Before you make up your mind about LightSwitch prior to beta release, watch the new video on Channel 9. Before you decide that LightSwitch is for non-developers, watch Joe Binder in this video extend a LightSwitch application with a Silverlight user control and a custom WCF RIA Service.

The key point, I believe, made in the video is that EVERY LightSwitch application is essentially a 3-tier application. The extension of the Data Access tier with WCF RIA Services makes it possible to extend those tiers into the enterprise infrastructure easily.

The demo also makes a very important point. When you write a real LightSwitch application, you will be writing code. While LightSwitch might be appealing to non-professional or hobbyist or business types, whoever uses it successfully will in fact end up writing code. Will they have to be an expert developer. Not if they have support from the enterprise pros that build the infrastructure for the business.

I still want to see and play with the beta before making up my mind, but what I’ve seen so far looks very promising.

Two days ago, Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio LightSwitch. I heard about it first on Somasegar's blog and have followed the chatter and the growing list of blog posts and comments. I watched the Channel 9 preview video and the VS Live keynote video introducing LightSwitch. And then I watched them again making notes.

I'm deeply disappointed in a number of bloggers I regularly read and their many commenters that have parroted their sentiments. I won't name them here. Their negative reactions demonstrate an ill informed prejudice and predisposition to discount all 4GL tools without careful analysis and thoughtful evaluation.

Based on my careful notes of the demo videos and "official" blog posts about the tool, these bloggers and many commenters have made statements and critical judgments of LightSwitch that are demonstrably false or grossly inaccurate. And the first early beta is not even available yet. This rush to judgment ill becomes the professional stature and experience of these otherwise well respected members of the .NET development community.

From a certain point of view, I understand the nearly autonomic reaction of these .NET development community leaders. Professional developers have long dealt with the problems that so often plague solutions created by a host of desktop 4GL tools such as Access, FoxPro, FileMakerPro, PowerBuilder and many others. These tools have been highly successful in the business world seeking to just get something working that they could afford. In enough cases to be considered a plague by many professional developers, these solutions have far exceeded their limits as the business grew and ran into some of the hard and harsh limitations of these tools.

Many professional developers have been put into that crucibal of having to tell the business owner that their pet solution will not scale, has to be completely rewritten, and the effort will cost mega dollars to get a similar solution that will scale and grow with their business. The business owner doesn't want to spend the money, so he insists that the developer just make the 4GL solution work. Happy developers then fire their client. Needy and miserable developers then swallow their pride and spend more hours in frustration dealing with a 4GL too they come to hate more often because the solution wraps around a database that was designed by someone who thinks of dinner when you say the word table.

Scott Adams owes his fame and fortune in no small part to the advent of ill conceived 4GL tools and the more horribly designed solutions created with them by the pointy haired bosses who fancy themselves tech savvy.

So I understand the rush to judgment, but the facts are not there to support the negativity and biased ignorance I've seen in so many recent blog posts and comments.

Anyone can actually take the time to watch the videos and read the official blog posts and carefully consider what they have learned. Any professional presented with a tool for solving a problem that has never been satisfactorily solved in the past who automatically dismisses the latest attempt does himself and those who respect his opinion a disservice.

Here is what I've learned after reviewing the demostrations and taking detailed notes and carefully considering the possibilities without making invalid comparisons to the host of 4GL tools on the market today.

• LightSwitch is NOT a 4GL in the traditional sense of closed source, desktop bound, proprietary database, with few if any extension points.
• LightSwitch is a set of .NET assemblies and Visual Studio designers and project templates that produce a model based on XAML from which a Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services solution is generated.
• LightSwitch is a .NET solution and can be extended in Visual Studio Pro (and up) with standard Silverlight control projects and server side support projects.
• LightSwitch supports three data sources: SQL Server (and SQL Azure), Sharepoint 2010, and most importantly WCF RIA Services. In fact, SQL Server access in the 3-tier solution is done via WCF RIA Services and Entity Framework. I was not able to determine exactly how Sharepoint access is supported under the covers but would assume that the same solution is generated, with WCF RIA Services providing access to the Sharepoint list libraries and other Sharepoint data on the host server.
• There is certainly an incoherent marketing message from Redmond on the subject of the target audience but it is clear that while marketing speak would have business buyers believe that they will be able to write applications without code, the fact is that some coding skill will be required to write even the simplest of applications in LightSwitch where commonly found business rules such as validations and computed values on existing data sets are required.

Based on what I've seen so far, it seems the sweet spot for LightSwitch might be the entry level developer or what one blogger called the "productivity developer" with professional support from senior developers and architects constructing back end systems, designing databases and providing safe and simple WCF RIA Services for the less experienced developer to consume to deliver line of business applications that may never need the skilled hands of the top notch developers.

I want to learn more about LightSwitch and see it and play with it before I make up my mind about its usefulness. I want to see how easy it is to extend and expand a LightSwitch application in Visual Studio Pro as promised but not demonstrated. I want to learn more about the extension points. And I want to see and perhaps participate in providing constructive and informed feedback. More importantly, I want to see what the Microsoft team does with that feedback.

Bottom line. It's far too soon to judge. Let's get the beta and provide Microsoft with some constructive feedback instead of the diatribes I've seen so much of in the last couple of days.

My absolute favorite feature of Visual Studio 2010, so far, is the javascript Intellisense support via the <reference> tag. Add the following line to your .js file and you get jQuery Intellisense.

           /// <reference path="/scripts/jquery-1.4.1.js" />

        

My second favorite feature, so far, was just added with the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools just released by Microsoft the other day. It is the Add Reference Search feature. Behold…

There are a bunch of very cool features added by this small but powerful extension pack, but not having to scroll through a list of assemblies to find the one I’m looking for is a godsend.

You can read about all the goodies on the download page, but two other honorable mentions are:

Ctrl+Click is now the equivalent of right click and selecting Go to Definition. Booyah!

Ctrl+Alt+] on a selected block of assignments will align the = operator making your code block far more readable.

I highly recommend this extension. Thanks Microsoft!

If you leave your door unlocked and someone enters your house for nefarious purposes, can you blame your lock manufacturer? Will you switch to a new brand of lock? Or if you open the door and pickup the the strange package you weren’t expecting from your doorstep, take it into your home and open it, do you sue the contractor or architect who built your house when it explodes? Do you declare your house to be unsafe and abandon it to live in a shed?

Well, it seems that if you’re Google, you do.

PC World reports today that Google has announced by leak that they will abandon Windows, blaming Microsoft for the Chinese invasion they suffered in January. Anyone with the slightest bit of brains knows this is an economic and political stunt and has nothing to do with security. The Trojan that Google claims allowed the Chinese hackers into their computers was, according to Symantec, entirely preventable.

Now, five months later we learn that rather than admitting the embarrassing fact that they either left the door unlocked (had un-patched machines) or invited the hackers in (opened attachments on vulnerable machines), Google is announcing that they will toss out their rival’s OS to spite their own face. Instead they will jump on the Linux for the Desktop and Mac OS bandwagon.

That’s fine. It’s a free country. But Google is just as big a target now as they were then and any honest security expert will tell you that Linux and Mac OS vulnerabilities exist and are ripe for exploitation. When Google is attacked again after having put its head in the sand, who will it blame then?

The bottom line is that you cannot blame your security failures on the lock manufacturer or the contractor who built your house if you’re not even willing to lock the door or question the anonymous package left at your doorstep. This is Google’s folly. They have opted for an effectively placed marketing jab against an opponent while leaving their left flank exposed for another Chinese hack attack. When it comes, will they blame the President of the United States or the Secretary General of the U.N.? Or will Google take responsibility for its own security?

Lately I've become alarmed at the negative level of my thinking at times with respect to my work which can then spill over into my personal life. I've been wondering how I can more consistently harness all the latent energy in the pressure to deliver within the constraints of limited resources, tight deadlines and even tighter budgets and convert that to more positive thinking.

I know the value of positive thinking and the resultant self-reinforcing confidence. It leads to greater achievement, productivity and happiness. And yet negative thinking can so easily overwhelm us when the deck seems stacked against us.

