Peter Seale's weblog - SharePoint | PowerShell | Awesomeness

NUnit's Assert.That

2009-05-26T18:08:01.6885263-07:00

I'm here today to present the case against a particular piece of NUnit's fluent syntax. But before I do, let's set up a concrete example, something that gives the test meaning. Instead of just writing something down in boring old plain text, I've sloppily remixed a work of art I found via an image search and retitled it "Rebellion Against the (overuse of unrelated, Creative) Commons(-licensed images)!":

Solid. Requests for ~/Default.aspx should redirect to the Home controller. Let's get on with the show.

My Gripe: Assert.That syntax

Here is a comparison of the Assert.That syntax, the traditional Assert.AreEqual syntax, and the syntax provided by MSpec's NUnit extensions (MSpec isn't the only framework with these extensions, it's just the one of which I'm familiar):

I don't like the Assert.That syntax, in this scenario.

Look at all that. The new syntax is just…ugh.

I've read elsewhere that it's good because it reads like a sentence. Well, to shock you into elevated awareness, may I jog your memory of something else that reads a lot like a sentence? In case you didn't dare hover over that link, allow me to properly title it:

"My First COBOL.NET Web Application."

Check out the action in the linkage section!

Rock on, COBOL.NET!

Okay, conflating "reads like a sentence" to COBOL is a sucker punch, it's unfair. Let's do this by the numbers.

Comparing the three ways to do the same thing

In all cases, the fewer, the better.

Syntax	Total chars	Chars used by test syntax (by my measure)	Total times Intellisense was necessary*	Of these, times Intellisense couldn't help (e.g. Assert, Is)
Assert.That	66	28	6	2
Assert.AreEqual	58	20	4	1
result.ShouldEqual	53	15	3	0

* "Intellisense is necessary" is roughly defined as "any point at which you can use Intellisense." Definition is left purposefully imprecise.

I could go on for a bit about this, but I'll let the fancy HTML table do most of the talking. If there are any takeaways from this oversized-for-its-topic post, let them be:

The fewer magic syntax words I have to learn (e.g. Assert, Is), the easier a framework is to learn. By this measure the MSpec extensions are the best, and the Assert.That syntax the worst.
The fewer characters typed, the easier a framework is to use. Terseness is better when it doesn't impact learnability.
"Reads like a sentence" is presumably the means to achieve some other goal, not a goal in and of itself. If your fluent syntax doesn't help achieve…whatever that other goal is, reconsider trying to make your fluent interface read like a sentence.

Related counter-point I don't care about today:

The fewer extension methods attached to "object," the better.
NOTE: test frameworks and mocking frameworks get a pass from me because they are supposed to work against any object.

Final note: Better vs Best

I'm complaining today specifically about NUnit's Assert.That(actual, Is.EqualTo(expected)) syntax. I'm not down on the Assert.That() syntax as a whole, just the most commonly used method. And maybe that's what's bugging me—Assert.That has a lot of great stuff in there, allowing fuzzier comparisons beyond simply .AreEqual(), but the most commonly-used scenario is measurably worse than the old syntax.

And the Assert.That(actual, Is.EqualTo(expected)) syntax isn't the worst thing ever. It's not the end of the world. But shouldn't it be better than the thing it's replacing, not worse?

First Irregularly-Scheduled Linkblog

2009-05-16T16:18:50.769231-07:00

In the past I've questioned the viability of linkblogs—does anyone (including, and perhaps especially the linkblog author) have time to read all these articles?

The short answer is no. They couldn't possibly have time to read and evaluate all those articles.

I think it's become something of a cultural expectation that we scan each of the 50+ links in a daily linkblog post as a way of discovering something interesting, without having the expectation of, you know, reading anything. Inevitably the quality of the links degrade, because nobody's reading the articles. As for me, I'm batting .000 on following linkblog links this year…I'm in a kind of "linkblog hitting slump." Maybe it's just me.

This also goes for programming-related aggregators. First we had Slashdot, then briefly, Digg, then Reddit, then the front page of Reddit became something of a wasteland, so we moved to programming.reddit.com, then there was that thing called Hacker News. Somewhere along this timeline DotNetKicks reached critical mass, before slipping into the doldrums of all-ignorance-all-the-time .NET op-ed pieces; ugh. For the record I still think the aggregators do a good job, it's just that they could do better.

Where were we? Ah yes, links.

I've found the following links fascinating for some reason or other, and I personally vouch for them. If I haven't looked at the link, I'll point it out right there (which I do a lot in the "Books" section.)

Links

Podcast series (AKA Super Podcast Roundup Turbo HD Remix)
Podcasts are roughly ordered by how much I like them…but note that if they're listed here, I like them. My first podcast roundup was in 2006.

Stack Overflow podcast - having read both CodingHorror and Joel On Software, this one's a lot of fun. Revisit old topics, get their unfiltered take on newer topics. It's good to get the unfiltered opinion, even if they're uninformed from time to time.
Deep Fried Bytes - I like their rusty washers segment. Maybe that's the pessimist in me, but hey, I'd prefer risking listening to an over-critical rusty washers segment over over-exuberant marketing talk.
Herding Code - when there are four co-hosts, you get better questions, and the guest isn't allowed to spout FUD/ignorance for an entire episode like sometimes happens on DotNetRocks.
Hanselminutes - I like the recent trend of doing "follow-up" shows to correct inaccuracies on other podcast series.
DotNetRocks - classic, still going, and like the rest of 'em, DotNetRocks has both good and bad episodes.
Software Engineering Radio - in theory I like this show, but I'll be honest and say I haven't listened in a long while. My commute dropped from an hour to just 8 minutes, what can I say.
Irregularly updated podcasts I enjoy:
- OOPSLA podcast 2008 and OOPSLA podcast 2007 - some of the best episodes/talks come from this podcast series. Hopefully we'll get the equivalent shows for their 2009 conference.
- Polymorphic Podcast - Craig's still going, several years later. ASP.NET/web development/object-oriented development topics.
- Elegant Code - I don't remember the last time they published something, but, hey, we're in the "irregular" section for a reason.
- ALT.NET podcast - just switched hosts, so we'll see where this goes.
- Rubiverse podcast - run by the former ALT.NET/now-Ruby guy. His shows are infrequent, but good.

Career-oriented (whether the career is freelancing, entrepreneurial, independent consulting, or even working as an employee)

Daniel James - Building an Indie MMO (Puzzle Pirates) - this is (believe it or not) not much about making games, as it is about building a product. He explicitly mentions that you have to be extraordinarily productive. I'm not selling this well, but trust me, you'll want to check this out. Also, he wears a pirate hat.
Archaeopteryx by Giles Bowkett - wherein he describes that he'd like to someday have Archaeopteryx (the open source app he built and loves) be his main job. Sometime late in the presentation Giles also says he'd like to describe himself as a "musician who happens to know how to program." It's an engaging laser show, fog machine and all, and as the InfoQ page says, "slides edited directly into the video since there were 500 of them." I don't agree with everything he says, but the career aspect of his presentation is something to think about.
DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails; 37signals) at Startup School - apparently his talk immediately followed a VC who spent an hour describing how to get VC money. One of the first thing he says is "you don't need VC money" and explains why working in a VC-funded startup is like playing the lottery, instead explaining that you should follow his revolutionary advice and "charge money for your product." Engaging/entertaining, and a lot of straightforward wisdom.
Do the Hustle, by Obie Fernandez - straightforward talk on the business aspects of independent consulting for Rails folk. Most of this applies to the rest of us.
ajmoir's description of a hyperproductive software team - this is a Reddit conversation with multiple threads, so for the full story you've got to read all his replies. I think this is important for everyone to read because you need to believe software development can be done, for lack of a better term, "way better." The promise of hyper-productivity is fascinating. Also: Lisp.
Mark Cuban on Success and Motivation (long, mostly storytelling)
How to become a famous Rails Developer, Ruby Rockstar or Code Ninja - I haven't watched the presentation, but I did read his transcript. Also you may be interested in the RailsConf video feed…I haven't found anything else I'd recommend.

Screencasts/webcasts/watching presentations on your computer

Ten Ways to Screw Up with Agile and XP - this presentation is a kind of response to the "post-agile" idea. Like the "post-agile"stuff we're beginning to hear about, he talks about how Agile projects and teams can fail. Unlike "post-agile," he doesn't blame Agile, instead focusing on solutions for the ten common problems he encounters. Highly recommended, especially for those not sold on Agile. Ben sent me this link some time ago.
Virtual ALT.NET meetings (ongoing) - these are the in-depth presentations I've been looking for. You can listen in live to any meeting…just plug in a working headset, go to http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet … and that's it. Also, they record sessions! Awesome! http://www.virtualaltnet.com/van/Recordings On my queue of sorts:
Øredev 2008 videos - I'm digging through these presently. Unlike most conferences, Øredev has provided videos for each track (i.e. "the breakout sessions")! Awesome! Find the videos either
- Split out by category ( http://www.oredev.org/ in the "Watch the videos from 2008" sidebar)
- in one big bag of videos on VIddler
Haven't watched - Lang.NET symposium talks. I think I'll check out the two PowerShell videos and then bail, I mean, hey—I've got plenty to check out without delving into programming language design. But, enough about me: you may find some of the other talks interesting. Big ups to Microsoft for publishing the videos.

Books (.NET development-related)

JP Hamilton has the only "required reading" book list I've seen that's less than 4000 books. His list has three (3). I'm on 1/3. For the record, I'm okay with longer "required reading" lists, so long as they're given some sort of priority. JP prioritizes his list.
Free PDF eBook: Foundations of Programming by Karl Seguin - in full disclosure I haven't read this. Karl doesn't directly tell you why you should read his book, but maybe this book review will help you make the decision.
Object Thinking by David West - I'd like to think the author saw some trollish post on Usenet about object-oriented programming, and started writing a long, detailed response. One thing led to another, and hey! Object Thinking. There's a chapter in this book that has a long discussion about hermeneutics. Hermeneutics. Try and work that one into a sentence.
PowerShell in Action 2nd Ed. is coming! Excitement! I'm biased, what can I say.

