Notes from a Small Mind

The Path to Windows 8 - Or How I Think Microsoft Needs a Tablet Now!

2011-04-12T21:35:00.010+01:00

So something that has been on my mind for a little while is how do we get a tablet version of Windows that is actually usable?

Following the announcement of support for the ARM platform as well as the necessity to release a tablet version of Windows to compete with the iPad I get the feeling that this is something that has to come sooner rather than later.

If Microsoft is determined not to release a version of Windows 7 that is optimized for tablet devices and if they keep to a regular cadence schedule with Windows 8 we're not likely to see it released until either July or October next year (depending upon whether you decide that RTM or retail is the correct release date). Does this leave them dead and buried in the tablet space? Pretty much.

So why not break the mold a little and release an interim, Windows 8 for Tablets version? The interim version that Steve Ballmer is against? Is it really that mad of an idea?

Windows 8 has been demoed running on ARM processors - we've seen it running Word at CES 2011 and IE10 at Mix 2011. Granted it's not been the full updated Windows 8 experience (such as the ribbon for Windows Explorer) but for the purposes of getting a tablet version of Windows that doesn't matter - the standard Windows user interface doesn't work on a tablet device.

Step forward Metro? It's a nice interface that works on the Windows Phone 7. It would scale up quite nicely to a tablet device - certainly, I think, better than iOS does. If you've not looked at the Windows Phone 7 interface I'd recommend you take a look at it!

But there's also something else that I think would help in releasing Windows 8 for Tablets - the limited hardware that it would have to run on. As Microsoft have done with Windows Phone 7 they could release a hardware specification than must be supported in the short term. This is the only way that you're allowed to release a tablet device running the new OS. A relatively fixed hardware specification - yes you can have an HDMI output, no you can't have a parallel port, etc. - no driver incompatibilities or driver support to add to the device. Make it a consumer device at launch and you remove the need for any Active Directory or Group Policy support from the off.

Sure it's a limited version of Windows that only works on tablet devices. But by definition it's a limited version of Windows. It's a tablet (or a slate if you prefer)!

So that gets us to the tablet release in time for Christmas. So then what? You spend the next six months getting Windows 8 for Desktops sorted. A desktop version of Windows requires a lot more than a tablet version does. It will have an update to the existing Windows 7 user interface, it requires full backwards compatibility (so that the eight year old scanner than I have works), it requires full integration with Active Directory and Group Policy, it needs to be manageable through System Center. There's a lot that goes into a release of Windows.

But does that stop an early release of Windows 8 for Tablets? Not to my mind no. It's a limited version of Windows and that shouldn't stop it being released. When Windows 8 for Desktops is released send out an update (call it R2 if you want!). You then have both versions of Windows 8 back in synchronization and move forward from there.

Giving Apple and Google a massive head start will be insurmountable. Bite the bullet and release a version for tablets pretty damn quickly. Otherwise I fear that Windows as an OS will never run on tablets.

Entity Framework 4 and Partial Trust

2011-01-24T23:07:00.006+00:00

Aaaggghhh. It’s been a little while since I’ve been plagued by trust issues on a hosting provider. And now I’ve hit one trying to move a site onto the Rackspace Cloud.

It seems that they force all code to run in partial trust and that stops Entity Framework 4 from running. It seems that it’s a known issue for EF3.5 but it seems that it also occurs in EF4.

You can see it in action running locally by adding the following to web.config:

<system.web>
  <trust level="Medium" />
</system.web>

So after some considerable digging, going round in circles, and swearing at anything to do with EF4 I came upon this article on the Knowledge Base - ASP.NET Web sites That Have EDMX files do not compile and deploy in partial trust.

It seems that the website that I’ve created is not a full Web Application Project but is some half way house – there is a compiled assembly but because it’s MVC the views are left as aspx/ascx files. This means that the site is dynamically built and the metadata files extracted and then compiled into the required assembly. Which fails with a SecurityException – because System.Data.Entity.Design won’t run in partial trust and it’s used if you don’t have a fully pre-compiled Web Application Project.