I was pondering this question when I remembered a post from Seth Godin called The Problem with Positive Thinking. Here's part of it:

“All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything. ... Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid? ... Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations. ... If positive thinking was easy, we'd do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We're the exception, so we say. Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.“ (Seth Godin, September 2009)

Tomorrow, I will actively think more positively. I will lay aside negative thoughts and entertain only the positive. I will convert and harness the energy of the pressure to deliver and channel that energy into positive, productive valuable thinking. Wish me luck!

Do you have a hard time making decisions? Even the most decisive of us can get caught in the headlights of the oncoming project train, unable to choose left, right or straight ahead. Here’s a few strategies that I’ve found useful and sometimes forgotten about while stuck on the software development analysis thought pot.

1. Ready, aim, fire! Research, evaluate, decide. Hesitation breeds doubt. Doubt is the father of indecision. Make a reasonable degree of confidence your standard and avoid looking for absolute guarantees. There are none.
    
2. Put away fear of failure and accept the fact that there is more than one acceptable outcome to life’s challenges, including your project. Learn from mistakes but don’t be too afraid to make new ones.
    
3. Begin. Make a start. Act. No journey or decision can ever be taken without the first step. Make a small decision, take action and then improve on your progress by evaluating regularly. Take digestible course correction decisions. Don’t derail your project by overcorrecting and rolling the bus at full speed.
    
4. Set a decision deadline and stick to it. Lay out an incremental research and evaluation plan with a list of questions you need answers to in order to make your decision. If you don’t have a perfect answer, enumerate what you have anyway and incorporate it into your final decision.
    
5. When the problem is too big and the decision too overwhelming, break it down into smaller, more specific pieces. Apply the strategies you find effective on the more manageable elements. Do that until you’ve put all the pieces together and before you know it, the puzzle will be complete.
    
6. If the outcomes of the decision, regardless of the choice, are equally acceptable, flip a coin. Move on. Don’t waste time dwelling on equally acceptable paths to different but relatively satisfying conclusions.
    
7. Go crazy. Make a choice even if you don’t have a reasonable level of confidence. Get off the ice berg and start swimming. Something will happen and that will lead to something else. It might turn out to have been a mistake, but at least you’ll have momentum on your side. A moving car is far easier to turn around than one that is parked.
    
8. Put things into perspective. This project decision you’re worrying about, the one keeping you up at nights. Can it compare with watching your kid’s school play? Will your client attend your kid’s wedding? Or your funeral? Beyond successful completion or abject miserable failure on the project, will the outcome have a permanent impact on your life in the long term? Will it matter to your grandkids? Perspective can be a powerful decision making tool.
    
9. If you can’t take the plunge off the high dive, run an experiment. Try out your decision on a smaller scale. See what happens. Take the results and boldly make the real decision.
    
10. Change your point of view. Look for a distraction. Take a walk in a Japanese garden. See a movie. Read a good book. Take your wife on a date. Go to church. Do something to get away from it all, even if just for a few hours. Then come back with a few oxygenated brain cells and make a decision. Ready, aim, fire!

What strategies have you found useful when stuck, unable to make a critical choice on a project? I’d love to hear from you.

Update: I know these are generalized platitudes, but sometimes a good platitude can spark the inspiration one needs to find a specific solution to a real problem.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett wrote (emphasis added):

“We tend to let our many subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree. That means we are sometimes late in spotting management problems and that both operating and capital decisions are occasionally made with which Charlie and I would have disagreed had we been consulted. Most of our managers, however, use the independence we grant them magnificently, rewarding our confidence by maintaining an owneroriented attitude that is invaluable and too seldom found in huge organizations. We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.”

There are times when working in an enterprise can be frustrating because there are individuals who deliberately and regularly hinder your work while hiding behind the plausible deniability and comfortable safety of that stifling bureaucracy of which Warren Buffett so sagely speaks.

The question is what to do when you find yourself in that situation. There can be only three answers, I believe. Either you succeed in spite of the efforts of well seasoned bureaucrats and hope that attrition wins the day or you fail while trying or even give up somewhere along the line, resigning yourself to failure. The third alternative is that you find another ball field and another team on which to play and never look back.

Which one would you choose?

I rarely just parrot-link another blogger’s post, but I’m going to make an exception here to give props to Chris Sells and his excellent “The Performance Implications of IEnumerable vs. IQueryable.”

Chris, the venerated Microsoft Legend, walks us through a great example of where the use of IEnumerable vs IQueryable can get you into trouble. With a simple swap, Chris goes from returning every row in a table to a simple count(*).

The critical thing to learn is that IQueryable is “composable” meaning that you can make one from another before executing the final “outer” query and having the composed expression parsed and executed.

One additional note, however, is the gotcha that can bite you on the keester if you’re not careful. With an IQueryable dependent upon a data context, don’t lose the context or you’ll end up with:

ObjectDisposedException: Cannot access a disposed object. Object name: 'DataContext accessed after Dispose.'.

So watch out for the dangling context. :)

The question of the value of third party UI libraries has often come up in my career. At one time I was an eager advocate of using a comprehensive UI library. Now my attitude is a bit more pragmatic.

Third party UI libraries are sometimes a boon and sometimes a bane. Even for well seasoned UI frameworks. UI libraries for web applications tend to be particularly troublesome because they so often have a clumsy, heavyweight configuration and API that end up requiring more time to use than they save while the vendors race to win the feature count contest.

For some years, the trend seemed to lean toward the use of UI libraries because building a UI by hand was hard regardless of whether you were working with spaghetti script or with Win32 and MFC. Now Microsoft's toolset supports a much richer set of UI paradigms making the delivery of a great UI much easier right out of the box. The trend seems to be gravitating away from reliance on third party controls toward a more simplified user interface style with a more elegant framework relying more on convention than a feature bloated configuration and black box API.

One area where UI libraries seem to continue to do well, in my view of course, is with Silverlight and WPF (XAML) applications. These UI frameworks and their supporting third party UI control sets seem to have been made for each other. Both rely heavily on the powerful UI declarative language XAML. The rich user interfaces that can be spun up using Silverlight or WPF can be intoxicating.

Ultimately, we need to use UI libraries judiciously, being careful not to overuse them where requirements and the effort needed to learn and configure them are not warranted. One could argue that the limited way in which many third party controls are used in a variety of applications provide us with a bountiful set of examples of the gratuitous overuse of these libraries. Sometimes all you need is a good closet and the kitchen sink that comes with that room builder toolkit is just plain old overkill.

I love Orson Scott Card’s books. My first and still all time favorite is Ender’s Game.

If you’re not a fan, go read the book anyway. If you are, you already know what I’m talking about. The iPad is Ender’s desk, or perhaps its precursor.

Here’s a composite I just made thinking of this concept. One image from Apple and the other from a very innovative early childhood education software company called Imagine Learning.

I’ve never wanted to own an Apple

When I think of the amazing ways that educational content and interactivity could be delivered to students using this device, I get very excited. And I imagine a very smart kid hacking the device and sending rude messages to another student. That makes me more excited for the future of technology than anything I’ve seen lately.

The .NET technology map keeps expanding, but I have my eye on one particular continent, a little piece of the .NET 4 world I’m calling the Silverlight 4 Enterprise Stack. There seems to be focus coalescing on this important piece of technology real estate.

The Patterns & Practices team blog has a great post looking into the enterprise crystal ball. Be sure to check out their Prism (Composite Application Guidance) on CodePlex.

The primary pieces of the Silverlight 4 Enterprise Stack are:

• WCF RIA Services
• Model-View-ViewModel (video)
• Managed Extensibility Framework

Other supporting players in the stack are:

• Entity Framework 4 (and other LINQ DALs like PLINQO)
• Windows Workflow Foundation 4

With the eminent release of these technologies on April 12, we the Enterprise Software rank and file have much to look forward to in terms of new toys to play with while delivering some amazing new user experiences in the enterprise world.

If you want to keep tabs on the Silverlight 4 Enterprise Stack, be sure to set your RSS reader to tap into these key bloggers:

• Brad Abrams
• Mike Taulty
• Tim Heuer

For us enterprise software geeks, the year 2010 is shaping up to be a very good year!