Code camps/Saturday developer events (Houston area, sorry everybody else)

Austin Code Camp - May 30th, 2009 (soon!) - check out the hot hot hot session proposals! Hot!
FOSS in Healthcare unconference - July 31st - August 2nd, 2009 - costs money, but maybe it's worth it to you.
Houston Techfest 2009 - September 26th, 2009. This is the day of the Texas Tech at University of Houston game, on the University of Houston campus. Techfest: est. 600 attendees. Football game: ~30,000 (it's a small stadium). I think we'll have a crowded campus that Saturday!

Everything else

Using Photos to Enhance Videos - this is one of those jaw-dropping demos. Click click click click click click click.
Fred Trotter on the "VA VistA Underground Railroad" and how our US government should spend its Healthcare IT money on open source - Healthcare IT has a problem, and I hope an open source ecosystem is a solution. This article is long and gives a lot of history, so you'll get something out of it even if not interested in the politics. Also the links to the VA VistA Underground Railroad were fascinating; folks interested in Behavior Driven Development would be interested by the stories about how "a programmer sits down with a clinician" to write the app. Fascinating for a lot of reasons.
While we're talking about BDD, you might be interested in the David Parnas' keynote at OOPSLA, wherein he lays out eerily similar goals (see the section on Documentation.)
The underhanded C contest - 2007's underhandedly-weak encryption contest: "Your challenge: write the code so that some small fraction of the time (between 1% and 0.01% of files, on average) the encrypted file is weak and can be cracked by an adversary without the password." Make sure to look at the criteria for bonus points, and of course, the winning submissions.
"Is anyone else here worried that they've spent so long looking briefly at everything, that they've still good at absolutely nothing?" - you don't have to click the link, just acknowledge the point. This reddit post has 1000 upvotes.
Scott Berkun's Project management for beginners (post is short!) - because, aren't we all beginners? You don't see this kind of straightforward talk from the PMBOK (if you do, it's sandwiched between "effectively denying reality" and "having long status meetings." In other news, I think I have a rebellious attitude towards the PMI, judge for yourself.
Abstract architecture-y type discussion - Design and Develop Versatilities, Not Applications - focus on the idea of what he calls "versatilities," and not so much on the specific technology involved (i.e. SharePoint.) I think it's a noble goal, but no, SharePoint in its current form can't realize the lofty goal he sets forth. Sorry, no. As I said elsewhere, you'll get far more mileage by training your power users to build their own SQL queries and how to use pivot tables in Excel. But the ideal is good.
Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To - Alex (the author) runs thedailywtf.com. I don't know what to say about this. Every programmer needs to find the balance between getting real work done the ugly way, and spending time learning new techniques that make the ugliness go away. I haven't found this balance. This goes in hand with Alex's other classic article, Pounding a Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle? - and carries the same assumption that you must live with your (bad) programming environment.
All this SharePoint Stuff is Going to be Normal Soon - a lot of people see SharePoint as the next "Microsoft Web OS," i.e. that the SharePoint trend will accelerate, and that we'll start to see every future web-based product from Microsoft (and products from other vendors!) run on top of SharePoint. As it is today, the easy answer is "no that's not going to happen," because the cost of running your complex app on SharePoint can't be justified. And for tomorrow the answer still looks to be "no that's not going to happen," because I don't see any fundamental changes taking place. Non-trivial add-ons today write their data to their own database, making their "SharePoint integration" more lip service than truth. I've thought about what I'd like to see in an application framework, and if I could summarize, the one thing SharePoint doesn't support that it needs to: it would be nice if it allowed deep customizations that the product team did not anticipate. I think this is the fundamental problem which at this point is unsolvable for SharePoint. Solving this problem would require re-inventing SharePoint into something that doesn't resemble the SharePoint of today.
But, who knows, I could be horribly wrong about all this.
Discussion about Microsoft Gold Partners, titled "Why Your Vendor Screwed Up Your SharePoint Project" - wherein the author (gently, ever so gently) points out that Microsoft needs to change its partner ecosystem.
How to call BS on a guru - again Scott Berkun. He writes books by the way :)
The DailyWTF programming contest entry (a calc.exe replacement) which is built entirely in C++ templates. I can't tell you what kind of respect I have for that kind of compiler abuse.
News: Clojure 1.0 - dismiss this at your own peril. Related: ClojureCLR alpha up.
Is mutation testing useful in practice [StackOverflow question]? I'm reading through Kent Beck's TDD By Example, and he mentions mutation testing. Years later, it seems like no one's talking about mutation testing. Are we doing something else to test our unit tests? Is this too much overhead? Have we adopted a new mental framework that eliminates the need for mutation testing? Anyway, there's your new-old idea for the day: mutation testing.

My Own Aroma

2009-03-26T21:48:49.2610081-07:00

I'm here today to relay two messages:

First: I'm still alive and well

I haven't posted anything of real substance in quite a while (and some of you in the back of the room are shouting "in a while…or ever!" I can hear you.) I'm not here to promise more frequent and meaty updates; instead, I'm here to say that you can expect a lot less from me, at least on this blog.

My growth-as-a-developer plan (I introduced it in detail here) is going full steam. While I'm not on track to hit all specific targets, the most important thing is that I'm seeing real growth. The bits that have been most helpful for me have been a) writing my own mini-project, and b) reading source code.

Lesson: read source code!

I'd like to emphasize how drastically this has changed my outlook. First, reading others source code gives me self-confidence. And yes that's somewhat mean, I know. But it's true, and I try to beat the "you are adequate" drum as often as possible—by reading others' bad source code, you'll better know where you stand. Sometimes you realize you've got a lot to learn; sometimes you realize that hey, you're not all that bad, relatively. Bad source code can be inspiring in its own way.

And let's pull this around to the positive—I've learned a ton reading others' source code. I've picked up lots of little nuggets like using params[] as a method argument, and bigger nuggets like the several different styles of context/specification-ish unit tests. I shouldn't have to explain this; it should be self-evident that one can learn by studying source code. Duh.

Lesson: have a side project!

But more helpful even than reading others' source code is simply getting out there and writing my own. And I don't mean the type of stuff I do at work…let's not go there today. I mean code that is almost 100% logic; data stored in List<T> and passed around as IEnumerable<T>. I don't have a database. I don't have a UI. My project is entirely useless at this point, and will remain useless maybe forever.

But I'm learning a ton! What's great about building my own project is that I'm able to focus on learning specific topics. My focus points for this project are:

OO (I'll flesh this out further when I know what it means)
Test driven development (not just unit tests, but actual test-first, drive-out-the-design via tests, TDD)
Context/specification-style tests

Along the way, as a kind of bonus, I've picked up:

LINQ to objects - replacing for loops and foreach loops with LINQ calls. Related and also learning: nuttiness featuring delegates.
Rhino Mocks AAA syntax - with the exception of method argument constraints. If someone wants to show me a good example of using constraints, I'd be ever so grateful—just a link to a project where someone's using RM constraints will work, I'll find it from there.
NUnit/XUnit/MSpec - in that order, and yes, I switched all my tests over, and yes, the process was ugly. Also you can't claim to know NUnit if all you know is the [Test] attribute and Assert.IsTrue().

What's most important about this whole 'writing my own side project' experience is that it is fun, and I had, and continue to have, the energy to keep at it. I'm never motivated to do self-directed learning, so this boost of energy is the biggest win. If you're one of those people who can't imagine this kind of thing could be fun, well, maybe it's time to try out a side project.

Everything else has suffered

Everything else has become unimportant. Learning the newest wave of MS technology isn't even a concern at this point; I'll pick it up when I need to, or when my side project calls for it. What's surprising to me is that even ASP.NET MVC, which I happen to like, is being shunned with the rest of them.

Also, blogging has suffered. Also, my book reading has suffered.

I've completely stopped reading those futile "here's 80 things you don't know" linkblog posts. Aside from the SharePoint one, which is golden, what are you getting out of your linkblogger? Do they read all the articles they link you to? Are the links relevant/do you intend to read any of them yourself? Are the links accurate/factual? See, I'd prefer a monthly linkblogger who had on average six or seven links, and all six or seven would be interesting. Then, every year or so, there'd appear one starred link. This link would be considered so important you couldn't ignore it, a "must-see" so to speak. …Anyway, that's how I see proper linkblogging. Seven links a month, or so.

But who cares about all that, really. I'm learning a ton, and you can't stop me!

Everything in Balance

I should clarify: I'm coming to this concept as the podcast junkie/blog consumer/programming aggregator consumer person, who didn't have a side project. I've been at it (this side project) a few months now.

So if you're thinking my advice is unwise, that's fine—I'll take this space and make a disclaimer: I intend to use common sense, and re-evaluate my learning strategy from time to time. In particular, I do intend to read books in the future, hopefully the near future.

Just not right now.

Second: I like reading my own Twitter feed

Way at the top I told you I had two things to say tonight. First was the message that everyone needs to start their own side project even just to help them learn.

Second is to tell you that I'm on twitter. Believe it, twitter.com/pseale. Subscribe! Do it!

Something I've found amusing is that I enjoy reading my own twitter feed. It's either a sign that my tweets are engaging and are chock-full of hilarity and insightful content…or that I like smelling my own aroma. You be the judge!

Here's a sampling of my twitter bouquet:

Posted update to my SP unit testing blog entry: http://www.pseale.com/blog/SharePointNotUnitTesting.aspx - summary is "learn OO first"

Thu Mar 05 16:26:41 +0000 2009

I should point out I updated the post because @jopxtwits linked to it at http://tinyurl.com/af9tnc

Thu Mar 05 16:29:17 +0000 2009

TDD in SP projects is a gun rack: http://www.pseale.com/blog/SharePointNotUnitTesting.aspx - yes I just re-updated my own post

Fri Mar 06 03:29:57 +0000 2009

In most recent episode of my ongoing "My Tests Suck" series: just found out I forgot to wire up events, 'the hard way'. No test failed,oops

Fri Mar 06 03:56:11 +0000 2009

Just hit CTRL+SHIFT+B on my Firefox window, out of habit. In other news, I've hit the 50 test mark.