So eventually I hacked a solution together…

Stop the metadata files being compiled into the assembly as a resource by setting the “Metadata Artifact Processing” to “Copy to Output Directory”.
Add a pre-build task to copy the three metadata files to the bin folder in the web site itself.
If publishing directly from Visual Studio to the hosting provider then also set the three metadata files as Content files so that they’re transferred across.
Reference the metadata files in the web.config version of the connection string correctly in the ~\bin folder.

So it’s not an easy solution and it’s not really tied to the 3.5 problem that I first thought it was.

What complicated the solution was that I do have the EF Model in it’s own project so the metadata shouldn’t need to be interrogated. And I thought I had a Web Application Project (which I apparently don’t even though I’ve got a compiled DLL for the site).

Aaaggghhh. Three hours later and it’s working. I’m still not sure if my understanding of the problem or it’s solution is correct but it’s working. And hopefully it will keep working.

SQL Server User Instances

2011-01-21T20:18:00.001+00:00

Note to self – remember to read this blog post when they don’t work.

Step 1 – Run it as Local System not Network Service.
Step 2 – Delete the SQLEXPRESS folder from C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Data.

Simples!

A Week With Windows Phone 7

2011-01-20T14:13:00.001+00:00

Due to a combination of working out whether I was moving jobs (yes), whether I was going to keep my work iPhone (now irrelevant), and whether I wanted to sign up to a new contract (not really) I’ve been very late to Windows Phone 7.

I eventually succumbed and, being on Orange for the last twelve years and not wanting to move network ,had a choice of the HTC 7 Mozart, LG Optimus 7 or the Samsung Omnia 7. Several people I know (including @jonoble and @dmilor) have the Omnia 7 and with a quick play around with it that was the one I went for.

I’ve now had it for a week and thought I’d put some thoughts down on what I like and don’t like. I think it’s a cracking little platform and there’s two many things to list of the the likes so I’m just going to list the don’t likes.

SkyDrive integration with OneNote in the Office Hub – doesn’t work correctly or does, but strangely. Thanks to Jon Noble for the post explaining how to integrate “correctly”.
SkyDrive integration with the Office Hub – there doesn’t seem to be any way to get Word/Excel/PowerPoint from the Office Hub into SkyDrive.
Integration within the People Hub – this one was raised last night at the NEBytes Birthday Event and until then I’d not really thought about it. We integrate Facebook feeds to people if they have an account but why don’t we link text messages and email messages? It would be nice to see the “here’s everything I’ve done with a person from one place” and then links from there to the correct application. And why don’t we show the call history in there as well? Yeah! I can see what they’ve spouted on Facebook but I can’t see when I last called/texted/emailed them?
Integration within the Photos Hub – why aren’t other applications in there. Yes we can look at SkyDrive and Facebook photos but where’s the Flickr integration (which is relevant to me as I have a Flickr Pro account but substitute your own photo-sharing application in there).

Now having written them down they seem a lot less bothersome than I thought they were. For a first platform I’m quite happy that the main issues that I have are all to do with “integration” with things outside of the phone itself. If you start playing around with the phone there’s an awful lot of attention to detail in the very small things – for instance slide from the “home screen” to the “application screen and watch the arrow rotate – that make it a pleasure to use.

It’s a really nice start to the platform and there looks to be plenty of updates in the pipeline for this year (including one this/next month). I am an ex-iPhone user (under protest I must add) and this just feels a little nicer – it’s certainly a nicer phone but whether it will ever get the market penetration as the iPhone or the Android is the big question.

Any Port? VPNs and SQL Server 2008

2011-01-13T00:28:00.001+00:00

I’ve had problems with the VPN to my hosting server for a little while now and, thankfully, it’s all sorted. I’ll not get into the “O2 updated their router remotely and it broke all VPNs” discussion but needless to say that I wasn’t best pleased.