Let’s face it. Most of us code slingers have no innate understanding of what makes a great user experience (UX) design. We spend so many hours in front of multiple user interfaces that navigating and using software becomes virtually intuitive, instinctual. But we are not “normal” users.

I’ve just finished reading and mean to re-read Whitney Hess’s “25 Guiding Principles for UX Designers” on Inside Tech. It’s a great piece with some very good references. I recommend you read the entire article multiple times. Here are some of my favorites (my number is not the same as Whitney’s):

1. Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it.
How often do we just begin coding and throwing a user interface together without having spent much, if any, time with the target audience to understand their needs, challenges, skill level and approach to solving the problem currently?

2. Make things simple.
How often do we try to put every feature we can pack into a single view thinking to make the software powerful and reduce round trips to the server or some other resource?

3. Provide context.
How often do we place controls or information in a user interface that we consider convenient but in reality is out of context and will confuse a user who does not understand what is going on “under the covers” so to speak?

4. Be consistent.
How often do we design one page in a certain way only to bounce the user to another page in a web application that uses a different design paradigm, making the user spend some time just to figure out where the OK or Cancel button or link is now?

You can read about these and the 21 principles at Whitney’s article (see link above). I also recommend the following resources, a selection from those Whitney recommends:

UX Principles and Design Guides

• Google
• Windows
• Facebook
• U.S. Government
• Jakob Nielson (King of Usability)

If you have some favorite principles of your own, please share them here.

I’ve been giving the question of why software teams fail some considerable thought in the past few days. Reading Brad Abrams’ post Don’t Waste Keystrokes and his statement that “By far the biggest problem I see on teams of > 1 is communication” led me to compile the following list. Here are some of the reasons, in addition to the most important one that Brad pointed out already, that a software team, or any team really, fails:

1. The team does not practice regularly, no coordinated learning.
2. The coach does not know the strengths and weaknesses of the players.
3. The players do not know their role, their zone or the plays.
4. The players do not get along, they are not one in purpose.
5. The players do not trust or respect the coaching staff.
6. The coaching staff puts players with no skill on the starting lineup for unknown reasons causing resentment amongst the other players and guaranteeing a loss at game time.
7. The players do not believe the coaching staff understand the game.
8. The players are more focused on individual agendas, they do not work together to win.
9. The rules of the game are not well understood and change during the game.
10. The coaching staff and team captains disagree on how the game should be played.
11. The coaching staff recruits new players looking for players who will agree with their ideas rather than seeking out players who can actually play.
12. The players fail to improve their skills on their own time.
13. The players lack motivation and fail to come to practice and give only a half-hearted effort in the game.
14. The team captain spends more time arguing with the coaching staff than he does leading and motivating the players.
15. Winning becomes secondary to just finishing the season.

If you can think of any others, please let me know. And if you have ideas for how to fix these situations, I would love to hear from you as well.

Documentation neglect is a chronic problem in most enterprise application development efforts. This problem is unrelated to the selected development methodology but there are some who assume that agile methods eliminate documentation despite the agile manifesto's declaration that we value "working software over comprehensive documentation." It does not claim that documentation is not needed.

In my own work, I've found that comprehensive documentation authored by well meaning individuals, or worse a committee, who possess very little technical expertise, is often written in confusing, lengthy narrative style that requires a linguistic anthropologist to decipher. Too often development teams spend days pulling out the real features and requirements and expected behavior from such documents, generally resulting in many unanswered questions, the answers to which just cannot be found in the comprehensive documentation.

Recently we have found greater value in documentation that has relatively strict structures that guide authors to produce specific, detailed and comprehensible documentation. The format is simple and adopted from the increasingly popular behavior driven design (BDD) approach.

The goal of this approach is to define desired behavior and clear acceptance criteria for specific requirements without mashing them all together in a narrative style that requires time consuming decomposition. Here's the format:

+++++++++
P[n]: Process Title
Two line description of a process (akin to epic user story)

F[n]: Function Title (a feature or step in the workflow)
As a role
I want action/process description
so that benefit/value of feature.

AC[n]: Acceptance Criteria or Scenario Title (p1)
Given some initial context (the givens),
when an event occurs,
then ensure some outcomes.

+++++++++

It's really not different than BDD. There is only one subtle difference which I've found can make all the difference in the world. the terms used (process, function and acceptance criteria) are far less scary to the business than terms like epic, user story and scenario.

Of course, this won't work for every situation, but where you can break documentation down into logical units that focus on one feature, one thing at a time, you can eliminate the time consuming deconstruction of comprehensive documentation that can only be processed by the most advanced computer in the world: the human brain.

I’ve not used this blog for politics in the past, but I’m going to start making some exceptions where I think there is a technology tie-in. George Will’s piece on the Copenhagen summit was very interesting. I recommend that you read it. I am not a climatologist but I am a skeptic of all science based on computer models, especially models that cannot accurately predict the present observable state of a system.

The recently hacked emails of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain reveal a pattern of behavior that would be more consistent with the corrupt leaders of a cult whose proclaimed tomes of divinely inspired scripture cannot withstand scrutiny should certain facts be revealed. In the minds of the true believing disciples or the corrupt leadership of the cult, the ends justify the means. And truth is not a consideration.  

The software models and data upon which all climate change disciples rely are written by flawed human beings. Whether a software engineer expertly writes the software to implement his best understanding of the requirements of the scientist or the real scientist writes the software with a less than perfect knowledge of software engineering and design, the outcome is the same. (Hey, not even a PhD can know everything.) All software is flawed. It is the nature of our art.

Can computer models be a good thing? Sure. Especially when they work. Can they be a bad thing? Well, consider that a climate model must model the entire earth and its atmosphere. That’s a few million data points (colossal understatement). These models must have historical data. And there’s the rub. It’s not there. Not really. So we extrapolate the data using tree cores and ice cores and, wait for it, more computer models.

Any software engineer knows that such a model will be inherently complex and that complex systems are inherently flawed and that very complex systems are inherently very flawed. No software engineer will declare her (or his) faith in such a model or its output, but more importantly, they would never bet a week’s salary on it’s accuracy without full testing and confirmation against known observable data and repeatable tests. Yet, we are preparing to bet trillions of tax payer dollars on these flawed models. “Hey, Sam, keep your hands out of my pocket!”

The problem we have is that scientists have put their faith in software models and data produced by software models as the magical source of all truth and knowledge. They are either the corrupt leaders of a cult (see the CRU emails) or its blind disciples insisting on the truth of their models even when observable facts contradict and invalidate those assertions.

The climate change models and extrapolated data have become scripture. The scientists who preach daily from the pages of that holy writ are held in prophetic awe and reverence by the ignorant masses of well intentioned politicians and citizens of the earth. Except for software engineers and the “deniers” of course.

So back to the question. Can computer models be a bad thing? Yes, when the ignorant or the corrupt use them as an unquestionable, magical affirmation of their own political agenda or emotional response to the idea that man is killing the planet and that unless we do something about it, we will all die. Well nobody wants that.

Oddly, we ridicule and persecute religious nuts who do the same thing. I guess they just weren’t smart enough to get a PhD and call themselves scientists rather than prophets. Stupid nuts.

Silverlight WCF RIA Services Beta Released was released recently, replacing the preview bits I’ve been playing with. You can pick up the new beta here. I'm still using VS 2008 SP1, but I am using Windows 7, so I download directly from here.

WARNING! If you’re not on Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, you’ll need the hotfix mentioned. If you're still on XP or Vista, let this be the final reason to upgrade and do it. You won't regret it.

I learned first about the beta release from Dan Abrams blog post. Some coolness he mentions:

• DataSources window. Drag and drop "tables" exposed by Domain Service onto the form.
• Simplified error handling on client and server.
• Data model inheritence flows through the Domain Service.
• Presentation model hides DAL model with CRUD support.
• Optimized binary channel by default.
• Integrated into Silverlight 4 installer.
• Handling of compositional hiearchy in data models.
• GAC and bin deployment, with bin taking precedence.
• Globalization support, user state and persisted sign in with updated Business Application Template.
• Go-Live bits for .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3.

