeks to confirm. Whilst it’s nice to get all the extra scans, as Beth says, she gets mighty bored sitting in the waiting room at the hospital. ETA for the new baby is still some time in early June.

Now does anyone want any girls clothes…

The day started off cold – although there was no snow it was definitely a case of scraping ice off the car, and if you were in any doubt, one look at Rachel Hawley’s footwear could tell you! Having said that, as has become traditional at these events, bacon butties to warm you up awaited those who got there early.

First off a couple of observations. For a Microsoft Developer Day, it was a very good advert for Apple! Of the five talks I attended, two were obviously running off Mac’s. One was about iPhone development, so using a Mac was a given, although the presentation was also given using Keynote (and all the more slick for it) and rather than messing around with font sizes as all the PC based presenters have to do Chris Hardy used the built-in OS X zoom gestures to quickly focus in on what he was showing. The other Mac based presentation given by Ian Cooper wasn’t anything related to Mac development at all, but was presented in MacOS X, using the Mac version of Powerpoint, with a windows development environment running in VMWare. It’s not so long ago that developers would buy a Mac, largely ditch MacOS X and stick Windows on it – it does seem that even with the advent of Windows 7 that isn’t always the case now… The other massive advert for Apple was not surprisingly the vast numbers of iPhones in evidence. I certainly think it would have been worth somebody doing the same as Scoble did at Le Web to get a ball park figure of how many there were. There were a good few Google Android phones around, but few if any Microsoft based phones in evidence. This was also reflected in the sessions – no talks on Windows Mobile development, but there was a talk on using MonoTouch to develop iPhone applications!

As is normal for these days, what I thought I would attend, and what I actually attended were slightly different. I initially thought I’d just take up residence in Chicago 1 for the day, but in the end I fancied a change of pace.

First up I attended a talk by Ian Cooper on Real World MVC Architectures. This in part was because I’ve just done my first ASP.Net MVC project, and I was half expecting to find I’d done it all wrong, as to a large extent I’ve put it together as felt right rather than following any explicit paradigm. To my relief it seems all the talk of proper architecture seems to be sinking in, and the way I’ve constructed it is pretty much as was suggested, even to the point that I’ve used particular techniques without having read about them as yet in my MVC book in that I understood why they were being used but didn’t recognise the idea by name! I suspect the session might have been pitched a bit too much towards the beginner end of things for experienced MVC programmers, but for me it was certainly a good reinforcement of the techniques.

Next I slipped next door for a change of gear, and a non-technical talk by Liam Westley who was talking about how to be a small software development outfit and not go bust. To be honest, the principles Liam outlined can apply equally well to large software houses, a number of which I’ve come across who don’t get this stuff right, and even to people in a corporate environment like me as getting these sorts of things wrong will at the very least have your internal customers looking elsewhere for their software, or at the worst put you out of a job. Liam gave us a set of broad principles that any software developer should be doing as a matter of course – things like delivering properly tested software, applying proper logging (even in a corporate environment fixing a problem before the users have got round to reporting it scores serious brownie points), and understanding your users, all go to making people happy to give you their software work, and not go elsewhere.

For session number three it was a first for me, in that it was the first time that I have heard Jon Skeet speak. His name will be familiar to anyone who frequents Stack Overflow – and as his reputation is testament to he sometimes seems to answer C# questions within seconds of them being asked. What is slightly more surprising is that his day job is at Google as a Java developer. Even more surprising he fits all of that in with being a Methodist Local Preacher too – but I suspect that stands him in good stead for being able to deliver material well, as from the experience today his reputation is well deserved. The latest version of C# brings in some interesting, but quite complex new ideas, and he did manage to put them over in a way that even with the early start on a Saturday I pretty well followed them. Having said that whilst I liked the presentation, and many of the new features, I was less than impressed by the return of the ubiquitous VB variant data type, in the guise of the dynamic type. Whilst I am well aware that the way the variant and the dynamic work are rather different, it’s much more about how it will end up being used, or more likely abused. I’m with Jon Skeet on this in that I much prefer a situation where the types can be validated at compile time. Whilst there are legitimate reasons for adding dynamic, and as an exercise in language design the implementation is very impressive, as with the variant I am quite sure it will end up being thoroughly misused, and will lead to many a difficult to nail down bug.

