david@safi

When you need some common functionality (an ORM layer is probably the most common example), you’re faced with three standard choices:

• Use an official release/product.  For .NET developers this usually means an MS technology, currently LINQ to SQL is replacing ADO.NET as the standard;
• Use an open source product.  Currently NHibernate and Subsonic are the main options for .NET.
• Roll Your Own.

The risk averse .NET shop would generally go with the MS release, but is this the best option?

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It’s taken for granted that lawyers and accountants will give opinions on things they’re asked to do. Maybe web design and software development needs to be more like that:

(via http://www.nikhilk.net/Dilbert-Features-Complexity.aspx)

Web design isn’t a core activity for us, but we do do a lot of web design work, and we get a lot of web design work done for us. It’s interesting being able to sit on both sides of the fence.

The thing that’s struck me most is how rare it is for both the designer and the customer to be happy with the same design.

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I spent some time recently taking a look at Castle Monorail. I came across it a while ago, and unfortunately I only really found the time to look at it after MS announced their version of it. I’ve been very impressed with Castle ActiveRecord, so I figured I’d have a play with Monorail anyway, and look at MVC closer to its actual release.

So far I’ve found Monorail itself to be a breath of fresh air, and looking at an MVC framework also helped me appreciate the areas where ASP.NET WebForms actually is quite strong. However finding good documentation has been a mixed experience, so in case anyone else is looking, here are the resources I found the most helpful.

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We finally found time to upgrade our website last week. Black will always be the new black in New Zealand, so that’s the colour scheme we went for.

We wanted it to be a showcase as much of the capabilities of the web as of our own capabilities, so there’s lots of CSS and JavaScript goodness on the site.  We didn’t want to go over the top, but there’s:

• A lavalamp menu, various jQuery slideshows and some nice hover effects.
• A (broadly) semantic layout. Turn off CSS in your browser and the content is still pretty readable.
• Use of the Zend framework at the back-end for future scalabiltiy and some nice REST-ful Url’s.

Enjoy!

Apparently there’s a popular engineering term called The Project Triangle.

You are given the options of Fast, Good and Cheap, and told to pick any two. Here Fast refers to the time required to deliver the product, Good is the quality of the final product, and Cheap refers to the total cost of designing and building the product.

You’ll always want a project delivered to a high standard, and done quickly and cheaply.  In reality you’re going to have to compromise on at least on of those.

If you own or manage a project, which is your priority?

PC Mag has listed .NET as one of the 21 Great Technologies That Failed.

.NET (2002) Runtime compiled, and featuring Net-connected apps back when people were laughing at the idea? You go, Microsoft! Go people did…to Java. Microsoft keeps improving the .NET framework, and people do build apps based on it, but it has nowhere near the scope that MS had envisioned back in 2002.

That seems pretty harsh, and will no doubt draw some reaction from the .NET community. Already D’Arcy Lussier has criticised this as irresponsible journalism.

The inclusion of .NET in this list is BS, and IMO its an example of irresponsible journalism. Spouting your opinion about something is one thing…having no data, examples, or …anything!…to back up your statements is nothing but spouting off at the ass.

I’m not sure what the PC Mag guys had in mind, and personally I think .NET has been a great success in the context that PC Mag describe.

On the other hand I do remember the original hubris back around 2000, where .NET was presented almost as some mystical force that would transform the Internet.

At the time Joel Spolsky described this as Microsoft going bonkers:

He quoted the .NET press releases:

Everyone believes the Web will evolve, but for that evolution to be truly empowering for developers, businesses and consumers, a radical new vision is needed. Microsoft’s goal is to provide that vision and the technology to make it a reality… The Microsoft .NET vision means empowerment for consumers, businesses, software developers and the entire industry. It means unleashing the full potential of the Internet. And it means the Web the way you want it. [from "Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation", June 2000].

Apparently Fortune Magazine touted .NET as a huge “revolution”.

Joel’s scathing response at the time was:

With vaporware, you promise all kinds of features and products that you simply can’t sell because you don’t really have them. But .NET is worse than vaporware. In their blasé loftiness, Microsoft isn’t even bothering to provide the vapor itself … I’m not saying that there’s nothing new in .NET. I’m saying that there’s nothing there at all.