Another item of note is the name change with the WCF moniker. RIA Services is now part of the WCF services family along with ADO.NET Data Services. This seems like a convergence of technologies in an enterprise ready set of tools and services that will bring Silverlight into the forefront of enterprise application development and delivery.

I'll be working on pulling these new bits together and getting my "Aventure" blog sample back on track with the new Azure SDK bits and these new WCF RIA Services bits. Given the plethora of changes, I'll likely start over with fresh new project templates and pull what little customized code that might be needed from my previous blog post on the topic.

In anticipation of repaving my Vista x64 machine with Windows 7 after the MSDN release on August 6, I’ve prepared my wish list of hardware upgrades I’d like to do at the same time I pave the machine with the new OS.

Should the family financial officer (FFO) decline to approve my purchase request, I’ll at least sneak in the SSD purchase.

Update (new list, bigger appetite):

What plans do you have for your Windows 7 upgrade?

Drool….

Here’s the content of the most exciting email I’ve received lately (invite code redacted of course):

Thank you for your interest in Windows® Azure™.

Your invitation code is xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx.

You can now sign up for a Windows Azure account at http://lx.azure.microsoft.com/fs . Please keep this email in a safe place.

This invitation to participate in the Windows Azure Community Technical Preview is subject to the following usage limits:

        Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours
        Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
        Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day

During the CTP, we reserve the right to suspend your account activity (this does not imply we will delete your cloud storage) if you exceed these usage limits.

Sincerely,
Windows Azure Platform Team

You have received this email because you registered as being interested in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Azure. As a participant in the Windows Azure CTP program, you will continue to receive emails related to that program unless you end your participation by emailing azinvite@microsoft.com with “END PARTICIPATION” in the subject line.

To ensure proper delivery of future updates please add azinvite@microsoft.com to your address book or safe-senders list.

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more about Microsoft's privacy policy, please click here.

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

I’m very excited to begin learning to develop against Azure in all my spare time. If I learn anything worthy of note here, I’ll share it. Just too many things to dabble in and too little time.

With the release of Silverlight 3 on Friday, I’m wondering whether the enterprise (that mythical stereotype) will adopt Silverlight 3 for line of business (LOB) applications. The official “what’s new” section included the following items that I found very interesting:

Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity. New features include:

• 60+ controls with source code : Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with nine professional designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. Other additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.
• Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Silverlight 3 enables users to solve the SEO-related challenges posed by RIAs.By utilizing business objects on the server, together with ASP.NET controls and site maps, users can automatically mirror database-driven RIA content into HTML that is easily indexed by the leading search engines.
• Enhanced Data Support Silverlight 3 delivers:
  • Element to Element binding : UI designers use binding between two UI properties to create compelling UI experiences. Silverlight now enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML, for instance binding a slider value to the volume control of a media player.
  • Data Forms. The Data Form control provides support for layout of fields, validation, updating and paging through data.
  • New features for data validation which automatically catch incorrect input and warn the user with built-in validation controls.
  • Support for business objects on both client and server with n-Tier data support. Easily load, sort, filter and page data with added support for working with data. Includes a new built-in CollectionView to perform a set of complex operations against server side data. A new set of .NET RIA services supports these features on the server.
• Improved performance, through:
  • Application library caching,which reduces the size of applications by caching framework on the client in order to improve rendering performance.
  • Enhanced Deep Zoom, allows users to fluidly navigate through larger image collections by zooming.
  • Binary XML allows communication with the server to be compressed, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be exchanged.
  • Local Connection This feature allows communication between two Silverlight applications on the client-side without incurring a server roundtrip: for instance a chart in one control can communicate with a datagrid in another.

I’ve just downloaded the bits and will begin exploring the new controls and just how easy it is or is not to build applications. My only criteria at the moment is whether or not the applications are as easy to build as a Windows Forms application. Obviously there are far more important evaluation criteria, but I’m wondering whether my stated criteria here will be the more common question raised in the enterprise. That is, can we build apps faster, easier, better with this? If not, I’m not sure the enterprise will get too awfully excited about it unless a clear case can be made for replacing the often time consuming, error prone web application development process with a simpler Silverlight 3 development process.

One way or another, I’m excited about Silverlight 3 and eager to dive in and have some fun.

After a long search for the right business process management platform that would allow us to integrate and extend with .NET, my team selected the Ultimus BPM Suite. The primary factors in the decision were the comprehensive nature of the solution which would allow us to deploy process management without requiring the use of some other tool such as InfoPath or SharePoint. Additionally, the solution would allow an incomplete process to be deployed and have assigned "process experts" make final decisions about business rules that may not have been clear or available at the time the process was designed.

I spent all of last week at their North Carolina offices in a "jumpstart" training course and met many of the key players at the company. Good people all around. Their technical expertise and willingness to listen to our team's concerns were impressive. There were a few minor UI glitches that we brought to their attention such as some scrolling issues when designing a process with limited screen real estate. The Ultimus people were genuinely interested in our input.

Having initially found and recommended the product, I was even more impressed with the product as we went through detailed training that brought out a number of features and illustrated an architecture that gave me even greater confidence in the product. This was particularly true in the area of integration points with existing systems and the ability to extend the process using custom developed controls or even process context aware ASP.NET pages hosted outside of the process server.

Our only disappointment was that some of the the training session content could have been improved as at times some of the class members were left a little lost and fell behind. This was in part because the "jumpstart" course was designed to fit a lot of material into a few days, but it was in part due to a lack of maturity in the content and presentation. We were very candid with the Ultimus training director about this and he took our input eagerly and promised improvement. Based on my conversations with key Ultimus employees, I believe that will happen.

If you are looking for a better way to deliver business process management and enterprise human-centric workflow solutions, you should consider Ultimus. There were other systems that were much more expensive that may have fit our requirements, but this was the only one we found that allowed us the freedom to extend and customize using our .NET dev skills without requiring coding skills to design and modify and manage processes.

I'll be writing more about Ultimus as our experience with the product continues.

The following spam message (less the links) skipped through my spam filters somehow. If you are not a native speaker of English, this message may appear to be in order if your skill level with the language is limited. Otherwise, I suspect you will find this text as amusing as I did. I have not modified a single character. Enjoy...

welcome to order,
Our company is one of the largest wholesalers in Asia ,and we sell products to all over the world,we have the authorithed licence issured by Chinese government,all products in our company ranges from varieties of electronic products like mobilephone ,television, laptop,DVD,GPS,MP3/4 to photograph video game ,scanner, motorcycle prohector and so on..
We have earned our reputation in the world through our honesty business practice in the past years,and obtained many compliments from our clients globally.As we are the direct wholesalers for many reputable brands in the world,so all the products purchased in our website are promised to be at a lower price with the high quality,also all the facuty products will be returned within 7 days,exchange within 14 days,repair within 2 years without charge.
We will be right here waiting for your visitation.

I hope that as software architects and engineers we are producing code and other textual artifacts that communicate with greater clarity and understanding of the language and idiom in which we express our ideas. Do we write documentation as badly because we can only communicate clearly in code? Or vice versa? It is something to think about.

I just posted this on a linkedin group to which I belong, but I thought I'd also like to pose the question here.

I'd like to get a discussion started that attempts to define enterprise software architecture. My own definition seems to be evolvoing with every enterprise for whom I've worked. In the abstract, for me, enterprise software architure is the art of putting the pieces of multiple puzzles together into one great work of art.

There are many puzzles to choose from and every enterprise has a unique mix. There are multiple teams with various skillsets and experience. There are multiple business processes sometimes with unique and strange business rules. Technology platforms that differ, communications protocols that won't communicate with one another, languages, frameworks, compilers, IDEs, components, and hardware that vary from team to team and department to department. Ours is the task of taking these disparate and often incongruous pieces and molding them into one coherent masterpiece of technology and human resources to get more done, get it done better, quicker, cheaper and easier. And if we do our jobs well, it may be that no one will notice that we did it at all.

What do you think?