Fri Mar 06 05:43:10 +0000 2009

Oops another bug, not covered by tests. Hopefully I'm learning by experience, emphasis on the word "learning"

Fri Mar 06 06:10:58 +0000 2009

I'm dead serious when I say that using PowerShell to explore SP central admin/SSP is faster than using the browser, esp. w/ 30 sec compile

Fri Mar 06 21:19:18 +0000 2009

compare-object $updateJob ($addToSsp+$inSsp) | group sideindicator —-note it's comparing list of fields in $updateJob to UNION of 2 lists

Fri Mar 06 21:42:49 +0000 2009

New-WebServiceProxy - instant web service test harness.

Fri Mar 06 22:34:24 +0000 2009

Does anyone use structs in C# for value objects? Because, I don't.

Sun Mar 08 18:47:55 +0000 2009

Finally discovered what Func<T>/Action<T> are for, yes, I should know this; no, I didn't know this. Now I do.

Mon Mar 09 01:48:55 +0000 2009

Note to self: learn how to use Rhino Mocks constraints…later.

Mon Mar 09 05:42:09 +0000 2009

Ugh, Can't use WCF Service References in VS2005 without installing a never-updated CTP that just now failed install. And yes, I said VS2005.

Mon Mar 09 16:51:35 +0000 2009

In related news: how do you troubleshoot a ~misbehaving VS Web Reference? Is there a verbose mode I can try to see why it fails to map data?

Mon Mar 09 16:57:00 +0000 2009

Q: Where are some good development-related mailing lists in which I can lurk? For me mailing lists are out of sight, out of mind

Mon Mar 09 19:56:05 +0000 2009

RT @yourdon I've begun writing a 3rd edition of "Death March" as a collaborative blog. DM me with your email adr if you'd like to see it.

Tue Mar 10 01:55:55 +0000 2009

RT 2of2 @yourdon Re: "Death March" 3rd ed: emphasize I'm just *starting* it; it's not a finished draft. But you can influence its content…

Tue Mar 10 01:56:46 +0000 2009

This ugly state machine state base class MUST DIE! Rolling up sleeves; got protective eyewear, steel toed boots, lead cup. I'm prepared.

Tue Mar 10 04:05:25 +0000 2009

Interesting series of posts about high expectations set on SP admins: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/matt/

Tue Mar 10 18:41:39 +0000 2009

Someone needs to make a "Watermark Production Central Admin + SSP" branding Feature, so I can know at a glance I'm looking at a prod site

Tue Mar 10 19:26:31 +0000 2009

In other news, the presence of a trailing slash (/) in my URL bombed out a stsadm -o createsite operation. Encourages my paranoia

Tue Mar 10 19:42:15 +0000 2009

I'm using this quick PowerShell script to compile my SharePoint Search scopes on demand: http://poshcode.org/925

Tue Mar 10 20:33:41 +0000 2009

I don't think Folder rules on custom Scopes work. I assume they work on doc libs, but not my custom list. Ugh

Tue Mar 10 20:48:04 +0000 2009

1) Write down concrete next action-style tasks. Failing that, 2) break them up into tiny actions. Failing that, 3) go home. See you tomorrow

Wed Mar 11 00:12:24 +0000 2009

Had thought: "hmm, how am I going to test this? Requires a lot of mocking." Answer: duh, move it out of the class. Trying for 0 static mthds

Wed Mar 11 03:08:54 +0000 2009

Not that I'm saying static methods are totally bad, I'm saying I'm trying to do this entire little project without them. I.e. to try it out.

Wed Mar 11 03:09:44 +0000 2009

In other news, I have test code duplication, and it's painful. But, I'm not sure how best to change tests, need to look around some

Wed Mar 11 03:11:30 +0000 2009

As an added bonus of doing my tests the hard way, JP's BDD framework ( http://is.gd/m3G0 ) makes sense to me now. Well, almost :)

Wed Mar 11 03:14:08 +0000 2009

IEnumerable shouldn't hate on null values as much as it does. Live and let null

Wed Mar 11 04:43:51 +0000 2009

1of#:"Since 2001, 23 TDD studies were published…13 reported improvements…4 were inconclusive, 4 reported no discernable difference. 1…

Wed Mar 11 16:30:22 +0000 2009

2of#:"…Only one study reported a quality penalty for TDD." http://bit.ly/13F8g - SKIP the article, go straight to Hakan Erdogmus comment

Wed Mar 11 16:31:41 +0000 2009

3of#: Meanwhile, this article (http://bit.ly/mHqZL) is fascinating. Found link via @raganwald's RSS feed.

Wed Mar 11 16:34:29 +0000 2009

1of#: For the record people: learn how to do your dayjob better first, THEN look to the shiny new GUI toolkit. If it doesn't help…

Wed Mar 11 19:21:43 +0000 2009

2of#:…doesn't help you be better in some way, than why are you learning it? Also, there's a lot of room for improvement with what we …

Wed Mar 11 19:23:05 +0000 2009

3of#:…have now. No need to wait for Azure on Silverlight + WF + WPF + jQuery to solve our problems for tomorrow; instead, learn how to…

Wed Mar 11 19:23:54 +0000 2009

4of#:…how to build web apps TODAY. People are so far behind, and then they read an article that casually says "learn WPF." LEARN WPF…

Wed Mar 11 19:24:28 +0000 2009

5of5: I'm done. Lesson: if anyone tells you to learn a framework/technology, ask them if they've learned it. Because they haven't.

Wed Mar 11 19:25:05 +0000 2009

Link that started my rant: "6 Things *EVERY* ASP.NET Developer should know by 2010" http://blog.saviantllc.com/archive/2009/03/09/4.aspx

Wed Mar 11 19:25:34 +0000 2009

RT @yourdon: I need lots of new examples, war stories, etc about today's death-march projects. If you've got one, DM me or email

Wed Mar 11 21:21:13 +0000 2009

Someone just said "Shame on you" on my "SP Wikis" post, I need to update the post body itself to be more accurate: http://bit.ly/VihV3

Wed Mar 11 21:27:59 +0000 2009

Also I'll point out I'm highly bemused by the "shame on you" comment :) He's right, but it's still a little funny, esp. the way it's worded

Wed Mar 11 21:29:48 +0000 2009

Q: How many off-hours technical learning would you say is COMMENDABLE? 4 hours a week? 2 hours? Please do reply, I'm curious. I say 4hrs

Wed Mar 11 21:48:20 +0000 2009

PHP is its own reward

Thu Mar 12 18:26:17 +0000 2009

Tomorrow's forecast: EXTRAORDINARILY PRODUCTIVE

Thu Mar 12 20:53:26 +0000 2009

Yes, I'm saying that codebehind in InfoPath forms is exactly like The One Ring: turns good intentions into GREAT EVIL

Fri Mar 13 20:47:59 +0000 2009

"Krikey,the things these artists are doing while everyone else is rewording their unit tests and staring at the TIOBE index." -http://is.gd/nfE2

Fri Mar 13 22:58:09 +0000 2009

META: when your new follower follows 10000+ people, block them; they won't miss you. Also, blatant ads. Block.

Sat Mar 14 00:14:04 +0000 2009

Whatever happened to Blossom? The TV show. Yeah, now you're remembering, that one.

Mon Mar 16 03:16:54 +0000 2009

On keeping up: http://bit.ly/5km3k - this is the #1 reason I've stopped SP-targeted learning—focus on fun! Link from @jpboodhoo

Mon Mar 16 17:59:25 +0000 2009

"SharePoint 14 to public beta in 2 or 3 months" - tweeted 26 days ago - http://twitter.com/rmaclean/statuses/1222833833

Mon Mar 16 20:31:18 +0000 2009

Neat, this is what a psake script looks like: http://is.gd/nDSD

Tue Mar 17 03:09:15 +0000 2009

Botched AnkhSVN file move => "Microsoft Visual Studio (2008) is Busy" dialog

Tue Mar 17 03:21:03 +0000 2009

Ugh, NBehave / NSpec examples (from src) are trivial=>not useful. JP's sample is scary, but is believable

Tue Mar 17 03:48:34 +0000 2009

The MachineSpecifications NUnit extensions are certainly neat: http://bit.ly/MSpecNUnitLove - also, CollectionAssert…it exists.

Tue Mar 17 04:26:57 +0000 2009

DL'ed files are "blocked" for my own safety. Downloaded "streams" from sysinternals to remove blocks en masse. Irony: streams.exe is blocked

Tue Mar 17 04:53:07 +0000 2009

RT @subdigital: 36* seats open for #altnethouston, please help spread the word! http://houston.altnetconf.com

Tue Mar 17 16:23:24 +0000 2009

Ok there are a lot of great PowerShell + SharePoint scripts at http://sharepointpsscripts.codeplex.com/ - common tasks, automated, easy

Tue Mar 17 22:30:42 +0000 2009

YEEAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh no-index attribute

Wed Mar 18 00:50:52 +0000 2009

~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~

Wed Mar 18 02:27:52 +0000 2009

SharePoint 14 upgrade details via MS KB articles: http://tinyurl.com/clv8ku

Wed Mar 18 13:47:50 +0000 2009

I've got to unsubscribe from dotnetkicks.com. I keep succumbing to the "someone wrong on the INTERNET" bug

Thu Mar 19 05:25:40 +0000 2009

Most recent post I "couldn't let go": http://tinyurl.com/d6vvx9

Thu Mar 19 05:27:31 +0000 2009

Fellow developers: you can BOTH a) acknowledge your dev skill shortcomings, AND b) feel adequate. SEE: http://secretgeek.net/inadequate.asp

Thu Mar 19 17:54:13 +0000 2009

Run one test =>pass. Run all tests=>same test fails. Lesson: I'm misusing the test framework

Fri Mar 20 02:45:37 +0000 2009

In related news, I'm still looking for how others do "rowtest"-style tests while adhering to the AAA convention. Examples?

Fri Mar 20 02:55:30 +0000 2009

Halfway done switching tests over to MSpec, and just read the output (which shows all specs formatted nicely). It's surprisingly readable.