Next up was lunch, and was the traditional scramble for a lunch bag. Unfortunately it seems that the entire occupants of the Chicago 1 side went the same way and got all the non veggie and non seafood sandwiches (I have to watch having too much of certain types of seafood with my gout) and as always it was a bit of a lucky dip as to what else you got, so I ended up with a sandwich, crisps and an apple that I wanted, and a can of diet coke and a snickers bar that I didn’t want. I know they’ve tried various things over the years, but I still think there has to be a better way than this, as it was pretty obvious looking around that not everybody wanted what was in their lunch and there was a lot going to waste.

The lunch time Grok Talks had relocated this year, and were in the atrium in building four. This certainly gave a bit more space, but did seem to make the security guards mighty jumpy – I got a stern “I’ve just seen you behaving strangely” from one for taking this picture – I just liked the look of the clear blue against the white of the building structure and was going to make some comment about the weather! The Grok Talks were marred rather by problems with the technology. For a start the speakers were badly positioned in relation to where the presenters were standing leading to endless feedback problems. The talks also took an absolute age to get started, and when they did people seemed to overrun, which as a result led to people who were further down the running order being disappointed. There were a couple of interesting talks though, and it was especially interesting watching Gary Short intensely watching somebody else demonstrate Code Rush! Looking at the response hopefully there will be a few more converts from Resharper, a jump I made many years ago!

After lunch was one of my personal interest talks. As an iPhone owner and software engineer I’ve always quite fancied giving an bit of iPhone development a go. The problem is that as well as learning a new platform and new environment, developing for the iPhone requires learning a new language, Objective-C. However Chris Hardy was demonstrating a way that I could leverage my existing C# skills using the Mono environment and an add on to it called MonoTouch. Whilst developers still need to be able to read Objective-C to understand what is going on, and still need to learn their way around the Apple API’s, it allows them to develop entirely in familiar C#, and even brings advantages in terms of some of the extra type safety that C# brings. I have to say I was pretty impressed at the environment and what it can do. I was less impressed by the price – $399 for a personal license, which only covers you for a year of updates, with even more for a corporate license – far too much for your average hobbyist programmer to even consider. I can’t help thinking that they are missing a trick here, and providing a low cost or free license for developers in return for a share of the revenues, maybe using some sort of phone home code to keep track would certainly broaden the base of programmers using it.

My last session of the day, to be honest I would have gone to even if Barry was just reading the phone book, as this was potentially his last appearance at a Developer Day before he loses the essential qualification for being allowed to speak of not working for Microsoft, as in a scant few days he will be starting a new job working for Microsoft at one of their offices in Redmond. As always there was the classic banter with people he knew in the audience, in particular Jon Skeet who was attempting to pose increasingly difficult questions it seemed. Barry also started off by hijacking the session next door as Ben Hall, the speaker had a birthday and was foolish enough to tell somebody! What I was also expecting, and got in spades were interruptions marking his departure from the UK development scene. His book Beginning ASP.NET Security featured in several. In the first Liam Westley gave a touching and heartfelt tribute, and said how much he had been looking forward to the arrival of the book – as it was just the right size to prop up his wobbly table. In another they spoofed the winter cold adverts, suggesting that the book was good fuel to keep the elderly warm. The session finished off with a clip from his appearance many years ago on The Crystal Maze, and several of the organising team appearing in T-shirts especially prepared for the occasion. All in all it was a memorable way to finish off the day, and hopefully a memorable occasion for Barry as he heads across the Atlantic. The one question that remains is whether all the spelling mistakes in the presentation were down to Barry, or whether somebody did get at his presentation before he went on…

All in all it was an excellent day, and although I know there were a couple of sessions that had problems, the ones I attended were all excellent, and well worth the spare time given up. It was great to catch up with friends from the community, previous developer days and previous jobs. Whilst it does appear that the day is very much a victim of it’s own success (even with local developer days around the country people still travel from far and wide to attend this one in addition to their local days) hopefully a way can be found to allow it to keep running in future years, and all credit to the organising team, and the staff at Microsoft for keeping the whole day running smoothly.

First off, Sky themselves have refunded our £60 installation fee. I e-mailed in a complaint saying much the same as my previous post here (but without the Simpsons reference) and to their credit they replied saying that it was not the level of service they should have given and therefore refunded the installation fee.