I just posted the following note on a LinkedIn group I follow in answer to a post about so called "software factories," which is a nice euphemism for overseas developers working for much less than they deserve struggling to meet the unreasonable demands of their bosses. This represents my opinion on the subject:

Never forget that you get what you pay for. Hiring an overseas or even local "software factory" or consultancy to build your software can be problematic at best and a complete waste of time and money at worst.

First, if you cannot communicate, forget about it. Building software is 99% communication and 1% technology. Okay, perhaps I overstate the case. A little. But you cannot overestimate the importance of clear, effective communication.

Second, unless you have the internal people required to manage such a relationship, your project will fail. This means you need project management and technical people in your own organization that you know well and trust. They need to be supremely competent. This is especially true if you plan to hire a firm outside of your own geographical area.

Third, plan for time and budget overages. It is the nature of consulting to promise a low price and quick turnaround and then when you are committed to the project and it is "nearly done," you will be informed that there is much more to do, generally due to legitimate changes in requirements because you did not fully understand what you wanted when the project first began. This is the boon and bane of software development whether internal or external.

Finally, you can have success outsourcing your software development project, but do not make the mistake of thinking that it will save you an enormous amount of time and money, especially for a single application project. It takes time to develop a working relationship with an outside consultantcy, especially one that is half way around the world. If you have multiple projects, long term goals, and a huge budget of time and money, it may in fact be cost effective to have a relationship with a so called "software factory." But if you are a small organization and have one or two projects, you will nearly always be better off hiring a professional locally, usually through one of the many technical recruiting companies, to come into your organization as a contractor to work on-site building exactly what you want as you discover over time what it is you want exactly.

I upgraded to the latest version of dasBlog a few days ago and inadvertently allowed comments without requiring approval. A spambot comment got through and while I quickly turned on the "require approval" feature, it was too late. Since then I've been bombarded with stupid link spam comments. I even deleted the one post that seemed to be the bot target and created a new post with the same content.

No luck. After many similar spam comments today being posted to the most recent post on my blog, I'm giving up. I'm taking a comment holiday. It won't bother anyone really because I don't get many real comments. I'll enable the comment functionality some day in the future.

Meantime, if you have a comment, feel free to email me and I'll post it as an addendum to the relevant post.

Being rather new to Vista this week, I was sorely disappointed to see the severely dumbed down defrag utility in Vista. A pathetic effort. Really! So after a few highly scientific Google searches, I settled on O&O Defrag and could not be happier.

Here's the lame, incredibly useless UI in Vista's Disk Defragmenter. Note, if you are going to use some other defragmenter on a schedule, which I would recommend, be sure to disable the regularly scheduled Vista defragmenter by unchecking the box. One way of getting there is to go to the Control Panel and then Performance Information and Tools and then Advanced Tools.

And here is only part of the incredibly useful O&O Defrag UI, a shot taken as it defrags my drives:

Of course there are other suitable defrag tools such as DiskKeeper and others. Perhaps Microsoft wanted the Vista tool to cater only to the basic, uninformed user. If so, they certainly left the market wide open to the more sophisticated tools vendors such as O&O.

I finally took the plunge. Now I get to use 4GB out of 4GB except that the bare minimum I seem to be able to get Vista x64 down to is a 1.2GB footprint. And that's after hours and hours of experimentation and disabling some visual enhancements, though I feel no loss there and am experiencing a significantly reduced sense of loss.

Now I'm happy to be able to test on x64 virtual images using VMWare's Workstation, I'm afraid I may need to buy four 2GB sticks of RAM now. Despite the fact that the additional memory is available now, the larger footprint nearly wipes out the gain.

And that's without running any significant applications, except IE, which is quite a memory hog. I guess the old 640K upper limit days are over.

Yes, RAM is cheap. A quick check on Newegg.com and I found 8GB (4 x 2GB DDR2 800) for $174. I can't even buy three tanks of gas for my SUV for that.

I'm getting ready to do some serious MOSS 2007 architecture and development work. In the past, I've used Virtual PC 2007 to host a virtual development environment running a Windows server operating system, SQL Server, MOSS and Visual Studio all running in the same virtual machine. And I've never been very happy with the performance of that virtual machine.

So today I decided to give VMWare a try and downloaded VMWare Workstation 6.5. I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard x86 (full install) on a new virtual machine with the same disk space and memory as I had allocated for the same operating system install using Virtual PC 2007. I gave both virtual machines 30GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM. I'm running on a Core 2 Duo 6600 on an ASUS P5B at factory default speed with 4GB of RAM with virtualization support enabled. Both virtual machines virtual drives live on the same drive.

The major advantage of VMWare is its ability to utilize both cores where Virtual PC is stuck with using just one. I'm sure there are additional reasons for the differences in performance. I used PerformanceTest 6.1 from PassMark. I'm sure there are other ways to test virtual machine performance, but this seemed to be a reasonable though unscientific approach. I made sure my machine was running the same processes and completely idle except for the virtual machine host application.

I only ran the tests that mattered to me: CPU, 2D, memory, and disk. I don't care about 3D and CD performance for the virtual machine. Here's the results:

vmware		test 1	test 2	avg	ratio
	cpu:	326.6	344.4	335.5	2.2x
	2D:	28.7	32.2	30.45	3.3x
	Memory:	96.7	96.2	96.45	1.2x
	Disk:	469.1	454.5	461.8	6.4x
	Total:	921.1	927.3	924.2	2.9x
vpc 2007
	cpu:	150.7	154.1	152.4
	2D:	9.2	9.3	9.25
	Memory:	83.3	83.2	83.25
	Disk:	69.6	73.8	71.7
	Total:	312.8	320.4	316.6

 

I was amazed to see that overall, the VMWare virtual machine ran 2.9 times faster than the Virtual PC machine. Even more amazing was the performance improvement of the 2D and disk tests, 3.3 and 6.4 times faster respectively.

I am now completely sold on the value of the VMWare Workstation license. The best price I found after a quick search was $161. For all the saved frustration in working with a slow virtual machine development image for MOSS, the product is well worth the price. But don't take my word for it, run your own tests if you don't believe me. Of course, if you aren't running a multicore machine, and what self respecting developer isn't, you probably won't see any improvement. On the other hand, if you have at least two cores, choosing save a few bucks seems to penny wise but pound foolish!

I get a lot of forward email from friends and relatives. I've never felt compelled to do anything with any of them until, bored this evening, I read this one from my father-in-law. I don't know if any of these stories are true or not, but whether they are or aren't, they are. In a time when America seems to be taking much criticism from within and without, it's good to have reminders like these.

When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush. He answered by saying, 'Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.'

There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?' A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly. 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships, how many does FRANCE HAVE?'

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, 'Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?' Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied "maybe it's because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to speak German.'

An elderly American gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on. 'You have been to France before, monsieur?' the customs officer asked sarcastically. The man admitted that he had been to France previously. 'Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.' The American said, 'The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it. 'Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France !' The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained, 'Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to.'

A week after being laid off finds me wondering why I've neglected this blog. I'm currently experiencing the self recriminatory state one goes into at the end of the dead end street having recently passed the Dead End sign. Brake, execute the multi-point 180 and head back to find the turn you missed. And then realizing that the turn you missed should have been as obvious as the nose on your face.

My conscience tells me not to be too hard on myself. In one week I've had an interview or two. Have another scheduled for tomorrow. And one or two inquiries from other potential employers. Met with more than one recruiter and talked with several more. Polished the resume a bit more and started working the neglected network of friends and former coworkers--neglect as a result of me working from my home office with little real world interaction. Note to self: get out more and talk with humans face to face.

I've even taken more than one meeting from possible business partners with ideas that may or may not pan out, but I'm not taking anything off the table until I replace my mainstream income.

So if anyone needs a C# dev guy with some architecture leanings, grab my resume and give me a shout.

