StrangeLog - Il blog di Andrea Saltarello

L’importanza di chiamarsi… Framework

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:07:48 GMT

Ok, spero innanzitutto che Oscar Wilde non si stia troppo lamentando per la citazione a sproposito presente nel titolo :-) Ciò premesso, questo tip appena pubblicato su UGIdotNET mi ha riportato alla mente un episodio che descrissi in questo post: più che sull’argomento in sè ho riflettuto sul fatto che nell’anno 2000, quando mi trovai a dover risolvere il problema citato nel post, spesi svariate giornate per giungere alla soluzione ivi descritta perchè per scoprire l’esistenza di quella modalità di scrittura “non logged” di SQL Server dovetti spulciare la documentazione di SQL Server ed altrettanta ne spulciai per capire come, utilizzando le estensioni custom del suo driver ODBC, trarre vantaggio da quella tecnica.

Per certi versi si trattò di un interessante esercizio speculativo che mi lasciò in dote qualche conoscenza in più in merito ad alcuni internals di SQL Server, ma con il senno di poi penso che i servizi offerti dalla classe SqlBulkCopy sono un ottimo esempio di cosa dovrebbe fare un framework, ossia offrire delle primitive ad un (ragionevole) livello di astrazione che permetta allo sviluppatore di dedicare il proprio tempo alla soluzione della parte “pregiata” (si ok, si scrive “pregiata” ma si legge “domain”…) di un problema potendo far affidamento su un substrato tecnologico che sia in grado di sfruttare la tecnologia/piattaforma sottostante.

In questo senso, nonostante l’ipertrofia che ormai lo caratterizza, penso a quanto valore ci sia nel .NET Framework che ormai diamo per scontato e quanto avrei preferito, mentre nel 2000 dovevo risolvere da solo il problema in oggetto, aver a disposizione SqlBulkCopy potendo dedicare meno tempo al lavoro e magari usare il tempo risparmiato per un Mojito in buona compagnia… :-)

Upload di file in applicazioni ASP.NET MVC: un paio di approfondimenti

Andrea Saltarello — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:46:00 GMT

Mi riaggancio a questo mio tip pubblicato su UGIdotNET per fare un paio di approfondimenti:

Se usate l’attributo accept dell’elemento input e il browser protesta anche se il file che avete referenziato per il download è corretto, probabilmente siete incappati nello stesso bug di jQuery Validate che anche io ho potuto “gustare”: aggiornate la suddetta libreria all’ultima versione (va benissimo quella disponibile su NuGet) e il problema sarà risolto
Se il vostro server è a 64 bit e l’application pool è configurato per usare questa word length, ove voleste (come nel mio caso) effettuare l’upload di un file Excel ed effettuarne il parsing con ADO.NET, ricordate che per default il Jet Engine in versione x64 non è installato (e per ottimi motivi, visto che praticamente non è supportato negli scenari server side): potete scaricarlo qui ma attenzione alle release note che trovate nella sezione “Overview” della pagina perchè vi starete addentrando nel classico scenario “it works on my machine”. N.B., non fatevi ingannare dal fatto che sulla vostra devstation, che ovviamente è a 64 bit, funziona tutto alla perfezione mentre fate sviluppo & test: Visual Studio è a 32 bit e così anche Cassini, quindi state “funzionando” a 32 bit e in questo caso il problema non sussiste.

BTW, in realtà dopo qualche utilizzo del codice mostrato nel tip mi sono proprio stufato di non avere un migliore supporto a questa tipologia di scenario e quindi ho realizzato un helper method analogo a quelli disponibili out of the box per i data type supportati nativamente. Diciamo che ho un’idea per il prossimo tip :-)

Guisa1, ovvero “a volte ritornano”

Andrea Saltarello — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:55:00 GMT

Dopo una lunga (e fastidiosa, almeno per il sottoscritto) assenza, torna un evento organizzato dallo “user group dedicato ai perché oltre che al come”; in una parola: GUISA. Il format è (crediamo) davvero innovativo: né sessioni “full frontal” né “open” né, soprattutto, tecnologia fine a se stessa bensì solo casi reali. Ogni sessione, infatti, presenta per 60 minuti un progetto “real world” del quale verranno mostrate le scelte architetturali e tecnologiche, motivando le suddette scelte; e dopo i 60 minuti… 30 minuti di “open” nel quale metterle in discussione. Insieme. Ma sempre partendo dai requisiti, perché vogliamo parlare e discutere di scelte fatte con la testa e non con la “pancia”.