The other outstanding issue was the really annoying audio/video synchronisation problem on our Amstrad HD box. After a bit of experimentation and online reading it seems the problem only occurs when the box is auto-switching the ouput resolution between standard definition and high definition channels. The solution is to lock the box to only output a high definition picture, by switching it from Automatic to 1080i.
However the downside with this is it sometimes does a lousy job of scaling standard definition pictures, especially if they we’re originally 4:3 – widescreen standard definition doesn’t seem to be a problem for us – also the upscaled picture is pretty poor quality in comparison to what you’d get from a standard definition Sky+ box or from the Sky+ HD box automatically switching.

The answer comes in the form of the SCART socket on the back of the box. This by design can only output a standard definition picture, but can be tweaked to use an improved RGB connection if the TV supports it, so it does produce a much better picture than the upscaled output over the HDMI cable.

Certainly it’s annoying having to swap, and it will be a lot better when the audio/video synchronisation problem is solved, but it’s a lot less annoying than the audio being three seconds behind the video!

In the past I’ve had one or two issues with Sky installers, generally a drawn out discussion getting them to run cables where I want them, but I was fairly confident this time since all that was required was to replace our existing Sky+ box with a new Sky+ HD box – not much to do for the flat rate £60 installation fee. I’d already measured the slot for the box to go into in the cabinet – it fitted although it was tight, all the cables were there, simple you might think.

When I came home, the first thing was that the Sky+ HD was placed at a jaunty angle because “it didn’t fit” – thirty seconds of shuffling solved that. Then I turned on the box. BBC HD worked fine, but none of the subscription HD channels did – so he hadn’t actually activated the card for HD.

Okay, phone up Sky and go through the process.

This proved to be slightly confusing as the techie originally tried to guide me through the HD settings pages, whilst the box had the old style Sky Guide – despite the yellow sticker on the front asking the installer to do the over the air download, he’d not bothered with that either.

The techie quickly activated the remaining channels, so we sat back and waited for a programme to record, only to be presented with an error again asking us to call Sky – another few minutes on hold whilst a different techie activated the recording facilities.

Once that recording had finished I went through the over the air download procedure myself, and we now have the latest Sky Guide, plus ITV HD set up.

And then the final icing on the cake, when I sat down to try and make this blog posting, I discovered that despite not needing to touch it at all, the installer had pulled the network cable out.

So of all the tasks the Sky installer had to do today, the only one he actually did was deliver the box, all the rest I ended up doing, and I paid a grand total of £60 for this…

Having said that, the HD picture is really good…

What I objected to with O2 was firstly that they were traffic shaping at peak times. They don’t do this on their own network, but apparently they are having congestion problems on the access service and rather than increase capacity are trying to control the service using shaping. It also isn’t working particularly well – even with the traffic shaping my speed was drastically reducing. I also had problems with the supplied router gradually negotiating the speed downwards – I’d had a similar problem on Zen and their tech support had been able to look at the line stats and tweak the settings to get my speed back up. Calling O2 their award winning customer support could only tell me that the line was connected – they had no statistics of connection drop outs, and their suggested action was that I sit and watch the router lights to see if they went out! After that I swapped back to Zen. (It is interesting to note at this point that BE who came second in the awards and are another O2 brand don’t even offer and access product for out of area customers…)

So based on my experience I’d easily rate Zen higher than O2, so I took a look at the ThinkBroadband results page. It certainly makes interesting reading.

The results have divided the ISP’s into two categories, Large and Niche, the dividing line being set at about 6000 user ratings. Zen comes in at 5,507 ratings with BE the smallest of the large category with 7,359 participants. Zen comes in as runner-up in the niche category.

But then I looked at the actual ratings. Zen scores 86% for customer service and 85% for reliability, O2 comes in with 75% for customer service and 68% for reliability. In fact the top four niche providers clearly beat O2 on both counts. If the dividing line had been set at 5000 user ratings Zen would have easily won the award by a large margin.

The upshot of the results seems to be that firstly, if you’re looking for a reliable and good quality broadband connection, you should seriously look at so called niche providers as the top ones rate significantly better than the big guys. I’m certainly happy to recommend Zen as a good reliable ISP, whether you’re on their network or a BT connection. Also when you see result headlines, take a look at the detail – an arbitrary split can make a quite noticeable difference to the results.

I was somewhat lucky in that I can see the main road from my office, so as the snow fell and the traffic grid-locked, I stayed put. In fact along with about twenty other stranded staff I was shouted dinner by our chief executive and a couple of other directors who were also stuck in the office. By about 8:30pm, in Camberley at least, the roads were clear and I could head for home. Whilst the snow levels increased as I headed into Berkshire, the roads were passable enough for me to make it home in about an hour.