From that perspective, and from what I remember MS promising with .NET, it probably has been a great failure. I think it’s a great platform for developing desktop applications and a good platform for developing Web Applications, but I don’t think you could say it’s transformed the internet. Think about the impact that Broadband, Web Standards, Google, Social Networking (YouTube, Facebook, etc) have had. In that company, would you even think of .NET?

(FOOTNOTE: As I say, I’m not sure this is the point PC Mag were actually making, but it is a point they could validly have been trying to make.)

I had to do another rebuild of my work laptop this week. This was forced on me this time, but it is nice to clear out some accumulated cruft. However it did remind me of a batch of XP annoyances that I’d had to hack around…

(Usual caveats. We take no responsibility for any consequences, caveat emptor. Don’t do this or your computer will certainly explode, etc. In other words the usual XP dialog.)

1. Getting rid of the Cartoon look

I never did like the default XP look. A lot of folk I know revert to the Windows 2000 style, but I prefer the Windows Media Theme. It’s odd that Microsoft created XP to be skinnable, and that this was the only skin they subsequently released.

1a. Getting rid of the Search Companion

Apple comes up with stuff like the iPhone. Microsoft comes up with the idea of having a cartoon of a dog wagging its tail to help you search files. Maybe Steve Jobs was right.

Anyway, to get rid of this second generation clippy, open the search window (in Windows Explorer, press the Search Button), select change preferences, and select “Without an animated screen character”.

2. Disable Balloon Tips

I really don’t like the quantity of Balloon Tips that Windows is happy to throw up. It’s like they decided that since Balloon Tips weren’t as obnoxious as Popup dialogs it was okay to throw them up all the time.

Anyway, I can’t remember where I found this, but in the Registry Editor I navigate to

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Explorer \Advanced]

Create a new DWORD called EnableBalloonTips with value = 0

There are disadvantages to this latter. Mainly that you don’t get warned when your battery is about to run out, or your AntiVirus is about to expire. But you also don’t get notifications every time your WiFi disconnects or reconnect,or every time MS wants you to participate in some Customer Experience Improvement Program.

3. Stop the ‘Reboot Now or be nagged every 5 minutes’ dialog

I’ve started using Ubuntu Linux on my non-work machines, and I’ve suddenly realised just how much XP reminds me of a 3 year-old kid in it’s constant attempts to get your attention. This dialog is XP throwing a tantrum. Reboot now or I’ll keep throwing modal dialogs until you give in!

Anyway, Jeff Atwood found a solution for this.

4. Force Excel to Show Documents in Separate Windows

I regularly work between two Excel documents, and not being able to show them in separate windows drives me nuts.

This link shows a solution.

If the frustration gets too much, have a read of this - apparently an email from Bill Gates expressing his frustrations…

I’ve seen this problem crop up periodically on various forums, recently on the excellent StackOverflow site. Essentially if you try to DataBind a DropDownList to a data source, and you declaratively set a Selected Value, ASP.NET is liable to throw an exception that you seem to have no way of handling.

Microsoft have classed this as a Won’t Fix bug.

I’ve seen various options which involve intercepting various databinding events, but none of them worked too well for me and I didn’t want to have to write this code on every single page that contained a dropdownlist.>

In the end, guided by various comments floating around the web I hacked around in Reflector and came up a solution involving a subclass of the DropDownList. So far this has worked quite reliably for me. You can use it where you would use a normal DropDownList.

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If selecting the right platform is the single biggest decision to be made on a project, building the right solution is the single biggest risk. Agile Development is the fashionable solution, but that’s not a lot of use when you have to agree a quote at the start.

At the big picture level this is handled via a spec document, which is why we always create one in some form or other. This makes sure that at least we build, say, a CMS rather than a static site.

However there remain a hundred smaller requirements, many of which are never clearly discussed in advance, and which can, when combined, easily swamp a project and cause a great deal of unnecessary friction between developer and customer.

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