Questo è il primo giro e per “far bootstrap” le sessioni le abbiamo messe noi, dal prox giro ci sarà la CFP perché parlar di progetti ha tanto più senso quanto più eterogenei essi sono nella loro genesi. Ergo, preparatevi. :-)

Ah, si: c’è anche una (piccola" ?) eccezione (perché ogni buona regola generale ha delle altrettanto buone eccezioni): un “acceso” thread della scorsa settimana avvenuto su Twitter ci ha infatti convinto ad “infilare” in agenda una sessione con formato “open” dedicata ad Ubiquitous Language. Non l’avete vista fino ad ieri? Non mi stupisce: l’ho appena pubblicata. :-)

L’iscrizione è gratuita; per i dettagli logistici vi rimando al post del buon Mauro. L’hashtag dell’evento è #guisa1

Tag di Technorati: GUISA,DDD,ubiquitous language,software architecture,CQRS

Community Days, ma anche Community Dinner

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:06:00 GMT

Alla vigilia dell’inizio della bolgia, parliamo della parte veramente importante dell’agenda, ossia… La cena :-) Il baccanale avrà luogo presso l’Hosteria il Castelletto, dotata di 2 assett fondamentali:

Si trova a Peschiera, quindi ad un tiro di schioppo dall’Innovation Campus di Microsoft
Gnocco fritto, salumi, tigelle e Gutturnio

E a ben pensarci, “chissene” del primo punto perché il secondo è già una ragione più che sufficiente. :-) Poichè, oltre ad aver ridefinito il concetto di “limite di presenze permesso dalla omologazione dell’Innovation Campus”, rischiamo di dover fare override anche di quello della “Hosteria”, conviene prenotare. Ecco, insomma: chi volesse partecipare alla cena mi scriva e lo aggiungo alla prenotazione (fissata per domani sera alle 19:30).

Tag di Technorati: Community Days,UGIdotNET

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Andrea Saltarello — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:06:16 GMT

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Acer Iconia Tab W500

Andrea Saltarello — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:05:00 GMT

Ho acquistato un Acer Iconia Tab W500: è brutto, grosso e pesante. Ciò nonostante, è più che sufficiente per mostrare che Windows 8 ha un potenziale *altissimo*. “Provare per credere” (cit.)

Tag di Technorati: windows 8,tablet,iconia w500

AAA: cercasi web developer

Andrea Saltarello — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:07:47 GMT

Un nostro cliente (una società di servizi con sede operativa a Milano) cerca un web developer freelance per una collborazione di 6 mesi, potenzialmente estendibile (per intenderci: se il progetto va “lungo”, la collaborazione si allunga). Skill richiesti: ASP.NET web forms (v 1.1 e superiori), ADO.NET “Oracle oriented” (ergo, PL-SQL e tutti quei bei “:” nei named parameter), linguaggio VB e Silverlight 3.0.

Se qualcuno fosse interessato, faccia un fischio e lo metto in contatto con il cliente.

UGIdotNET: gli eventi “new wave”

Andrea Saltarello — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:05:42 GMT

Beh, visto che qualcuno ha già spifferato la notizia ai 4 venti… Parliamone. Nel prossimo mese e mezzo, UGIdotNET organizza una mini serie di 2 workshop “gemelli”, che abbiamo definito “New wave”. Qualche ben informato sospetta che il nome sia dovuto ai miei gusti musicali: lungi dal rinnegarli, in realtà volevamo solo riflettere il fatto che i temi affrontati non sono probabilmente relativi a tecnologie che useremmo “domani”, ma che ben presto potrebbero far parte della nostra vita (lavorativa) quotidiana. E’ il caso (guardando all’evento di settimana prossima) di HTML5: lo standard è ancora in beta e la RFC richiederà ancora tempo, ma l’argomento è sulla bocca di tutti (e, soprattutto, l’attuale beta è già utilizzata da vari siti/portali. E’ anche il caso di Silverlight, del quale offriremo una preview della versione 5 basandoci sulla beta attuale, e poi ci sono i device mobili e una preview di WCF vNext.

L’agenda del 6 giugno, invece, non è ancora completa (BTW, se avete delle proposte non esitate a comunicarcele), ma all’appello hanno già risposto NuGet (io non riuscirei più a farne a meno) e ASP.NET MVC, per il quale abbiamo messo in agenda una sessione di confronto di 2 view engine (per la precisione: Razor e Spark). Probabilmente, approfitterò dell’occasione per riproporre la sessione su Code Contracts/LINQ/Generics che ho erogato durante .NET Campus, che in 45 minuti era risultata un po’ “tirata” ma che in 75 dovrebbe essere maggiormente fruibile. E poi… Vedremo: le idee sono tante ma, ribadisco, anche le vostre proposte sono benvenute.

Le iscrizioni per entrambi gli eventi sono ancora aperte qui e qui.

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET MVC,html,nuget,razor,silverlight,spark,wcf,UGIdotNET

Algoritmi di ordinamento… A passo di danza

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 06:53:27 GMT

FAN-TAS-TI-CO.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Andrea Saltarello — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 07:16:31 GMT

Programmers… often take refuge in an understandable, but disastrous, inclination towards complexity and ingenuity in their work. Forbidden to design anything larger than a program, they respond by making that program intricate enough to challenge their professional skill.
[“Principles of Program Design” - Michael A. Jackson]