Others were less lucky. The wife of my cousin who works in Reading and lives in Amersham had a hellish eight hour journey through the areas with the biggest snowfalls. Similarly several friend who work up near Oxford had five hour journeys as again the motorways ground to a halt. Locally there were several accidents on major routes leading to traffic slowing to a halt, and trapping the gritting trucks in the jam. The situation in Basingstoke actually made the national news.

Needless to say, this has produced the other staple of a winter event in Southern England, moaning about the local councils failing to keep the roads clear, and numerous comparisons with other countries like Germany and Canada, that don’t grind to a halt in the snow.

First off, it is worth comparing what happens in a country like Canada with here. Yes the local authorities are better set up for dealing with snow, and indeed they have more equipment on standby ready to keep the roads clear, but the important thing to note is that the local drivers are properly equipped as well. It is common practice to fit special winter tyres to the cars, whereas it is unheard of in the UK – pretty well everybody was sliding around on all season or summer tyres – check out this YouTube video for the effect that winter tyres can have. Also once you get stuck, most British drivers are ill equipped. In Canada many drivers will have an emergency kit in the car, certainly Beth when she lived in rural Canada would travel in winter with a warm change of clothes in the car, a shovel to dig the car out in an emergency and a bag of grit to improve traction if needed. If you told most Brits that they needed that, they’d think it laughable, because you don’t get weather like that in England. Needless to say that is exactly the same reason the local councils don’t spend vast amounts of money on equipment that could sit largely idle in between major snow events like we had this Christmas.

It is also worth mentioning, that even in Canada they get disruptive snow fall from time to time, and they can’t deal with everything. What happened around our area last week was after an initial fairly light fall of snow on 21st the forecast was for sleet, which fell initially as rain, and then turned to snow. The problem with rain is that it washes away the grit that is put on the road, if that then freezes, and then snow falls on top you get what we got on 21st – a layer of ice with snow on top – treacherous even with good tyres and experienced drivers, let alone with most UK cars.

But I’ve been in Canada in similar conditions.

One winter trip over to Alberta it rained on the Tuesday, froze overnight and then snowed on top, leading to precisely the same sorts of conditions as we had – a layer of ice covered by snow. It was chaos. The local news swapped between pictures of chaos across Calgary, with removal trucks stranded by sheet ice, multiple accidents on the major roads, and hauled up the council staff responsible for maintaining the roads who tried to explain how they’d done their best, but there was nothing they could do. Even several days later when we headed for the airport many roads weren’t clear of ice despite the road crews working around the clock to clear it. A trip that would normally have taken us three hours took over six.

The moral of the story is that snow and ice causes chaos, even to those most experienced at dealing with it. Sure the UK could invest much more money in snow clearance, and they could mandate that all drivers fit winter tyres for the winter, but when it comes down to it, most people I’m sure would consider it not worth the money, whether out of their own pockets directly in buying a second set of tyres for their cars, or indirectly through the increased taxes to pay for the equipment. And even having spent all that money, there will still be the occasional times like this last week where however much grit you use, and however much the councils try to clear the roads, things will still grind to a halt.

However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist appointment at Frimley Park. After the complications with gestational diabetes Beth had to have an appointment to get booked in for two glucose tests, the results of which will determine how many more appointments and ultra-sound scans we will have during the rest of the pregnancy, and ultimately when baby 2.0 is born. The due date is officially 14th June, but if the diabetes returns, as it is expected to, the birth will be induced early.

Having said that, it does look like the trips to the hospital will be a little bit less of a hassle as after leaving early to take account of the usual vast queue to get into the chaos of the hospital car park, we got in really easily, and even got one of the big spaces that make it a lot easier to get Lucy in and out of the car. At first I thought it was just that it was the time of year, but it turns out that it wasn’t only that…

As far as possible we’ve always tried to get morning appointments at the hospital, because you can usually get into the car park – although it’s often busy, you can usually get a space. In the afternoons it has always been absolute chaos, with the queue for the car park stretching out onto the road outside. The problem has always seemed to be around the couple of hours of visiting of an afternoon. Aside from one or two exceptions, all the hospital visiting is in two blocks, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, so in the afternoon you have visitors cars and patients heading to clinics all competing for spaces. According to the sign coming into the hospital today they seem to have finally taken heed of the problems, and afternoon visiting is only available on the weekends, during the week visiting is limited to the evening only. We’ll have to see whether it helps as we go through this pregnancy.