Fri Mar 20 04:14:42 +0000 2009

Ok I just deleted 2 tests that were dumb. Who's the jerk that wrote them in the first place! Jerk! Oh, that's me, I wrote them, my bad.

Fri Mar 20 04:28:00 +0000 2009

#followfriday @CobraCommander - proving that everyone succumbs to the inanity of Twitter

Fri Mar 20 15:54:27 +0000 2009

Do the SHIFT key! ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ +

Fri Mar 20 17:50:31 +0000 2009

Finished conversion of my tests to mspec. Now to fix the ugliness that reared it's head during the conversion. "Now"=>"later"

Sat Mar 21 07:28:03 +0000 2009

Seriously considering changing my avatar to this:(http://is.gd/ou6J) - Related: http://qwitter.com isn't owned by qwitter

Mon Mar 23 03:24:50 +0000 2009

Do the UNICODE! Õ??????¦?n?????

Mon Mar 23 19:06:10 +0000 2009

New favorite word: "roughage" - http://tinyurl.com/dltl2g

Mon Mar 23 21:22:25 +0000 2009

In other news, I like Neal Ford's arguments against workflow designers: http://bit.ly/ILTZq

Mon Mar 23 21:27:40 +0000 2009

New thought: someone needs to write another twitter client…specifically, a gopher twitter client. Believe it, gopher.

Mon Mar 23 22:28:15 +0000 2009

RT @doctorlinguist: @pseale gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/fun/twitpher

Mon Mar 23 22:49:03 +0000 2009

Nothing encourages me to learn keyboard shortcuts more than my laptop touchpad. Tonight's find: CTRL+W, CTRL+E gives focus to Error List

Tue Mar 24 02:40:58 +0000 2009

Found my pre-LINQ code that attempted to count items in an IEnumerable. Thankfully today's me is smarter; ~5 lines replaced with .Count()

Tue Mar 24 02:52:39 +0000 2009

SharePoint's search engine can go die. Forget any nice things I've said about it in the past.

Tue Mar 24 13:41:41 +0000 2009

Or, it's my fault I sacrificed the chicken BEFORE the goat, not AFTER as clearly laid out on MSDN.

Tue Mar 24 13:42:34 +0000 2009

And by "chicken"I mean "ran full crawl" and by "goat" I mean "updated the search scopes." Also forgot to do macarena and sprinkle fairy dust

Tue Mar 24 13:43:48 +0000 2009

And by "macararena" I mean "include displaytitle AS WELL AS ows_Title in the managed property mapping."

Tue Mar 24 13:48:18 +0000 2009

Issue is resolved, I did the macarena and sacrificed a chicken, in that order. See previous tweets to see what I mean, that's the real sol.

Tue Mar 24 14:09:16 +0000 2009

jQuery eliminates crapola JavaScript. I HAVE PROOF

Wed Mar 25 00:00:54 +0000 2009

Another example of how the real-world Internet surpasses imaginations of any fictional cyberspace: http://bit.ly/tCKU - home router worms

Wed Mar 25 12:43:30 +0000 2009

SP as app dev platform: 1) do your app dev the old way, ASP.NET/SQL, but deploy to _layouts/ folder. Declare SUCCESS

Wed Mar 25 21:36:52 +0000 2009

SP as app dev platform 2): 80/20 rule, pretend remaining 20% is "impossible." no project longer than a week

Wed Mar 25 21:42:05 +0000 2009

… 3) extenuating circumstances require you do app dev in SP.

Wed Mar 25 21:45:18 +0000 2009

There is no fourth option. You're doing 1-3 or it's (in my opinion of course) a bad idea.

Wed Mar 25 21:46:39 +0000 2009

The example demonstrating spec failures from thrown exceptions is hilarious: http://bit.ly/HSLYMY - just click the link

Thu Mar 26 03:47:32 +0000 2009

Also note in MSpec that Catch.Exception( ()=>stuff() ) is the syntax. For example see: http://bit.ly/18tVh8

Thu Mar 26 03:55:18 +0000 2009

Cloud computing appreciation manifesto! http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/manifesto/ CLICK! Click it! You won't be disappointed

Thu Mar 26 18:07:33 +0000 2009

Is it just me or should I NOT feel dirty using an image submit button in HTML? http://tinyurl.com/df76nm (<input type="image"/>)

Thu Mar 26 18:12:43 +0000 2009

I call this code pattern "choosing to suppress disgust:" http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/8726/choosingtosuppressdisgu.png

Thu Mar 26 18:59:16 +0000 2009

There wasn't really a point to listing all these out. Well, no reason besides blatantly advertising twitter.com/pseale. Subscribe! Do it!

Pablo Picasso Refactors

2009-02-18T21:12:52.9846099-08:00

Or, how two unlike things can seem alike!

A while back, I followed a fascinating link from programming.reddit titled Pablo Picasso's version of refactoring: Reducing a drawing to 12 perfect pen strokes.

As the story goes, Pablo Picasso created a series of eleven lithographs of a bull in profile. He first created a detailed, accurate image of a bull. Then, for his next lithograph (I don't know what a lithograph is either, let's just pretend these are drawings from now on) he changed some aspects of the bull, accentuating its bull-ness. As he progressed, he began to remove detail, slowly replacing photorealism with smaller expressions of the same aspect, retaining the bull-ness. His last drawing was twelve or so thin strokes, a stick figure still roughly recognizable as a bull.

As the programming.reddit title indicated, this sounds a whole lot like refactoring!

It's super impressive, and I dearly urge you to look at the progression of Picasso lithographs yourself (click link below):

Click Me!

Now for the dangerous part.

Extra space added so you follow the link before viewing the section below; you'll miss out on the full experience otherwise!

So you're with me, right?

I was feeling great until I read this, the first comment on the reddit comments thread:

This is something with which I want to leave you. The next time someone makes a bad analogy, nail them with this Descartes quote. I can't pronounce Descartes properly, but that won't stop me, and it shouldn't stop you either. If in doubt, try a "dude, the French philosopher dude," sprinkle the word "dude" anywhere you're uncertain; they serve as TODOs for your vocabulary.

Aside: in true reddit fashion, this is the next highly-rated comment thread:

…and following that, unintentional, then intentional, references to realultimatepower.net.

Linking this discussion to the present day

This misuse of seeming similarity is (among other reasons) why a lot of us are bugged with recent CodingHorror posts. Specifically, let's take list a):

List A: SOLID principles et al

Here's list b), in The Ferengi Programmer (emphasis added):

List B: 285 Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

The Ferengi are a part of the Star Trek universe, primarily in Deep Space Nine. They're a race of ultra-capitalists whose every business transaction is governed by the 285 Rules of Acquisition. There's a rule for every possible business situation—and, inevitably, an interpretation of those rules that gives the Ferengi license to cheat, steal, and bend the truth to suit their needs.

And in case that was a coincidence, here's the list from his next post, responding to the standard rebuttal:

List C: processes and methodologies

So the question to you: are these three lists the same?

I win either way

My logic is inescapable. If you think the SOLID principles (list A) are in fact, as sneaky and extensive as the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (list B), and are just the newest in a long line of fad methodologies (list C), then hey: I'll point you to the story about the bull, and how we all thought it was similar to refactoring. Except when you think about it, it's wasn't refactoring, it only resembled refactoring on the surface. I mean, come on, he drew pictures of a bull, it wasn't refactoring. I dare you to say the Picasso bull lithograph series was like refactoring.

And there I have you as well! Because if you refute my drawing-a-bull-isn't-like-refactoring argument, then by the very nature of your disagreement that "these two things aren't alike," you're proving that "these two things aren't alike!" Refute my "bull-metaphor doesn't apply to refactoring" argument to the "Ferengi rules metaphor doesn't apply to the SOLID principles" argument, and you've proven the very thing you're trying to argue against! I have you either way!

Next time I see you I'll collect the five dollars you owe me. And before you say to yourself "but I don't owe Peter $5," remember, my logic is irrefutable and you owe me a fiver*. Descartes says so. THE BULL! Pay up.
*this is a real word, people use it

iPhone App Gold Rush

2009-02-01T14:32:01.912-08:00

This deserves its own post. After declaring that I won't be writing any iPhone apps, despite my secret dreams of iPhone app fame and riches, I went back and looked for the source of these secret, repressed dreams. Where did I get the idea that there's an iPhone app gold rush?

iPhone app gold rush stories

I didn't write the titles; the following links are as they appeared to me on either programming.reddit or Hacker News. Click each [comments] link if you're interested.

2009, Here I Come!

2009-01-28T00:27:42.7445293-08:00

I won't recap 2008; I dislike public introspection and what's more, you can read all about my 2008 by visiting my blog's home page, which has everything. I think the home page weighs in at 5MB of content right now. It's huge, and unashamed of its hugeness—my blog wears a T-shirt that says "large and in charge." The T-shirt has prominent pizza stains. Deal with it.

It's already late January, and I've missed the new year's deadline, but I'm still roughly in time for the Chinese new year.

New year's resolutions ahoy!

Programming-related aggregators:
your new hobby!

Hacker News
programming.reddit.com
CodeBetter.com | LosTechies.com | devlicio.us
DotNetKicks
ayende.com - (due to quantity, counts as aggregator)

One thing dramatically missing from my 2008 was a proper book education. I read every programming-related aggregator known to mankind, listened to every programming podcast known to mankind, and read my share of technical weblogs. But I can't say I read programming books. Books!

I shouldn't have to explain why books are uniquely and deeply beneficial to any education. …So I won't.

Resolution: read 6 "fundamentals" books this year

6 is the reach goal, because for me, reading dense textbooks is tough. I used to put myself to sleep reading history textbooks. It turns out, Object Thinking by David West works just as well as a history textbook—even though (in both cases!) I'm interested in the subject at hand, focusing is tough.

Of the six, I'm going to start with JP's short list focused on coding fundamentals—not necessarily design, estimation, DDD, business analysis, project management, management, or whatever other useful fundamental skill you can imagine. Coding, not that other thing.

Sub-resolution: read 3 technology-focused books this year

No specifics here because I don't know which three; I'll know when I need them. I'm just writing this as an acknowledgement that yes, at some point in the next year I'll have to tackle some new frameworks; this space is reserved for three such Unnamed Frameworks.