Now that it’s working again I found that I couldn’t connect to the SQL Server 2008 through the VPN. I’d not changed any rules for the firewall but any connection to the database server was failing with a network error. SVN and MySQL would connect perfectly but for some reason SQL Server wouldn’t.

Trying to track it down was a bit of a problem but in the end I stumbled upon the problem. Since I last connected across the VPN I’d installed a second instance of SQL Server on the hosting server and the SQL Server Browser was now running. So as well as opening up port 1433 to connect to the default instance I had to open up port 1434 as well. Once I’d done that it connected like a charm.

Now I’m not sure why I needed to open the extra port – the default instance of SQL Server is still saying that it’s binding to port 1433 in the logs so I’d have thought that you could connect to it without hitting port 1434. But apparently not.

Changes are afoot...

2011-01-04T16:01:00.003+00:00

Hopefully no one will notice as the feeds should still work (the wonders of FeedBurner) but this blog has moved domains.

It was originally setup when littlepond was just a domain name I had. That then became a company in it's own right and it just doesn't seem right to keep my personal blog on that domain.

With the changes that are coming this year for me it was about time that I sorted it all out so now it's here. As well as this blog - Notes from a Small Mind - there's also a Musings from a Small Mind that I'm using as a general dumping ground for things.

Hopefully there will be more coming on this domain soon - including a real site when I get round to it!

SQL Server 2008 R2 Install

2010-05-07T14:07:00.001+01:00

Now that it’s gone to RTM I’ve just updated my development server to SQL Server 2008 R2 and hit an error that is a little weird.

The install was blocked because it thought I had the SQL Server 2005 Express Tools installed. However this is a machine that has never had anything other that SQL Server 2008 on it.

Searching around on the internet I found a post on the sqldabtips.com blog that covered why this is the case.

Basically the problem is that SQL Prompt and SQL Search from RedGate add a registry key (at least the version of SQL Search that I had installed did) that fools the installer. Simply uninstalling SQL Search and hitting “re-run” in the SQL Server 2008 R2 installer solved the problem and allowed the upgrade to be applied.

Page.Title Strangeness

2010-03-26T21:41:00.003+00:00

It’s very late and I’m madly trying to get a release out to the client so that I can go home (and have food as I’ve also not had lunch as well) and came across a rather strange problem in ASP.NET.

When trying to set the title of the page in code using a line very similar to the following:

Page.Title = "My new page";

It was ignoring it completely. Even setting the value in the watch window when debugging wouldn’t change the value of the Title property.

After a fruitless twenty minutes or so I spotted what the problem was. It was set in the mark-up to an empty string:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Title="" %>

And this stopped it being set in the code behind. Rather mental! Especially if you do the following:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Title="My page" %>

When in this case it’s actually set correctly in the code-behind, overriding what is in the mark-up.

NEBytes – March 2010

2010-02-25T09:33:00.001+00:00

The details of the March NEBytes event are up on the events page. “Visual Studio 2010” with Richard Fennell and “System Centre in the R2 Wave” with Matt McSpirit.

Hopefully the turnout at this one will be a little better than the last one (56 registered, 23 attended). Registration opened yesterday morning and, at present, we have 26 attendees. There’s plenty more space so get over there and register!

ASP.NET 4.0 Cometh

2010-02-25T09:28:00.001+00:00

For all of you who are looking forward to VS2010 (after playing with BETA 2 and the RC I know I am) my good friend Dan Maharry is putting together a series of posts covering ASP.NET 4.0 that make pretty good reading.

SQL Server Table-Valued Functions Funny

2010-02-12T06:13:00.002+00:00

Putting it here so that I have it somewhere that I can remember. Stored procedures and table-valued functions in SQL Server 2008 (I don’t know if this applies to earlier versions as I’ve not checked) behave slightly differently when using a view as their data source.

I have a view called cb_ClientView that does some jiggery-pokery to return the results that I need across several tables. It’s used in several places so that I don’t have to repeat the code several times.