And before anyone mentions the importance of visitors, and how inconvenient it will be to only have evening visiting, I am well aware of that, but short of building a bigger car park, or introducing park and ride – especially with parking charges for hospitals looking like they will be abolished, it is more important that patients are able to park.

Anyway, if you’re still here, I’ve spent the past day or so trying to track down a problem in some WCF code. Essentially the problem has been that whilst I have been out of the office over the last week, we’ve had a change propagate through to our development server which has caused problems with some of our existing services, specifically some code where one service needs to make a call to another service running on the same machine to finish it’s work. To do this it needs to pass through the Kerberos ticket that the initial service has received, and whilst up to now it has been quite happily doing this, now it has stopped and instead is getting the credentials for the underlying windows service passed.

The problem was made a lot harder to diagnose by a little WCF gotcha whereby the error that is generated is overwritten when the calling code tries to dispose of the service object. Damien McGivern has an excellent post describing the problem and giving a solution, however it didn’t quite meet our needs, as we sometimes need to specify an endpoint when creating the proxy object.

To get around the problem, I adapted Damien’s code slightly creating an extension method taking an object of type TService rather than creating the object within the method, so the method can be used as follows:

new RelationshipServiceClient().UsingService(service => ... );

Whilst it doesn’t actually solve the mystery of why our server started mishandling WCF calls, it did at least give us a bit more clue!

It is a shot taken by him of the audience, and is the answer to a simple request, for people to hold up their iPhone – just take a look at the full sized shot and count quite how many there are.

Back before the iPhone launched, Nokia and the other big players in the market were bullish. The mobile phone market largely consisted of largely similar devices, and Apple coming in with something that didn’t conform to what everybody else was doing wasn’t going to make an impact was it? They seemed to think that doing it different meant that the iPhone wouldn’t sell – everybody had been doing the same thing for years and the consumer would stick with them.

From a personal point of view, I had spent years being largely dissatisfied with what the established players had been producing. I’d bounced back and forth between Nokia handsets, Sony Ericsson, and even a Motorola handset at one point, my general feeling is that despite promising much, they’d generally failed to deliver, with annoyingly quirky user interfaces, buggy firmware, and a generally frustrating experience all round, hence why I’d ended up changing phones pretty frequently. The best mobile device I’d owned was still the venerable Psion 5mx…

When I eventually got my hands on an iPhone, it proved to be a game changer – finally someone had actually managed to produce a mobile phone that was nice to use, and one that was a reasonable substitute for a desktop web browser. With the later addition of applications it became even more of a useful device.

The impression I get in tech circles is that I am not alone. At a couple of tech events I’ve attended recently by far the largest number of people had an iPhone – people who had been die hard Nokia fans, or had developed Windows Mobile apps for years had bought one, and weren’t planning on switching back. Now the numbers being used by non-techie friends is impressive, and the competition is struggling.

Check out this article in the Independent about the effect on Nokia, or this article about the recent Sony Ericsson Saito problems, with both the rise and rise of the iPhone, and the other new kid on the block Google Android it’s going to be very interesting to see what the second decade of the twenty-first century will bring for the old market leaders like Nokia…

The iPhone users at LeWeb originally uploaded by Robert Scoble.

Anyway, all three of us took a trip down to Frimley Park Hospital, which is where Beth has opted to go once again, and we sat and waited. Lucy is not surprisingly at her age, not really clued up as to what was going on. She had some fun playing with the toys in the waiting area, however moments before being called in for the scan she decided she was hungry and was signing both “milk” and “more”. Whilst the dimmed lights and images on the screen distracted her for a bit, her thoughts turned pretty quickly back to food.

Her new brother or sister seems to have already developed the same skill at dodging the scan operator as Lucy in that the operator had to chase around a bit to get the measurements, and the pictures she managed to get are not the clearest. In the pictures the baby is positioned with the head to the left, and on the third image you can just about see an arm in front of the face. As with Lucy, the subsequent scans should be clearer, again as with Lucy we’re expecting quite a few scans as having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes last time it is thought quite likely Beth will develop the condition again.

Following on from the scan, Beth also had a blood test, and then from there is was time to make the next scan appointment for twenty weeks (we have a consultant visit for the diabetes test later this month).