Sometimes the odd helper class is useful. This one might even be a decent candidate for some .NET 3.5 extension methods. These URL utilities are quite self explanatory and by no means are a complete set of URL helper methods that would be useful, but who knows, they might have something you're looking for.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace HelperCode
{
    internalstaticclass UrlUtils
    {
        internalstaticstring GetTldFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string tld = UrlUtils.GetHostFromUrl(url);
            if (tld !=null && tld.Contains('.'))
            {
                string[] parts = tld.Split('.');
                if (parts.Length > 0)
                {
                    tld = parts[parts.Length - 1];
                }
            }
            return tld;
        }

        internalstaticstring GetHostFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string retval =null;
            try
            {
                Uri uri =new Uri(url);
                retval = uri.Host.ToLower();
            }
            catch
            {
                retval =null;
            }
            return retval;
        }

        internalstaticstring GetSchemeFromUrl(string url)
        {
            string retval =null;
            try
            {
                Uri uri =new Uri(url);
                retval = uri.Scheme.ToLower();
            }
            catch
            {
                retval =null;
            }
            return retval;
        }
    }
}

If you have a better way to do it, please, by all means, let us know. There are no doubt better ways. :)

Whether it be in code or business deals, complexity kills. If you're an architect and you love the elegance of endless inheritance where everything is a descendant of MyCoolRootObject or an venture capitalist trying to tie off every risk with carefully structured language that leaves a founder in the lurch and you in the driver's seat of the getaway car, you are the enemy of success. If you flout the team's style guild and name your class members with freaky names and patterns only you can recognize, you are an enemy of success. If you're a framework developer and you believe you have to add every possible toy feature in the universe to your framework, you are an enemy of success.

And enemies of success lose! Lovers of complexity may win a battle here or there, but the ash heap of history is full of them. Consider any number of technologies that have become so overbloated and difficult to work with that developers and architects look for simpler solutions. Examine the many thousands of failed startups killed by pencil pushing pinheads with no other agenda than to make the deal difficult in hopes of making it perfect, only to kill the deal with a stulted obsession with detail and gaining the advantage in every paragraph.

Simplicity is the key to success.

I recently picked up Booch, Jacobsen and Rumbaugh's new book Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. It's like the textbook I never had in the OO classes I never took. (Yeah, I'm just another self taught bozo who knows the difference between a five minute class exercise and a multiple month enterprise development project.)

Among others, I have especially enjoyed Chapter 6 called simply Process. Let me quote the opening paragraph and you'll know why.

"The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensational method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial. It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exists. Amateurs often want to follow cook-book steps; professionals know that such approches to development usually lead to inept design products, born of a progression of lies, and behind which developers can shield themselves from accepting responsibility for earlier misguided decisions." pg.247

There's more and the book is a treasure trove of wisdom, but when I read this paragraph, it was nice to feel as if I had met the estimeed Booch, Jacobsen and Rumbaugh definition of professional software engineer.

I do remember looking for magic bullets when I first started teaching myself how to do software development. Fortunately through long trial and error and even greater opportunities to learn from true professionals, I gave up on looking for magic solutions long ago. Since then my life has been easier and busier and much more rewarding with regard to software development.

To their credit, the authors in Chapter 6 review the strengths and weaknesses of both agile and more traditional plan driven (sometimes called waterfall) process approaches. They begin their thesis in this chapter in addressing the traits of a successful project. Now having this is true magic. Here they are:

• "Existence of a strong architectural vision."
• "Application of a well managed iterative and incremental development lifecycle."

The killer qualifiers in those two statements are: "strong" and "well managed." Yikes! These are qualifications that are difficult to come by. When you do, grab them up and hold on to them for dear life. I think most of us can agree that "weak" and "poorly managed" will result in disaster every time.

In an ever more agile development world, we gradually learn to accept that requirements change constantly. Of course, it has always been thus, but I do remember a time when we pretended that requirements were locked and could not be changed. But then I remember delivering a product some months later which did not then meet the client's requirements despite what they had agreed to only months before. Their requirements changed, you see.

Now I work in an environment where this norm is the norm. Requirements change and they change often. Or better put, requirements are discovered daily and old requirements change into new requirements nearly as often. This is the unavoidable nature of the business I'm in. I accept it.

What I hate and cannot accept in this ever changing world are requirements documents written in a proprietary binary format. Sure they're stored in source control, so when I do a little update on my Subversion client in the morning and see that several requirements documents have changed, I'd like to just do a nice simple DIFF on them and see what's changed. But no. Oh, sure there are probably some diff tools out there I could get, but why should I when we could have just written the requirements in text or even a simple transformable XML rather than the binary gobbledygook in a Word or Excel file.

And can anyone tell me how to "blame" a change in a particular line in a Word doc on a certain author? Oh sure, I could use the gooey sticky messy change tracking--no thanks. Just give me a good text file and an editor that can handle it well.

Is my rant a cry for a product or what? Is there an existing product you can recommend? If so, please tell me. And then maybe we can ban the use of Word and Excel for the production and maintenance of requirements. We can say goodbye to the lack of transparency and traceability. We can say hello to simplicity and accountability. Ah, how would it be.

I'm currently working on a rather complex ETL system in the medical industry. There are new business rules uncovered daily as development and analysis proceeds in parallel due to overwhelming business urgencies. The use cases in the system are limited pretty much to "Process File." Everything else is buried in a system of business rules more complex than I care to think about very often and a series of events and event handlers which process the file and implement the business rules.

My own approach to this challenge could have been much more organized had I purchased Karl E. Weigers's book More About Software Requirements earlier on in this project. He says, "Use cases are less valuable for projects involving data warehouses, batch processes, hardware projects with embedded control software, and computationally intensive applications. In these softs of systems, the deep complexity doesn't lie in the user-system interactions. It might be might be worthwhile to identify use cases for such a product, but use case analysis will fall short as a technique for defining all the system's behavior."

I could not agree more. Weigers goes on to recommend the use of event-response tables to provide a way of documenting the requirements of such complex systems which have little if any interaction with users. Granted, you could write a use case using the machine or file system or OS or scheduler or some other non-human entity as the actor, but the analogies break down when trying to document the requirements of the complex rules within the case.

The event-response table is a simple approach to organizing these details that in fact works much better than an ad hoc method of writing it all down in sequential paragraphs and then asking developers, in this case that developer being me, to interpret those requirements and design and code a solution that really works.

You simply need a three column table with the following headers: Event, System State, and Response.

Breaking up functional requirements in a complex rules-driven system with minimal human interaction can be a daunting task. You can make it a bit easier by using some simple organizing structures such as the event-response table.

Thanks to Miguel and his team for making it easier than ever for us Windows-bound .NET geeks to give Mono a try. It's a fairly big download but well worth it. You can now download a VMWare virtual machine image of Mono 1.2.2.1 on openSUSE 10.2 and the free VMWare Player. Install the player and open the unzipped VM file. Easy peasy. I had to play with network settings a bit but that was easy.

There is no easier way to check out Mono on Linux. No partitions to worry about. No setup to worry about. No drivers to mess with such as the constant failure I would get with my dual monitor card when I tried earlier to get SUSE running on a separate partition on my box which led to me giving up.

I recommend you give it a try. Amazing what the Mono team has done. Kudos again to Miguel and his team and all those who have contributed to the Mono project. 

There is much ado about the coming Semantic Web and the dream of objectifying all the data in the world allowing machines to exchange mindshare, yada, yada, yada. But what happens to old web pages when they die? Do they go to HTTP heaven? And when this glorious web for machines supplants the Legacy Web (that messy old WWW), what will we all do with our fancy browsers? Where will we find the fuel to power our AJAX rocket engines? And how will humans survive the rising tide of <tag><mytag>
<yourtag>hey</yourtag>
</mytag></tag> drive by taggings?

The truth is that while the semantic web will find some heavy hitters to knock it out of the park in a variety of industrial and scientific arenas, I'm not sure the messy old WWW is ready for retirement just yet. I doubt the content switch will occur very rapidly in most corners of the world given that most users of the web currently are human and they use the mundane web browser occasionally flicking the AJAX booster switch and dreaming of the connected client days of yore.

We humans like messes. Just look around your office if you don't believe me. Four out of five dentists recommend a messy desk for a healthy work life. And if you don't believe me, Google it.