Now I have both a stored procedure and a table-valued function that return data from the view. In both cases the SQL to utilise the view is pretty simple:

SELECT *
FROM cb_ClientView
WHERE @ShowEdited=1 OR cb_ClientView.IsEdited=0

Now I know that I should specify the exact columns that I want to return and not use the wildcard for columns but this method allows me to change the view to return other bits of data without having to modify all the stored procedures that use the code.

Which is exactly what I had to do. However this doesn’t work if you have a function!

Running the table-valued function still uses the old view definition. Unless you open the function in SQL Server Management Studio and run the statement, effectively altering the function, to be exactly what it was in the first place.

Seems a little inconsistent to me!

NEBytes - February 2010

2010-02-05T11:38:00.002+00:00

The details of the February NEBytes event are up on the events page. Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 with Oliver Sturm and a Direct Access talk by Dan Oliver and Conrad Sidey.

We've got a bigger room this time (in a different building as well just to confuse you). It would be good to see you there.

The year in review

2010-02-05T09:30:00.000+00:00

I’ve tried for several years to write a review of the previous year just to try and put a little perspective on what’s gone on. I’ve never really gotten round to it (or more correctly I’ve started but never finished). However this time I managed to craft together a “year-in-review” whilst away diving at New Year. It's just taken me a month to get it up here!

Diving

Diving seems to be the main theme of the year. The year started with a New Year’s Day with a dive on the Thistlegorm off a day-boat (after not much sleep due to a very rowdy bunch of Russian’s in the hotel from hell) – the only saving grace was that I helped with the tie off dive and was the first person on the boat to touch the wreck in 2009 – I even beat the dive leader down. The end of the year was equally as good with a dive on the Thistlegorm again on New Year’s Eve. Thankfully this time on a live-aboard which is a much more pleasant way to do it.

In between I did an awful lot of diving.

I qualified as a Divemaster with Sunderland Scuba Centre in February and lots of thanks to Steve Gibson and Jonathan Bray who made it enjoyable yet challenging and rewarding all at the same time.

Shortly after that I took a three month sabbatical from work (more on that below!) to do some diving and travelling in South East Asia. Spending two months on Koh Tao diving with Buddha View I decided to complete the instructor course and at the end of April I became an Open Water Scuba Instructor (as well as an EFR Instructor, Enriched Air Instructor, and Emergency Oxygen Provider Instructor). It wasn’t something I planned to do but it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done. Not only is Koh Tao a fantastic place to dive but Mark Soworko, Darius Moazzami and Gannon Murphy make a very good instructing team. It also helped that I had a great group of people on the IDC as well – John, Marie, Helen, Ewan, Nicola, Rob, Niki, Sascha, and Tom.

The only problem is that I’m (a) not diving enough back in the UK and (b) not teaching!

Travelling

As well as the time in Koh Tao I also did a month of travelling whilst I was out there. Bangkok, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were all seen. I also got to spend some time with some university friends - Dom and Becca – in Brunei. They’ve got two kids now that it makes me feel really old.

After spending inordinate amounts of money over the three months I was away I didn’t do much more travelling – a trip to Italy to watch the Newcastle Falcons take on Petrarca Padova and a fleeting jaunt to Belgium for the F1 Grand Prix. Well, not as much as I’d like to. There’s something to be said for those people that spend a lot of time travelling!

Reviewing and Writing

Once I started writing and enjoying it I always planned to do a lot more than I actually have. If you followed this blog you’ll see that I did make a start on a fourth book not so long ago and I’ve briefly toyed with the idea of self-publishing a new book. Well, it’s one of the things that I need to do! There are maybe plans afoot to write more (and not necessarily in technical areas) and once the plans start to firm up then I can make some headway on those.