Okay, so, books. That's obvious.

Resolution: read source code

Another obvious (and easy!) candidate is reading others' source code. Scott Hanselman has covered the why's of this topic well; I'm just here to say "me too." What's unfortunate is that I'm already running out of good samples. Most of the ASP.NET MVC samples don't even cover all the CRUD operations! CRUD!

At this one I'm doing well. So, stay the course!

Resolution: complete and release one minor development project this year

Next: practice. This is easy to describe. If I want to become a strong developer, I need to practice. Others have done a good job explaining why; I'll just say that I plan to do this. And not just attending coding dojos, which are great, but actually doing some self-directed practice. "Practice" isn't a specific goal, so instead, we'll work at one minor development project.

Minor means that it doesn't have to change the world or make me a billion jiggawatt dollars. I'm also going to try to stop reading all the rags-to-riches-iPhone-app stories that appear regularly, seducing me with their plausibility. There's been a lot of those recently (story#1 story#2 story#3 story#4 story#5 story#6).

Anyway, the point is—make a project, finish it, and do so in such a way that I'm not ashamed to release the source code. No ulterior motives, like releasing it later as an iPhone app. But if I were to release an iPhone app—I have a dream where Steve Jobs shows up on my doorstep holding a duffel bag full of cash. He's there making his daily delivery of my iPhone app's earnings. In my dream Steve Wozniak is there too, giving me a thumbs up and another duffel bag full of cash. Woz doesn't work for Apple anymore; he's there because my iPhone app is that good.

Anyway, no iPhone apps.

As a way to practice, make one project; practice techniques while making the app; no ulterior motives. Sounds easy enough. I should clarify that I can't count work projects, no matter how proud of them I may or may not be.

Resolution: boycott more Microsoft frameworks

While boycott is a strong word, it may not be strong enough to express how overwhelmed I am by the tide of technologies and frameworks coming from Microsoft! Also, it's a proven strategy—by boycotting Workflow 3.0 and LINQ to SQL in 2008, I saved a bunch of time not learning these deprecated frameworks. I'm sticking with this general strategy for 2009: if I don't need a technology, I won't pressure myself to learn it.

Putting all this in perspective

These are my technical learning goals for the year. Let me state that by no means is this my life priority for 2009. I think it would be awesome to reflect on 2009 and say "this was a great year," despite woefully failing to meet any of my stated goals above.

The point being, there are more important things than arguing about whether Silverlight matters. You know, life!

Oh and, quick, shot-across-the-bow answer: no, Silverlight still doesn't matter; don't learn it yet.

Final note: if your goal is continuous improvement, ask yourself why?

Something I noticed at the KAIZENC0NF was that there were exclusively enterprise development-related sessions (and I'm culpable as I could have suggested a topic Friday had I been there Friday). This didn't bother me at the time, but as I look back on the conference, it bothers me now. I think it's because I don't want to be truly great at enterprise development. Sure, I'm driven by a desire to be good at what I do. Sure, I want to remain gainfully employed, ideally such that I'm more valuable, rather than less, as time passes. This is all reasonable, and yes, I will put in the requisite effort. I.e., this means I'll spend time learning things I have no interest in learning, i.e. I'll work at it. The key word there being work.

But I'm not passionate about (name your enterprise vertical). I don't get excited learning a technology, framework or skill if I can only use it at work.

And don't think I just mean SharePoint (unpopular amongst .NET developers, an easy target); this applies also to the enterprise development aspects of DDD and Lean (popular, and on an upward arc*), and in learning enterprisey things like data warehouses. Or BPEL, or the abstract concepts behind BPEL. Yawn.
*the key here is to note that yes, I believe they're valuable, but no, I can't seem to get excited about learning them. Don't overreact, I just mean "I can't get excited about learning them."

What's the point of trying to become truly great at enterprise development? Just enterprise development?

SharePoint Plus ASP.NET MVC

2008-12-18T13:48:39.0092721-08:00

It's all business again.

First: I'm going to be away from (hopefully all) computers for a while

I'll be on vacation, in a very real and non-metaphorical sense. Which is awesome.

What it means for you is, if on the offhand chance you leave a comment or email me, I won't respond. Sorry, I'll be away. Sucks for you, awesome for me.

Second: ASP.NET MVC and SharePoint, together as one

It still boggles the mind how many people are searching for this term. The only thing I want to ask you, the many people who are searching for "how do I get ASP.NET MVC running underneath SharePoint," is: why? Why do you want to do this?

I'm not here to provide any answers today; instead, I'm posting this as a kind of googlebait to lure you in. Maybe it's wrong, but whatever. Why do you want to use the still-beta ASP.NET MVC framework on top of SharePoint? I honestly don't know why anyone would do this. So please, if you search for "how do I combine SharePoint with ASP.NET MVC," and you hit this page, leave me a comment! I want to get in your brain and swim around a little.

I'm pretty sure I can get ASP.NET MVC running underneath SharePoint; the only magic will be removing pieces of SharePoint from the MVC project's web.config, and (maybe) integrating with SharePoint's security (or maybe not). Besides ugprading to .NET 3.5 SP1, which is by far the most arduous step on a production farm, it shouldn't be too tricky to get this working.

Anyway, there's a somewhat rambling teaser—it's probably possible, even if I can't imagine why it would be a good idea.

Disoriented

2008-11-06T12:16:47.098-08:00

This isn't my building, but you get the idea. Like my building, the elevators line both sides of a short hallway.

I had a moment of sudden disorientation during an elevator ride recently.

First, let me explain the elevator setup. In our fancy downtown building, we have a bank of five (or is it six?) elevators. Our elevator bank is housed in the center of the building, lining both sides of a short hallway. As fancy as we are, we aren't fancy enough to justify glass windows or any of the other elevator luxuries. The doors open, you get in, the doors close, and your new, smaller world is the four brushed-metal elevator walls.

So, as the scene had played out hundreds (or possibly thousands) of times before, the doors opened, I got on the elevator, the doors closed. This time, however, I was distracted—more so than usual—and wasn't paying too much attention to where I was walking.

As the elevator began its descent to the ground floor, and as is quite unusual for me, I had a new thought intrude—which elevator am I on? And which way do I turn when the door opens—left or right? I had no idea.

And for a brief moment, I was suddenly disoriented—almost in a physical sense.

We'll get back to the elevator story in a moment.

Conference that shall not be named so that keyword searches shall not pick it up

Last weekend I attended the open spaces event in Austin, and while I'd like to post something saying "it was a great time, well worth it, etc," I can't. There were only two impressions I have after attending the conference.

One: I'm not ready. I'm not even currently using the tools discussed by (and at times, designed by) the other attendees, nor (with my current technology stack) am I planning to use them. Tools aren't everything; my "I'm not ready" feeling also goes for the softer topics like lean/agile/kanban, which are definitely of interest to me, but not in the sense that I have any authority to make changes outside of myself. I'm not a "Big Tymer" like Manny Fresh and Baby.

Before we move onto the second impression, let me talk for a second about my learning queue, by way of Billy Hollis.

Learning queue

I listened to a fascinating Deep Fried Bytes podcast interviewing Billy Hollis. Most interesting to me was his discussion of how no one is keeping up with the .NET framework—while Microsoft is now pushing Azure and Windows 7 and C# 4.0 and whoops, throw out the old Workflow Foundation, we're pressing the reset button on Workflow 4.0—while all this is happening, of the developers Billy Hollis interviews, only ~1 out of 10 are using generics. Generics, which were introduced in 2005, and as Billy Hollis pointed out, not a large topic to learn, are still not in regular use by 9 our of 10 developers.

Sample bias noted, even if the developers he interviews aren't representative of the developer population, this is still something to sit up and take note. The key takeaway is that almost everyone is far behind. And he illustrates this with some stark (if anecdotal) numbers.

Meanwhile, over the last several years I've focused on SharePoint. I've been learning about web parts and workflow and InfoPath and web content management publishing features and ASP.NET app pools and IIS6 and XSL and Solution packages and Feature packages and governance and taxonomies and IA and so on—I've immersed myself in the SharePoint world. It was tough to keep up, especially given the magnitude of SharePoint itself.

But, at some point in the past, I publicly and officially declared, "I'm done." No more SharePoint learning, except what I need for my job, today. And it's really freed me up, in terms of mental weight. Now that I know I no longer need to learn how to do SharePoint workflow, for example, why would I ever want to learn it—especially now as they've announced WF4.0 will be completely new? Why would I want to research SharePoint object disposal best practices, when I myself no longer need this to get things done at work?

But something else happened, something unintentional. At the moment I declared I was no longer going to learn SharePoint—at that moment I experienced a similar moment of disorientation. If I'm not going to be a SharePoint guy in the long term, what now? The elevator doors will open soon; left or right?

Back to the conference

And we're back to talking about the open spaces conference I just attended. This was the conference where I was to meet up with what would become my new community of practice. This would be the group with which I could identify.

But for whatever reason, it didn't work out that way.

I've already mentioned that at the conference, I got the strong impression that I wasn't ready to attend; that I needed to do some homework before even being able to process most of what was discussed in the sessions, much less contribute.

Surprisingly, at this conference I also had a strong moment of disorientation again. Instead of cementing my understanding of software development into a rigid cast, and allowing me to fall into something of a comfortable pattern as I expected, I felt distinctly less comfortable afterwards.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to be uncomfortable. If we're following the elevator story from earlier, a dubious metaphor to begin with, but hey, here we are at the end and we can't exactly go back and invent a new and possibly worse metaphor—well, let's stick with the elevator story. At the open spaces conference last weekend I experienced a kind of career vertigo—I'm in the moment just before the elevator doors opens. It's uncomfortable, but I'm sure the sensation will pass. And when it does, my world will have grown.

SharePoint Timer Jobs

2008-10-28T16:46:47.877-07:00

I couldn't hold out.