Still, the semantic web bears some level of intrigue beyond its obvious usefulness in some areas of business and science. In fact, I'd love to have a browser that would help me make more sense of the mess on the WWW or even the mess on my desk.

My New Year's resolution is to explore that idea and determine whether or not it can be done in the messy old WWW world without holding a gun to the head of all those gumbah's with an HTML six shooter in their belt.

I've been busy. Yeah. Sad excuse, but true.
 
On November 7, 2006, about two months after I was hired, my employer "invited" me to resign my position because I refused to sign a mandatory arbitration agreement which among other things included the following language: "I understand that by agreeing to this binding arbitration provision, both I and [company name] give up our respective rights to a trial by jury."

I told my employer that I didn't think I should have to waive my constitutional right to petition the government for redress just because so many others abuse that right. I had researched the issue on the Internet and found that these agreements are enforced by the courts and that in about 99% of all cases, the employee loses, regardless of the issues and facts.

I was annoyed. More at the law than at my employer. I know the law stands behind employers on this issue. And I even support the idea of arbitration as a first option, but I cannot abide the idea of just waiving my right to go to court just to keep a job. I don't think the law should allow an employer to require such a concession upon employees, but it does. Specifically, as long as both parties give up the same rights, the contract is enforceable.

This would be just fine except for the fact that in arbitration, the little guy is viewed by most arbiters (usually retired judges) as the money grubbing whiner and the employer as the victim of the evil, greedy employee. So you give up the same rights but you put yourself, as an employee, at a significant disadvantage if you run into some dispute with an employer.

All that said, I've never been sued by an employer and I've never sued an employer. Still, if I had to, I'd like to preserve the option of having a real court and a real jury hear my case rather than an arbiter who answers to no one regardless of his or her conduct and decisions in the face of the evidence. Take those odds? No thanks.

I was lucky. I found another job the same day I was "asked" to leave which happily pays even better. And I've been super busy with the new gig ever since. Not everyone has the same opportunity and flexibility that I enjoy, so I recognize this development as a true blessing.

Since that day, I've spent an hour or so contacting legislators about the issue. They are generally either indifferent or completely ignorant or in some cases both. Senator Hatch sent me a nice, completely off-base form letter reply referring me to legal counsel despite the fact that I had just asked for his opinion on whether employers should be allowed to continue this practice and whether he would support legislation to prohibit it. Many others just never responded. It's pretty sad when elected officials care so little about the way that employers are now forcing their employees to give up their constitutionally protected rights just because they are afraid of employees who abuse those rights.

It's typical fare for our culture. Punish those who have done nothing wrong in the false hope of protecting yourself from the real bad guys. Similar examples are not difficult to find. Such draconian practices are not needed. If you're going to get sued by employees, you're going to get sued. And if it happens a lot, you might want to consider changing your behavior and/or changing who and how you hire.

If you're reading this and you've signed employment documents without really reading them, you may have signed a similar document. I recommend reading every document your employer "invites" you to sign. Despite your excitement to have a new job and your high opinion of the people you'll be working for, you may be surprised at what they've asked you to agree to. There's only one way out of such an agreement. Don't sign it in the first place. I really liked the people at the former job, but regardless of my regard for them, I was not about to give up my rights in order to work for them.

Of course, everything I've said here is my own opinion. I'm sure my former employer sees it completely differently. I bear them no ill will and certainly have no plans to waste time and energy on the lawsuit that so many of my friends have recommended that I bring against them. I would just hope that they would see their actions for the paranoia I believe it to be and revise their agreements with their existing employees. I think it would be the right and moral thing to do. But that's up to them.

With that all said, I'll get back to coding and promise some real .NET coding posts here in the future.

Thanks to Google CoOp, www.netbrick.net is now my personal .NET developer search engine. With the help of a few friends, the list of domains searched remains relevant to .NET development. This helps eliminate all the clutter I get when hitting Google directly.

Thanks to Paul Allen for alerting me to this very cool feature. And if you use it, don't be afraid to click on the ads. :)

Today I attended my first UCNUG meeting. It was great. Easy location. Perfect size crowd. Great presentation by Aaron Zupancic on refactoring.

Previous meetings have been held at UVSC, but fortunately they got kicked out of there. I'm lazy by nature and didn't want to bother with finding the room on a campus I don't know. This one was hosted gratiously by NuSkin at the East Bay location and that was easy to find.

Aaron gave a well thought out, cogent presentation on the ins and outs of refactoring. I actually learned some things. And for me, that makes any presentation valuable. But it was a good presentation as much for what Aaron did not do as what he did do. He did not just read from the book. Martin Fowler is great but the presentation was really valuable because Aaron pulled examples and ideas into slides with even better code examples.

I've attended the Utah .NET Users Group, where Aaron is the president, a few times. The presentations are generally good, including Aaron's, but this one was much better. I'm trying to convice a buddy of mine to present on CruiseControl.Net, NUnit and automated build and testing in general. I'll post it here if I can get him to commit.

Installed IE7 (7.0.5730.11) over the top of the beta. Everything working well so far. Ah, but now, because of the increasing clutter on my drive, I'm running out of space and will soon be rebuilding my machine. Just another chance to install, install, install.

Point, click, wait. Repeat.

It's been less than a week and my www.photohistorydoc.com site has caught up by many RegNow affiliates, hacked by some warez hackers in the UK, Israel, and Australia, and indexed by Google. The question I have is why does Google continue to index warez sites whose primary purpose is to sabotage the shareware and commercial software industry.

So, Google, why? Why do you help promote these low lifes whose only goal seems to be to troll for software thieves susceptible to the enticements of porn in order to make money from the click flips to the real porn sites. Why? These sites don't use AdSense, so there does not seem to be a monetary motive. What else can it be?

Does anyone have a clue?

After two months of working nights and weekends, I've finally finished Photo History Doc, my little contribution to the shareware world. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Visit http://www.photohistorydoc.com and download it and let me know what you think.

I'll post more about it and how it gets received out in the world later.

I'm disabling trackback on my blog because one particular post gets spammed with about 30 porn trackback spams a week. All of them in one batch. They point to seemingly empty places. So if you want to trackback here, sorry, too bad. It's too much of a pain to delete all the spam trackbacks and there is no easy way to track the offender or block him/her/it.

I want a T-shirt with these words on it:

Bad Code is Platform Independent

All the political and religious debates about platform superiority all come to an end when running bad code. It amazes me how much bad code is out there (some of mine included). And yet we so often jump to blame the platform, runtime, operating system, tools, or some other outside element.

Where have all the good coders gone? More to the point. Were there ever any?

Bad coders never die, they just pick a new platform.

Nothing like a great laugh to perk up your day. Stumbled onto this Captain Zilog on computerhistory.org today. Take a moment and read it. What happened to those good old days? Did the dolldrums of reality take over?

"Systems designer Nick Stacey works late into the night, unknown to him, a small eerie comet passes overhead..."

"I am known to men as...opportunity! I give you the key to man's destiny in a brave new world!"

"It is the beginning of a new freedom for man's imagination! It is a microprocessor! I bestow upon you all of the knowledge that goes with it, but use it wisely! Now, go!"

Corny? Yes. Prescient? Definitely. It was 1979. I was in junior high school. It was the battle of the little, inventive, hungry geek vs. the titans of business with deeper pockets than I could imagine. It was an epoc battle that went to the best and the brightest, not to the most powerful. Or so it seemed. But as a kid, I was only barely aware of the war that raged in the world of technology in those days. To me, it was just an exciting time of change.

Now, change is more terrifying because I have responsibilities. I have four kids, a mortgage and car payments. Just like everybody else I know. And a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And it's been terrifying. And exciting. Two days ago, I blogged about the ethics of meta-searching. It came as a shock to others involved in the project because I had not discussed it with them. I blindsided them. That was fundamentally unfair. And yet, even had I wrung my hands over the issue and discussed it with them, it would probably not have changed the end result. Things changed. And it scared the heck out me. Some of them are probably still angry with me. I don't blame them. I would be too.