I’ve also not done as much reviewing as I’d like. If you look at the list of books that I’ve worked on (there’s a published works page on my main website – which reminds me I must update that pretty damn quick) there’s only three books in the last year (well four if you count the C# and VB versions of Professional Silverlight 3 separately). I’ve got a couple of Silverlight 4 technical reviews coming up for Apress which should be fun – I’m also trying to get some Windows Azure reviewing as it’s going to be a big growth area and definitely something that needs to be looked at.

Gigs

One of the highlights of the year for me is the number of gigs that I managed to get to. I always like to try and get to at least a gig a month and, apart from the three months away, I managed it. From seeing Metallica the day before I flew to Thailand, to Coldplay at Wembley, Bruce Springsteen and Blur in Hyde Park, Oasis at The Stadium of Light, and Papa Roach at the Newcastle Academy it was a very good year!

Work – aka The Things We Have to Do to Make the Other Things Possible

Work is one of those things that no-one wants to do but everyone has to. Last year was a particularly bad year for me work wise and not something that I’d want to repeat. If not for the three month sabbatical that I took I can’t say that I’d still be employed at the same place.

Returning from travelling was even harder. Coming back into the same job that you despised three months earlier – despite repeated promises made before I departed – tends to be a little soul destroying. Being a software developer it takes something to get you to a point where you don’t want to even look at a computer takes an awful lot.

That’s not to say that it was all bad. Well 90% of it was but there’s the 10% that was good. Things did get better towards the end of the year but it’s still the same old place – no matter how people try to change things they always stay the same.

So Where to Next?

So that was the year that was 2009. Onwards into 2010. New ideas, new people, new places.

There are lots of things that I’d like to do in 2010 – some of which are already happening, some of which need a lot more work before they become viable.

Travelling this year is pretty much out – with the Rugby World Cup being in New Zealand next year I need to spend as little as possible for the next year so that I can have three months off again. The current planning is to have two weeks in the Phillipines with Sunderland Scuba Centre, three weeks in Koh Tao, a week in Singapore for the F1 GP, then over to New Zealand for the England v Scotland game (what do you mean there are games before that – there’s only one that matters!). So it’s going to be expensive.

The user group I’m helping run, NEBytes, looks as though it’s going to be good. Over 80 people there for the launch event this month and we’re hoping that we can keep the numbers up around there – the higher the numbers we can get the bigger speakers we can get so here’s hoping.

It also may be time to start looking for another job. I was at BT for four years before I left and since then, other than two 18 month periods where I was self-employed, have worked in two year stints. I’m been in my current job for three years come April and it may be time for a change. Something challenging and worthwhile rather than a mundane 9-5!

DDD8 and thoughts about a DDD North East

2010-01-31T20:03:00.002+00:00

I’ve attended the last two Developer Developer Developer events and yesterday was my third at DDD8. I’ve blogged in the past about DDD6 but didn’t blog about DDD7 (something to do with watching the Newcastle Falcons play Worcester Warriors in Worcester the night before).

From a choice of 19 sessions (split over four tracks) it was quite difficult to pick the sessions that I wanted to attend. There were some interesting sessions that I didn’t get to see but the ones I did were:

“Real World MVC Architectures” by Ian Cooper was an interesting session. It covered a lot of ground around some of the pitfalls that you may encounter when using MVC.
“Commercial Software Development” by Liam Westley was the only non-technical session that I attended on the day. A very good presentation with some quite well done interludes to illustrate Liam’s points. He’s up for NEBytes later in the year to deliver a developer session.
“C'# 4” by the Google-man who nearly wasn’t an MVP, Jon Skeet, covered all the new stuff coming along. Having tech reviewed Accelerated C#4.0 for Apress I’m quite happy with what is coming in C#4 but it was good to see a different take on them. And I think I now get the difference between covariance and contravariance (go and read the Wikipedia article and see if it makes sense!).
“Microsoft Surface” by Kris Athi was a nice introduction to Microsoft Surface and a look at some of the things that you can do on it. Having got one sat in the corner of the office in my day job at TH_NK it gave me a few ideas as to what we could do with it. It’ll be interesting to see how things move forward on this with the advances in multi-touch added in Windows 7 (the Surface platform is based upon Vista SP1 at the moment). Definitely something to watch when Surface 2 arrives.
“A Developers Guide to Encryption” by Barry Dorrans rounded out the day. It was Barry’s last session at DDD as he’s drank the Kool-Aid and is off to Redmond on Friday and, as per usual, was an excellent one. Whilst coping with the video interruptions poking fun at him, pimping his new book at every opportunity, and updating spelling mistakes on his slides on the fly, Barry covered all the basics of what you need to know. Hashing, symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and X509 certificates where all covered in Barry’s inimitable style.