It's okay though, because today we're strictly business. In the course of developing a bunch of SharePoint timer jobs recently, I've learned several things, most of which aren't obvious from the get-go:

Storing and retrieving configuration data is a problem. Because I don't have a farm-wide configuration list (yet—the temptation grows every day), I was forced to do some ugliness in order to store and retrieve configuration data. I don't necessarily recommend my approach; instead I'll just say I'm using a custom SPPersistedObject as my Timer Job's config store and I'll further say that it works, roughly, though I'd now prefer a better way. Consider setting up a farm-wide config list, it's a relatively big time investment but is probably worth it. Other traditional config storage options (such as the web.config, or a site-local config list, or your site-local property bag) aren't accessible to Timer Jobs without some sort of…configuration's configuration…hmm, yes…without something extra pointing the way. Anyway, it's a problem.
ANYTIME YOU UPDATE YOUR TIMER JOB CLASS (or custom assembly), YOU MUST BUMP ALL SHAREPOINT TIMER SERVICES ON THE FARM! I learned this lesson the hard way. If you fail to bump the timer service, it will blissfully run the old copy of your timer job class; I don't know how or why it caches your assembly, but it does, and bumping the SharePoint timer service is the only way to clear the assembly cache(?) and force it to use your minty fresh assembly.

Side-note: can we report this as a bug in the Solution framework? Because this is a big enough gotcha that the Solution framework needs to include an option to -bumptimersvc …or something. Maybe a custom stsadm command (stsadm -o resetadmsvc) or maybe tack something onto the Solution deployment API and associated stsadm commands…we need something.

There are differences between the context of a test harness (i.e. something like an NUnit integration test running under the NUnit test runner) and a timer job running in the Timer service. This may sound obvious, but when you're troubleshooting something that "only breaks on the test farm," this little bit of trivia is important. If you need to troubleshoot your timer job as it runs on the timer service, specifically, this can get tricky.

My script below will reschedule your timer job to run 10 seconds in the future

$siteUrl - the site collection root URL. We need this to get a reference to the SPWebApplication that holds your Timer Job.
$customAssemblyName - the partial name of your custom assembly. This is necessary because we're going to new up an instance of your timer job, and thus we'll need to first load the containing assembly.
$jobName - this need only be a rough equivalent of your job name. I'm usually lazy and say something like "*custom profile job*" or the minimum necessary to identify my job from all the rest. Messy is good; we're running a one-off script, right? Or you can go ahead and type the perfect exact case-sensitive job name in there, that's fine too.
$timerJobClassName - again, we need this because we're going to new up a rescheduled timer job.

Your original schedule doesn't matter, and may be destroyed. Because that's exactly what this script does, by the way—it destroys the original schedule and sets a "10 seconds from now" schedule. Incidentally, whatever it did before, your job now runs on a daily schedule :)
You're only concerned about the timer job running on one web application's context. Because in truth that's all that mattered to me when I wrote this script, I didn't consider the possibility of multiple jobs.
You're running a single-server farm (i.e. a developer VM). My script only stops the service on the local server.
No one else cares if you bump the SPTimerV3 service, including any other timer jobs that may be running presently. Note in the script below, PowerShell has some cmdlets to work with Windows Services. I was totally unaware of them until I had to bump this service; neat.

you won't care.

$siteUrl = "http://dev"
$customAssemblyName = "Corp.SharePoint.Assembly"
$jobName = "*your job name*wildcards*work*"
$timerJobClassName = "Corp.SharePoint.Namespace.TimerJob"

[void][reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
[void][reflection.assembly]::LoadwithPartialName("Microsoft.Office.Server")
[void][reflection.assembly]::LoadwithPartialName($customAssemblyName)

function Run-Init
{
    $global:s = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite]$siteUrl
    $global:webApplication = $s.WebApplication
    $global:job = $webApplication.JobDefinitions | ? { $_.Name -like $jobName }
}

function Create-NewJob
{
    Stop-Service "SPTimerV3"
    Start-Service "SPTimerV3"
    $global:job.Delete()
    $global:job = new-object $timerJobClassName -arg $webApplication
    $sched = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPDailySchedule
    $now = [datetime]::now.AddSeconds(10)
    $sched.BeginHour = $now.Hour
    $sched.EndHour = $now.Hour
    $sched.BeginMinute = $now.Minute
    $sched.EndMinute = $now.Minute
    $sched.beginsecond = $now.Second
    $sched.endsecond = $now.Second
    $global:job.Schedule = $sched
    $global:job.Update()
}

#Usage: paste this script directly into a PowerShell console; the quickest
#way is to right-mouse-button click. Then when you're ready,
#run the following commands (minus the # of course):
#
#Run-Init
#Create-NewJob
#
#Anytime you update your custom assembly "Corp.SharePoint.Assembly", you will need to
#DESTROY your open PowerShell console/session and create a new one. This is the cleanest way
#to unload your old custom assembly.

THAT

Anything

any

Exploring System.Drawing; I'm aware it's the year 2008

2008-10-27T18:52:14.5405685-07:00

Yes, I'm aware it's late in the year 2008, I'm aware this stuff isn't as fresh as WPF 3D or Ruby Processing.

As I've posted earlier, I've accrued some treasured junk. Now that I have all this junk, what am I to do? Well, um…I didn't really know either.

So I started messing around.

Messing around with System.Drawing: first, infrastructure

The first thing I did was to determine the average color for a single image. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going, but I figure, hey, if you want to get a rough "picture" of what an image looks like, it's not a bad idea to look at the average color value. And we're using the RGB breakdown for color, meaning white is #FFFFFF (256,256,256), black is #000000 (0,0,0), and everything else falls in between.

Note that in my case, performance is not a big deal; I'm doing all these calculations one pixel at a time which, as you might image, is suboptimal. Mostly a straightforward operation:

public static Color Average(Image image)
{
    using (Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(image))
    {
        int red, green, blue;
        long redRunningSum = 0, greenRunningSum = 0, blueRunningSum = 0;
        long numPixels = bitmap.Width * bitmap.Height;

        foreach (Color pixelColor in ImageHelper.GetPixelsFor(bitmap))
        {
            redRunningSum += pixelColor.R;
            blueRunningSum += pixelColor.B;
            greenRunningSum += pixelColor.G;
        }

        red = (int)(redRunningSum / numPixels);
        green = (int)(greenRunningSum / numPixels);
        blue = (int)(blueRunningSum / numPixels);

return Color.FromArgb(red, green, blue);
}
}

Ok, so why do we care—it's a function, right? Well, okay, yes—but here's a PowerShell function you may also find interesting:

function Average-Images ($filenames)
{
    [void][reflection.assembly]::Loadfile("C:\a\sandbox\ImgTest\bin\Debug\ImgTest.dll")
    $i = 1
    $total = $filenames.count
    $results = @()
    foreach ($filename in $filenames)
    {
        write-host "$i - $($i*100/$total)%- $($filename)"
        $i++
        $img = [System.Drawing.Image]::FromFile($filename)
        $o = new-object PSObject
        $avg = [ImgTest.ImageHelper]::Average($img)
        add-member -inp $o -membertype "NoteProperty" -name "Filename" -value $filename
        add-member -inp $o -membertype "NoteProperty" -name "Image" -value $img
        add-member -inp $o -membertype "NoteProperty" -name "Red" -value $avg.R
        add-member -inp $o -membertype "NoteProperty" -name "Green" -value $avg.G
        add-member -inp $o -membertype "NoteProperty" -name "Blue" -value $avg.B
        $results += $o
    }
    $results
}

So. This is getting interesting. What the "Average-Images" function above does is create a custom object with some useful properties: we've got the original filename, we've got a still-breathing reference to the System.Drawing.Image object, and we're storing the "average pixel's" red, green, blue values as individual properties. The resulting objects look something like this:

Maybe it's still not interesting for you. That's fine, 'cause this party's* just getting started!
*despite what I've just written, this is not a party

I have one more piece of "infrastructure" to explain, before we can get cooking: I've created a PowerShell function called "Make-Html," which creates a permanent HTML file listing all the images I want to see, in the order I want to see them. As an added bonus, the function immediately launches the newly-created file in my browser. Here's the code:

$startDir = "C:\a\ps1\scrape\"
function Make-Html ($fullfilenames, $resultingFilename)
{
    $files = $fullFilenames | % { $_.split("\")[-1] }
    $tags = $files | % { "<div style=""float:left;""><img src=""$_""/></div>" }
    $html = @"
<html><head><title>$($resultingFilename)</title>
</head><body>
$($tags)
</body></html>
"@

$html > "$($startDir)$($resultingFilename).html"
ii "$($startDir)$($resultingFilename).html"
}

Ok, I know, we're still not doing anything.

Let's warm up

Okay, as I say to everyone, the real power of PowerShell is its object piping. PowerShell pipes objects, not text; this is something best seen, not heard, and hopefully we'll see a little something today. The objects we'll be slinging through the pipeline today are, as mentioned above, custom objects that have a Filename, an Image, and the RGB values representing the image's average (mean?) color.

So, let's count how many items we have:

Awesome. Let's count how many items we have that are more red than any other color:

Hmm, that was unexpected, 359 red-dominant images out of 503, that's proportionally huge. I'll point out that I did some extra fanciness to get this count to evaluate on one line, but usually (i.e. when I'm not posting to my blog) I'll work my way in parts, not all at once. So the same thing, split out, would be:

That's more realistic.

Okay, one more thing before we go. Finding out most of my pictures are red-dominant has me wondering: what about the other two? Let's work with the objects a little* to massage the answer out of them:
*a lot; ugly function that pulls out the dominant color not shown

Weird.

Skipping ahead to the end

This is the pattern: we'll ask a burning question, we'll form this question as a PowerShell pipeline, and we'll see the results.

Question: can we see the images in order of "redness"?

Pipeline:

$a | sort red | % { $_.filename }

Results:

Least red:

Most red:

Summary: okay, that makes sense. We used a naive algorithm that simply counted the red value, meaning that a pure black image or a pure blue image would have the "least redness" and a pure white image would have as much "redness" as a pure red image. Hmm, we can fix this. Onwards!