Granted there were problems with ticketing and the way the tickets are allocated – I only got a ticket after being on the waitlist – it was a really good event again. Hopefully these will be sorted in time for the next DDD event (which I did hear a rumour that it would be later in the year). There was also rumblings of a third WebDD event later in the year as well.

DDD8 was the first event that I’ve attended since starting NEBytes and, whilst still attending and enjoying all of the sessions, it was with a slightly different outlook on things.

One of the things that the North East developer community missing is the bigger events. There are several events ran (by NEBytes, SuperMondays, and SUGUK amongst others) and Black Marble run their events down in Leeds. But there isn’t an all day event along the same lines as DDD.

And that’s what we’re thinking for later in the year for the North – a DDD North East if you will. On a Saturday, several tracks (two developer, one IT Pro, one open source) with five sessions in each track, GrokTalks, and swag. It won’t happen if people don’t want to see it – drop us a note at NEBytes if you think you’d like to see an event like this using the contact form.

Dan Pink and a Drink

2010-01-29T07:48:00.001+00:00

I had the pleasure of attending the Codeworks Connect Think and a Drink event on Monday evening. It’s the first one that I’ve attended and was a great event. Being in The Sage was also an added bonus as I’ve never been inside what turned out to be a remarkable building.

The first speaker up was Caspar Berry. Whilst not the talk I was most interested in seeing it was still worthwhile. Some interesting points regarding risk taking and a few things to think about going forward.

I’ve talked about the second speaker, Dan Pink, before when attending the TEDx Newcastle event last year. Whilst not startling different to the talk that he gave at TED Global (the video is online) it’s still a very good talk to see. The insights that he brings to the table regarding motivation – autonomy, mastery and purpose – are fascinating and certainly something that all managers and employers should take into consideration.

The Future of NEBytes – aka Coming Soon

2010-01-26T09:31:00.001+00:00

As part of the team behind NEBytes we’ve got quite a few events planned over the next sixth months for both Developers and IT Pros. Whilst the launch event had three talks we realise that this is a bit much and the normal format is to have two events – one for Developers and one for IT Pros.

We’re currently planning three/four months out and at the moment we have speakers lined up until April – all will be revealed soon!

There may be times when when we partner with the SharePoint User Group to host a joint event and the format will probably change slightly when we have these.

We’re also looking at other formats and ideas (GrokTalk anyone?) for future events as well. At the moment we’re concentrating upon technical subjects but that doesn’t mean to say that we won’t branch out into more “soft” subjects.

It’s all down to you, the attendees, to tell us what you want and we’ll see what we can do. Drop us a note on the site using the contact form telling us what you want!

For February we have two very good speakers lined up (or it may be three depending upon the format of one of the talks) – they’re speakers that we’ve had in the North East before under the old VBUG banner. The details aren’t on the main site yet so I’m a bit reluctant to reveal the full details just in case things change.

When the event details go live there’ll be another post and we’re looking forward to seeing you there. Well - Ben and I will be looking forward to it as Andrew and Jonathan are off to the MVP Summit in Seattle.

Introducing North East Bytes (NEBytes)

2010-01-05T14:48:00.002+00:00

Rather than simply repeating what Andrew and Jon have said regarding the launch event for NEBytes I’ll just say – get booked it’ll be good.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark

2009-10-05T11:43:00.001+01:00

I missed out on getting enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program due to to Littlepond being more than three years old. It’s only really Visual Studio that I was after in the entire program (although having a full MSDN subscription wouldn’t be bad).

It was nice then to see Scott Guthrie launch the Microsoft WebsiteSpark program when on his European tour at the back end of last month.

Not only do you Visual Studio 2008 (and I’m assuming that it will be updated to include Visual Studio 2010 when that is released next year) but you also get:

Production licenses for Windows Web Server 2008 R2
Production licenses for SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
3 Visual Studio 2008 Professional licenses
1 Expression Studio 3 license
2 Expression Web 3 licenses

It’s a tidy little program. It’ll cost you $100 in three years when you leave the program but that’s small change when you look at what buying the software provided individually would cost.

TEDx Newcastle

2009-10-01T10:40:00.002+01:00

I attended the TEDx Newcastle event last night at the Tyneside Cinema. A community organised offshoot of the global TED events. A really well organised event that had three local talks and two “roll-vt” talks from the main TED events.

The three local talks were given by Mike Stenhouse, Chris Stainthorpe, and Andy Budd. Two first and last covering user experience with the middle talk covering privacy. They were all filmed so look for the videos online – there was talk that they’d be available somewhere!

The two “TED talks”, for me, were the highlight of the evening. I’ve watched a couple of the TED talks online and the two that were shown on the night were definitely up there with the best that I’ve watched.

Ed Ulbrich gave an overview of the visual effects work on Benjamin Button. Well worth a watch but it did raise the interesting question that if an actor plays a character but it’s not really him for the first hour of a film (watch the talk) then how far off having completely digital actors are we.
The second TED talk was by far the highlight of the evening with Dan Pink talking about how motivation and carrot-and-stick approach to incentives doesn’t work and possible new ways of managing and rewarding people for working. Certainly something to think about for any managers out there!

And in closing they played a video from the Playing For Change project. Recorded at various places around the world in the local style and then mixed into one track. It felt a little random tacked on the end as it was but it’s well worth having a look at Stand By Me on YouTube. Absolutely fantastic and you can buy the CD and DVD that came out of it.

SyntaxHighlighter

2009-08-20T12:53:00.001+01:00

With my post last week about IIF in VB I realised it was about time to do some proper syntax highlighting on here. Whilst looking at a “cool” bug in the C# compiler I found that the code highlighting they use is fantastic.

Have a look at SyntaxHighlighter – it’s free and covers nearly every code style that you’d want to use.

UPDATE – and there’s a really cool plugin for Windows Live Writer on CodePlex.

Client facing “people” Part 2

2009-08-19T15:50:00.001+01:00

So from the same client person as last time:

Client person [15:44]:
the client is asking something that im not sure about
he is saying he wants the same module as we have for the other pages to go on the XYZ page?
i dont kno what that means
Me [15:46]:
they already have it as you asked for it at the time and we built it at the time
Client person [15:46]:
thats what i thought

So you now do know even though two minutes ago you didn’t?

Client facing “people”

2009-08-13T15:13:00.001+01:00

Is it just me that the following conversation strikes as pointless:

Client person [14:59]:
SITEXYZ- can u think of a url that shows an example of an article page?
Me [14:59]:
what do you mean by article?
Client person [15:00]:
like a page that shows an article

Now being able to describe what you want is a key requirement of someone who is responsible for all interactions with the client?

IIf is a pile of poo

2009-08-11T15:40:00.009+01:00

I’m having to write some VB code for a website that we maintain at work. Although I write everything in C# now (wouldn’t everyone?) it’s a legacy site so it’s a case of deal with it rather than rewriting everything in C#.

I needed to do a ternary operation which in C# is easy and works as you’d expect it to. However in VB it seems that both parts of the ternary are evaluated irrespective of which is the one that is really going to be ran.