Question: Okay, so we're looking for redness. Let's call this proportional redness. Hmm, here we go:

Pipeline:

$relativelyRed = $a | select filename, @{Name="redness"; expression={$_.red / ($_.red+$_.green+$_.blue) }}
$relativelyRed | sort redness | % { $_.filename }

Results:

Least red:

Most red:

Summary: now that's more like it. Our earlier naive results were instructive, but this is more what I was looking for.

Question: okay, so let's stop messing with redness. Instead, let's find out what images have the most variance between the colors. We're less interested in the white-gray-gray-gray-black spectrum, and are looking for more colorful images. Let's do this:

Pipeline:

$variance = $a | select filename, @{Name="Variance"; Expression={$avg = ($_.red+$_.green+$_.blue)/3; $var = [math]::Abs($_.red-$avg) + [math]::abs($_.green-$avg)+ [math]::abs($_.blue-$avg); $var} }
make-html -fullfilenames ($variance | sort variance | % { $_.filename }) -resultingFilename "variance"

Results:

Most balanced:

Most variance:

Summary: most interesting, besides a grouping of the "grayish" and "black and white" images all together, is the smattering of images that have color, but are so perfectly balanced they're nestled right in there with the pure black-and-white images. Neat.

Final bits

This post is already too long. There's not too much else to say, besides a) stuff is awesome, and b) with the aid of either PowerShell functions or .NET library calls, you can do some complex things. If you only remember one thing from this post, try and pick up the impression I'm trying to leave. This is how I see PowerShell: it's an experimental playground where I morph a thought, an idea, slowly into something workable, and in each step along the way, I'm getting feedback and refining, and in the end, I've satisfied my curiousity. Maybe it's something as useless as basic image analysis using System.Drawing.

Incidentally, if you want to see how the professionals do this kind of thing, check out Multicolr - an color search engine indexing 10 million Flickr pictures, which makes the stuff I did above kind of pitiful looking :) When I checked last, the Multicolr site was slow, otherwise it's neat; check it out.

(take 2) Site now runs on ASP.NET MVC

2008-10-21T04:58:07-07:00

HOWDY!

This is a quick announcement to let you know that my site now runs on ASP.NET MVC. A few things have been updated:

My sweet SharePoint search page (follow this link for description) has been updated with the NEW MSDN forums search, and the NEW Google Groups (USENET) search. It turns out I wasn't searching USENET much because this thing has been broken for months now . Anyway, check it out—you either need it or you don't.
My best-of-breed CAPTCHA is back! See pseale.com/captcha for details.
Similarly, my regularly-updated wealth clock (pseale.com/clock) is back! I'm sure you all missed it as I have.

(strike that) dasBlog 2.1 running on ASP.NET MVC Preview 5

dasBlog 2.2 running on ASP.NET MVC Beta

First thing I should point out is that I'm running under IIS7 Integrated mode on shared hosting. If you're attempting this, be sure you're running on IIS 7 in Integrated mode. If you're trying to test this out on your own machine, this means you must be running Vista or Server 2008, must create a fresh web site in IIS and make sure the app pool is running on Integrated mode. Let me be clear: you can't properly test on the Cassini web server running your Visual Studio project.

ALSO: Now that ASP.NET MVC Beta adds itself to the GAC, for a while (until you host loads the dll's to its server's GAC), you'll have to make local copies of each ASP.NET MVC dll. "Copy Local" a property under each assembly Reference—set it to True for each one of them.

Ok. There are three things you have to do to get dasBlog working underneath an ASP.NET MVC app.

First, in your MVC app, set Routing to ignore your blog's folder. Mine is called "/blog". Here's what it looks like (I think I stole this from a Phil Haack blog post, so if it looks familiar, it is):

Second, and this won't be an option for all of you—I removed all the System.Web.Extensions (AKA ASP.NET AJAX, AKA "Atlas") from my root MVC app. This fixed the problem I was experiencing with my ASMX-powered RSS feed, which Atlas usurps by default (thanks Ben for the tip, that did the trick).

Third, we need to do some heavy work on the dasBlog web.config. First I'll say, thanks to Paulb on the dasBlog team for providing the starter IIS7 web.config. Big ups to changeset 14700.

Instead of attempting to explain in detail any of the nasty things I've done to make the dasBlog 2.2 web.config work under the most recent MVC drop, I'll just post my web.config directly for viewing. I don't recommend what I've done for others; instead I'll say that I got my web.config minimally working underneath a small MVC-based site.

If you're reading this blog post because no one else has provided a better explanation, then maybe perusing my web.config will help.

Without further ado, I present you: web.config of my dasBlog application running underneath an ASP.NET MVC site.

KNOWN ISSUE: http://www.pseale.com/blog (without the trailing slash) bombs out with an error. http://www.pseale.com/blog/ works fine. I assume it has something to do with the blowery.web component, something that I have no desire to fix; I'll work around the problem with a Routing fix/hack. Anyway, lesson learned: BEWARE TRAILING SLASHES!

UPDATE: apparently the blowery.web compression is somehow interfering with delivery of my CSS files. I say apparently because I didn't attempt to troubleshoot this, I just disabled the HttpModule…with extreme prejudice! As much extreme prejudice as one can muster against an HttpModule, anyway.

Awesomeness Without Words

2008-10-13T20:31:12.3768887-07:00

Recently I've been trawling THE INTERNET for retina-dissolving or otherwise awesome images, and have programmatically collected/mushed them into the nuttiness above. More to follow soon, unless I'm lazy. So, uh, probably more to follow…eventually.

EDIT: reposted with an image that is NOT 3MB. Yes, the original image was 3MB, a catastrophically large file. I'm like the guy who sends a holiday greeting PowerPoint over email that brings down the mail server for two days. Thankfully no one subscribes to my blog, otherwise that could have created "heap big bandwidth bill." I blame Windows Live Writer and Paint.NET, daring me to paste directly from one program to the other. For shame, Paint.NET. For shame.

Beyond Technical Challenges

2008-09-22T20:10:01.9025348-07:00

Summary first, because I just re-read this and it's ridiculous long

If you've subscribed to my blog exclusively for the SharePoint bits, sorry; now is the time to unsubscribe.

That goes for both of you/half my subscriber base :)

I've become increasingly frustrated with SharePoint (I'll explain why in, um, detailed fashion), and instead of souring like a lemon, I'm just going to refocus. This means I'm dropping out of the SharePoint blogosphere to focus on long-term fundamentals; knowledge that won't expire when SharePoint 14 hits beta. I may jump back on for SharePoint 14, but it all depends.

UPDATED 2008-10-18: fixed grammatical and factual errors. By factual errors, I mean that time when I attributed something to Chris O'Brien's blog, when oopsies! it wasn't him at all.

Introduction

I've become increasingly frustrated with SharePoint recently (again, I know), but what's been bugging me more lately is the fact that I'm solving all the wrong technical challenges. I think I have a (deeply suppressed) aesthetic sense, that every so often, rears its ugly head. Or flares out from my neck like a humongous goiter. Goiters are a serious problem—hey!—used iodized salt, it's that easy.

I get agitated at times staring at (undocumented) CAML, or anytime I work with InfoPath, or remembering when to surround hardcoded GUIDs with curly braces (and when not), or knowing when to dispose SharePoint-created objects, or remembering which Workflow activities only work in SharePoint Designer and not Visual Studio, or working around concurrency bugs, or troubleshooting failed Solution deployments. And so on, pick your topic; these are real issues by the way.

So what's the point of this post again?

I want to send the message out there to everyone working with SharePoint, to look beyond your immediate technical challenge, and think. Think beyond your immediate issue, beyond with what you're wrestling at this particular moment, beyond your immediate (sometimes overwhelming) technical challenge with me. Are you ready? Looking at the size of this post, maybe not!

Let's DO THIS.

Are you an expert at SharePoint development?

I recently watched Dave Thomas give a talk about developing expertise. It's interesting, go watch it if you have time; he's not making it all up on the spot, he relies on some kind of research. In the talk he does something I like: he categorizes everyone (using the Dreyfus model) somewhere along the expertise scale: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, Expert. And gives definitions for all five categories, and gives helpful tips for how to work with people of varying skills. It's not all fluff, go watch it.

Bringing this back to SharePoint: after trolling the entire SharePoint blogosphere for quite a while now, I've come to the conclusion that there are no expert SharePoint developers. I'd go as far as to say that there are very few proficient SharePoint developers, and you probably know all their names (hint: look for "MVP" in title and/or multiple Bentleys in the parking lot).

The rest of us are just struggling. The "everyone's struggling" theme really sunk in recently when I browsed the source code for SharePoint-tagged CodePlex projects. All of them (save one) disposed their objects improperly. Including mine, to be fair, I'm not hating on your free, labor of love project, I'm making a point. The point isn't to hate on your baby, the point is to say that no one is doing SharePoint development properly. Look on CodePlex; you'll see what I mean.

Let that sink in. No one is doing SharePoint development properly. And hey, your team may have tackled all the object disposal issues, but maybe instead, you're ignoring large portions of the framework and (unknowingly) rewriting large portions of it. Maybe you don't bother packing things in Features and Solutions; maybe you spend too much time packing things in Features and Solutions. Maybe you're great at writing Site Definition CAML but haven't gotten the memo that putting everything in your site definition is a bad practice (or the other memo telling you that custom Site Definitions don't upgrade to v14). Maybe you're unknowingly triggering framework bugs that ruin your customers' trust in your solutions. Maybe you write unmaintainable code.

Maybe you don't understand your customer's core problem!

Maybe, in your metaphorical dwarven greed, you've delved too deep into the framework, and unknowingly stirred the framework Balrog. And you don't want to wake the framework Balrog, let me tell you.

I don't know about you, but I'm there—I'm struggling.

Takeaway: just try to be competent

Dave Thomas says in his expertise talk that advanced beginners think they're much further along than they are, and those who are proficient or experts think they're beginners. Let me tell you: as far as SharePoint development skills go, I'm an advanced beginner, bordering on competent. And I mean it—knowing that he says "beginners tend to think they're experts, and experts think they're worse than they are"—with all that said and digested, I still think I'm a beginner (advanced beginner, I'm not a total scrub :) ).