So the following code doesn’t actually work:

strKeyword = IIf(intEnd = -1, strKeywords.Substring(intStart, intEnd - intStart), strKeywords.Substring(intStart))

If intEnd is –1 (which in this case it is if the value I’m looking for is at the end of the string) then I want the false (second) part of the ternary to execute taking the string from the value of intStart. However that’s not what happens! VB evaluates both and throws an error on the true (first) part – even though it’s never going to be executed. Bah!

So in the end I’ve got to go with the much less elegant normal If statement as follows:

If (intEnd <> -1) Then
  strKeyword = strKeywords.Substring(intStart, intEnd - intStart)
Else
  strKeyword = strKeywords.Substring(intStart)
End If

Do I need anymore reasons to run away from VB and develop exclusively in C#'?

A new way of writing?

2009-08-06T16:55:00.001+01:00

My friend Dan is in the process of trying to get a MbUnit/Gallio book off the ground as a self-published work (well sort of, you see the full details if you have a look at Dan’s blog post). If you know anything about unit testing or what to learn that go and have a look. The more people involved the better the output will be.

Dan’s idea got me thinking about an idea that I’d had a little while ago. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time (I’m sure I have more than one reader out there) you’ll see that I was in the process of updating my Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 Databases book to .NET 3.5 but aborted it due to time constraints.

However I’m now thinking that it’s something maybe worth doing a self-published, peer-reviewed, peer-written (?), book that covers data access in the .NET world.

It’s a big chunk of work, especially if you consider all the things added since .NET 2.0. Think Data Annotations, Data Services, LINQ to Entities, SQL Azure, etc. then it’s an awful lot of work.

And would you limit it to the ASP.NET world? As well as the desktop development (WinForms and WPF) we also have ASP.NET MVC (alongside the traditional WebForms), Silverlight (where you’re adding in bits of WCF for Data Contracts), and Azure.

And would you add unit testing best practices into the mix (perhaps tying back into the MbUnit/Gallio book)? And also best practices for nTier development (which is a requirement if you add Silverlight into the mix)? And what about telling the world not to write data access code in UI code and put it in a Data Tier?

It very quickly gets very complicated.

So I’m thinking that we have several paths to work down.

We have the “basics” which would cover (perhaps in a Console application so that we’re not polluting what we’re talking about with platform specific ideas) things like the DataReader, DataSet, and LINQ to Entities.
Once the basics are out of the way we add in details about nTier and separation of UI –> Business –> Data tiers. For basic applications it may be overkill but to my thinking it’s the way that we need to go. Even if it’s just a separation into UI –> Data then it needs to be considered and "forced”. Well, forced is probably too strong a word but you get the idea.
Testing then needs to be covered – which is now a lot easier as we have the separation of concerns so we can test the Data tier separately and not having it horribly integrated into the UI code.
Then the WCF bits and how we can use this to get across server separation if needed (now that we’ve a nice nTier model!).
Then we get to the parts where we talk about specific UI models: WebForms, WinForms, MVC, WPF, Silverlight. And all the lovely control goodness that we have in there.

In my rough outline there are lots of things missing – Validation (DataAnnotations, etc.), Data Services, SQL Azure – and some things that are not quite defined. And if feels a little too “forced” (there’s that word again) by pushing an nTier model for all development (although by doing this we allow any data access method to be used in the Data tier without affecting the way that we handle the Business and UI tiers).

That’s just my initial thoughts (so that I can get them down somewhere rather than percolating in my head where nothing will ever happen with them).

And don’t even get me started on what databases we need to consider (SQL Server for definite, but what about MySql and Oracle?). And would you need to consider other data forms such as XML, RSS feeds, etc.

As I’ve wrote more, it’s getting more complex :-(

Windows Azure

2009-05-30T11:54:00.003+01:00

Following on from my last post I've also got some work coming up with Azure and it's nice to see that there's a new CTP of the Azure stuff available. And this works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. So that's a bonus!