So, and this applies to those of you who are still new to the SharePoint world and/or isolated—it's okay to admit that you're not an expert. If you need an ego boost, go look at CodePlex—you'll certainly learn a great many things from others' code, but you'll also realize that hey, these people don't have it together either!

Becoming a competent SharePoint developer

What I've also begun to realize, is that the more I learn about SharePoint, the less I want to apply it to different scenarios. Where before I used to say "SharePoint Workflow is supposed to be good at solving that problem," now I say "SharePoint Workflow is painful, and for long-term maintainability I'd recommend you manually code up whatever you need, elsewhere." Whereas I used to say "InfoPath is useful for simpler scenarios," now I further limit InfoPath to "end-user tool only; don't you dare use InfoPath's code-behind." I say these with specific scenarios in mind, I have biases, your mileage may vary, all things within reason, etc, but the point I'm making stands—I'm recommending SharePoint less.

Dave Thomas says, again, that as an advanced beginner you believe that nothing works. Unfortunately, every time I encounter a new piece of the SharePoint framework, I'm an advanced beginner. I don't have the opportunity of being the CQWP guy, every day. Today I'm that guy, tomorrow I'm the InfoPath guy, day after I'm the admin, day after I'm the help desk. I'm that guy.

And hey, I've been an advanced beginner before. For example, I distinctly remember the first time I tried to do Active Directory scripting with PowerShell. It was painful. But gritting my teeth and working through the pain, I became comfortable with it. And, now that I know my way around, I'm able to do some cool (simple) things with PowerShell and Active Directory.

This is a common pattern—I've been an advanced beginner elsewhere, worked through the pain, and by the end, I was comfortable and was feeling more confident.

What I'm trying to articulate in these long rambling paragraphs, is that as I learn more about SharePoint via experience, I become comfortable with pieces of the framework and trust the framework less. As I learn more, I trust SharePoint less. Today I'm totally comfortable in telling you that InfoPath is absolutely great for simple data entry, for simple review scenarios, but nothing else*. And this isn't just InfoPath. As I work my way around the framework, I am becoming comfortable with individual pieces, and as I do so, I am trusting each piece less.

And let me set the record straight. I'm less interested in whether a particular technology is Turing-complete—whether it can theoretically solve any problem—I'm more interested in whether using that technology is a good idea in the first place. And as I learn more about SharePoint, the world of good ideas seems to shrink.
*note for InfoPath nitpickers: yes, it's useful for other things, but yes, it's also easier for me to say "good for nothing else" than rattle off 15 edge cases.

Do you want to become proficient?

I think what is bugging me most is that I don't want to be a SharePoint apologizer. Not apologist, apologizer.

Oh, sorry, that doesn't work. Sorry, yeah, there's a bug. No, yeah, you heard it was great for ECM; well, yeah, it's cheaper, but we'll have to customize a lot. Oh, yeah, that's undocumented. Oh, no, we hit the list size limit early. Yeah, no, SharePoint Designer is unmaintainable, don't build solutions with it. Oh yeah, factor in cost of upgrades on every SharePoint project.

Last week we found out "the hard way" that SharePoint can't handle 12000 documents in a single folder, no metadata, no versioning, nothing fancy. Performance whitepaper aside, 12000 documents shouldn't be a problem, I don't want to hear about it—this is a bug. And meanwhile, from the other end I'm attempting to fend off a total migration of terabytes of network file shares to SharePoint, because "this should work, right?"

I don't want to progress with SharePoint, if my energy is going to be spent tackling the wrong challenges.

Add in the cost of learning

Something that I'm maybe not emphasizing well enough is the point that in theory, all things are possible in SharePoint. And if the cost of becoming a SharePoint expert was zero, SharePoint development would be no question, worlds better than coding by hand. No contest, no question, better.

But learning isn't free.

SharePoint gold rush

Dux Sy refers to a SharePoint gold rush. It's real. It's real in part because the time cost of learning SharePoint is so high. Chris O'Brien (I can't find the entry on his blog) Shane Young states that you should be wary of hiring developers if less than 5 of their last 10 projects are SharePoint projects. It's expensive to find people with that kind of SharePoint experience. Thus, high prices, thus, gold rush.

This equation works for all Enterprise solutions; when I talk about how SharePoint is aggravating my inner engineering brain, trust me, I've worked with other Enterprise systems, and they're worse. SharePoint's a great "Enterprise" product—believe it or not, Microsoft is quite open compared to other vendors, who require all independent consultants be licensed by the vendor, or who provide no public documentation at all—all these extra hurdles artificially inflating consulting prices. Microsoft thankfully doesn't do these things (at least that I notice). So, it could be worse.

No more SharePoint on my blog

I've posted exclusively SharePoint content for a while now, and as I do so, I notice my attitude continues to trend negative. It's my doom-and-gloom engineering brain, it can't just let it go. So, instead of ranting further, I'll just, hmm, let it go. No more SharePoint 2007-related topics on my blog, even if a potential topic is brilliant (WHICH IT INEVITABLY WOULD BE!). No more SharePoint content unless I just can't hold it in.

If you've subscribed to my blog exclusively for the SharePoint bits, sorry; now is the time to unsubscribe.

I'm also officially done learning SharePoint 2007 development, permanently—no more off-hours learning, no more digging through my humongous SharePoint blogroll. When SharePoint 14 is announced, I'll evaluate it to see if they've fixed anything—to see if the situation's improved any. If so, great! Maybe SharePoint 14 will realize the potential of what some are calling "the first real application development platform from Microsoft." There are some awesome business problems that SharePoint already attempts to solve—that with just a little extra help, SharePoint could be a powerful solution. It could be dominant, even.

But if SharePoint 14 is more of the same; if they announce SharePoint Designer Designer 2009, and we're all given the "look what you can do without coding!" demos, and the BDC is still 14 pages of XML without proper tooling, and pieces of the framework are "secretly known" to not work at launch (like the PRIME API), and SharePoint still produces noncompliant HTML out of the box, and I'm still handwriting Feature manifests, and I'm still handwriting CAML, and I'm staring at a doubly-XML-encoded internal field name passed as an argument to a custom XSL function emitting HTML and all this is wrapped in a XML-encoded WebPart tag, and a new SPDataGridView is released and it adds 50 more undocumented methods and properties, and we need to rewrite all our SharePoint 2007 customizations just to make them work with v14…well, we'll see. If MSDN rolls out a SharePoint 14 resource center and it has 3 articles and 50000 useless Sandcastle-generated stub pages—gold rush or no—it may be time to bail.

So what are you going to focus on, Peter?

I have three words for you.

FUN.
DUH.
MENTALS!

Project management (not getting a PMI cert; instead, the meat of project management). Proper object-oriented design. Programming languages (plural). HTML/CSS/JavaScript (they're not going anywhere).

Personal projects!

Programming for fun—something that may even inspire me!

And hey, maybe SharePoint 14 will be a pleasure to work with; maybe I'll jump on that bandwagon…I'm the guy who owns sharepoint14.com, after all.

Does this describe you?

2008-09-22T01:00:22-07:00

A while ago I came across a paper written by Niklaus Wirth. Well, okay, I don't read "papers", but I do read programming.reddit.com, and so came across some guy who does read papers, whose story made it to the reddit front page. I'll just link to him.

So here's how this goes: I'm only going to quote a small section of the original paper, then ask, "does this sound familiar to you in any way?"

Okay, here goes. Niklaus Wirth:

By contrast, modern languages are constantly growing. Their size and complexity is simply beyond anything that might serve as a logical foundation. In fact, they elude human grasp. Manuals have reached dimensions that effectively discourage any search for enlightenment. As a consequence, programming is not learnt from rules and logical derivations, but rather by trial and error. The glory of interactivity helps.

…so, ring any bells?

Estimating SharePoint Tasks: Cry For Help

2008-09-22T01:00:22-07:00

Estimating is difficult to begin with, but add on

a new technology stack with which you're unfamiliar,
sometimes unreliable and often undocumented API (I can back this up with examples, just take my word for it),
tight integration/reliance on Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS, Exchange, Office, and Internet Explorer, all of which may fail in difficult-to-debug ways;

Given all this, how much risk are you taking on if you provide a tight estimate? If you haven't tackled three or more Visual Studio Workflow projects, for example, how do you even go about getting a ballpark estimate on your first one?

On a recent project I put a 10x difference between my lowest and highest estimate for an SAP integration task, and everyone complained to me about how "there's too much variance." Well, what should I put there, I've never tried it before!

This isn't a passive-aggressive way of trying to win a work argument via my blog. If I start doing that, dude, let me know, I don't want to be that guy.

But it is a cry for help. How are we supposed to estimate SharePoint development tasks? If you're not an experienced SharePoint team, and by "experienced" I mean experienced in building the exact same solution, using the exact same method calls on the exact same SharePoint objects—if you're not truly experienced, then how do you even attempt estimating?

When you may be blocked anywhere between zero to ten times on a task, and each blockage may take up to a full week (or more) to resolve?

When your project approach hits a dead end? A brick wall?

In traditional build-it-from-the-ground-up systems, you can estimate the complexity of your requirements and envision a rough idea of what your solution will look like, and compare the complexity of your new task with similar tasks you've done in the past. This works for traditional development, so long as you double your estimate and increase it by an order of magnitude :). The idea is, when you're building it from the ground up, estimating is "as simple as*" estimating your effort based on the complexity of the problem.
* saying estimating is "as simple as" anything is an implied joke; you may laugh now

But if your task says "write a custom field that pulls data from SAP," or if someone says "hey, let's build this web part with Silverlight!" …how do you put down an estimate? When the task, performed by an experienced expert (see above for my definition of experienced) takes an hour, and in reality the bulk of your time is spent discovering how to do the one hour task?

What do you do when your honest estimate is, "this will take between 40 and 400 hours?"

I don't have the answer

I'm just throwing this out there because no one even talks about it. So here it is. When you're on a project and someone asks you for an estimate, and you answer "4 hours to 4000 man-months", and they laugh, hey—you're not alone. I can't figure it out either.

UPDATED 2008-10-21: I made mostly grammar fixes—so if you notice some changes, no, you're not going subtly crazy, this post changed a little.