Looking back to the days of Captain Zilog made me laugh. It also made me think. Zilog is not a player in the huge PC market. But it's still alive and from all appearances, it's doing well. They innovated. They struggled. They stayed alive and ultimately found a niche market that has served them well. Are they comparable to giants like Intel and Microsoft? No way. But did they survive? Did they make money. I'm guessing that they must have given the fact that they're still around and still selling the Z8 line.

So what is our challenge? We must find a way to survive. Find a way to innovate something truly useful. Believe in that thing. Work hard to make that thing succeed, even if it's in a market you had not originally foreseen. In other words, we must adapt without losing a sense of who we are or what we've created. Time will tell if we, as technologists and entrepreneurs will do just that.

(Modified slightly on Monday, August 21, 2006, after considering issues of fairness and further introspection.)

For the first seven months of this year I worked on a project which, in part, was a meta-search tool designed to bypass the router pacing algorithms used by sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. I have come to believe that even if this were not a violation of their terms of use, it would be fundamentally unethical. I cannot claim the high road in having come to this conclusion. I did not arrive at this conclusion until some time after becoming unemployed and then re-employed.

Yesterday I began to question myself more seriously about the ethics of meta-searching than I had done before. Without doing any online research, a rarity for me, I just wrote down in long hand some basic questions and let one lead to another. My conclusion was that I could not ethically or morally justify the acquisition of data and resale of it in some form or another using meta-search techniques in violation of the source's terms of use.

On July 21, 2006, I was suddenly unemployed along with the rest of the development team at Provo Labs LLC, a Paul Allen (the lesser) venture. I didn't abandon the project even then. I looked for ways to keep the project alive. After all, I had spent months, including nearly every Saturday and Sunday, working on the code for this project. It was my baby. I was the only developer on it. A week or so after that fateful day in July, reality set in. I had no income and four children to feed. I had to find a job. And I did. A great job! The timing could not have been better.

In my first three days on the new job, I was impressed by the effort and expense the company is willing to expend to be sure that copyrighted material used in their product is properly licensed. This reminded me of a conversation I had had with management at Provo Labs earlier in the year. I had raised the question of the ethics of meta-searching and collecting data using automation from public search engines and other resources whose terms of use statements clearly prohibit such behavior. The discussion was brief and the subject was quickly swept aside. It boiled down to "everybody does it, including the search engines, so that makes it okay". I filed that rationalization away and kept going.

The intellectual property transfer from Provo Labs LLC to the new company Phil Burns is starting had not yet happened. I had even contemplated using my company, NetBrick Inc, an S corp of which I am the sole shareholder, as a holding company for this new venture. But I had become impatient and as Phil put it, "emotional and panicky".

I had my doubts about the whole deal and so today I pulled myself out of the deal entirely in part because I had lost faith that we would successfully negotiate the intellectual property rights to this product, in part because I did not believe I would have time to continue working on the project, but mostly because I had come to believe that it would simply be the wrong thing to do.

This process of introspection has been painful. I had to admit to myself that for the last seven months of my life, I have been building, enthusiastically, a product that was in large measure designed to violate the terms of use and possibly violate the law in the acquisition of meta-data from search engines and other sites for the express purpose of reselling that data in the form of market research and other such reports. I had rationalized this by thinking that we would not sell the data but only the conclusions we reached from the data. Splitting hairs like this was just another way to sweep the ethical inconsistency under the rug.

Today I informed Phil and Paul that I will no longer be involved with the project as it stands and that I will deliver the code in its existing form. I did not share with them my reasoning behind my decision because I really did not want to engage them in a debate on the merits of my decision. We had already been down that road.

After I informed Phil and Paul by email, I did some online research--something I really should have done, and unbelievably did not ever do, prior to starting the project. From any of the big three engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), you can click one or two links to get to the following terms of service information.

Google
http://www.google.com/intl/en/terms_of_service.html
"The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons... You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them... You may not "meta-search" Google... You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things: using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries;
"meta-searching" Google; and performing "offline" searches on Google.

MSN
http://tou.live.com/en-us/
"In using the service, you may not:...use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or “meta-searching”);"

Yahoo & Overture
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
"Except as expressly authorized by Yahoo! or advertisers, you agree not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Service or the Software, in whole or in part."

Clearly, these search engines do not want you to use automated search software to mine their meta-data presented in search results and the results of other search related queries. It is clear that their intent is to only allow individual users through a normal web browser to access and use this information. Yahoo is more vague than the other two but the intent is still there.

So is the search engine behavior of crawling the content and indexing the content of other web sites unethical or immoral? Does that violate the terms of use posted by many other sites? Will the search engines remove your content from their site if you request it? I do not believe that it is unethical or immoral to drive traffic to a web site because its content contains what a search engine user probably wants to find. The search engine is not repackaging and reselling the data they find on the crawled sites. Yet they do profit in some measure from mining that content, for without the content, they would have no users. It seems to be a trade that most web site owners are willing to make.

I want to make it clear here and now that I believe that if I had made my concerns known to Provo Labs management more forcefully in the early days of this project, they would not have required me to work on it. They would have, I think, found something else for me to do. I hope this illustrates the flaw in my own character, which I hope to remedy in this, and does not leave the reader of this post to believe that Provo Labs LLC acted in an unethical manner.

The code is powerful and capable of being extended and used in a variety of ways. A friend of mine pointed out to me that not everything it does is a violation of terms of use document. In fact there is a lot of things that it is designed to do which goes no further than a typical web crawler in terms of gathering data. Perhaps a means can be found to make use of what it can do without violating terms of use policies. Perhaps the power of the code can be leveraged within the framework of licensed APIs. This is something that will have be determined.

Until that time, I'll continue my work at my new job and focus my personal coding efforts on my Forseti Project to keep my coding skills as sharp as I can. And I will take away an important lesson from this whole roller coaster ride: always examine and question the ethics of a project and then listen to your instincts.

If you'd like to comment and berate me here, go right ahead. I deserve it. If you're particularly vicious, I reserve the right to edit or remove the comment. If you've had similar experiences and stood up more valiantly, I'd like to hear about it and how it all turned out for you.

Just found this referenced on an FTPOnline story: http://www.turboexplorer.com/

For an old Delphi aficionado (version 5 was my last), I can't wait to download the Explorer versions to see what they've done with the place.

I've always felt that starting with a Borland tool was a better place for a beginner to start. And then you take a corporate job and everyone is drinking the blue coolaid. Don't get me wrong. I like the coolaid too. Visual Studio 2005 is hands down the best IDE I've worked with. And no, for you Eclipse fans, I've not tried that highly vaunted IDE. I do know people that have used both and they invariably have good things to say about both.

Borland is spinning off the tools, so they say. So where will they be spun and how do these new dolled up Turbo versions fit into the equation. And so I don't have to wait so long, is there anyone at Borland that can get me a sneak peek copy.

I promise to run it through it's paces and report back here. I'm especially eager to try the C++ flavor. Could the good old days of Turbo be back? Let's see....

SOAP vs REST
In my work I've had occassion to use both SOAP and REST in the client and the server. SOAP is easy if you have good tools. Hard wiring a WSDL is not my thing. At the risk of committing a pun foul, I'd rather eat a bar of soap than hard code good WSDL. Fortunately, .NET makes WSDL for simple web services easy, both on the server and client end of things. And WSCF makes more complex web services easy in the .NET world.

At the same time, REST is more comfortable, especially for those without nice support tools for consuming SOAP on a plate of WSDL. A nice simple HTTP POST. A simple agreement between friends to pass X, Y, and Z data along in a simple name value pair model.

Trust or Verify
I guess in some ways it comes down to trust. Do you trust the client to submit clean data? Can you trust your server application to parse through and make safe any data that is not clean? Or would you rather automate some of that authentication via schema and the rigidity of SOAP? For me, it all depends on the circumstances.

The Illusion of SOAP and Schema
How tight are your contracts? A good lawyer will take a two page agreement and expand it to ninety pages. Not only because she wants to bill you more but because she needs to cover all the bases. Are your web service contract bases covered? Is the schema and secondary validation sufficient.

Can REST Be Secure?
This line of thought takes me to the question. Can we trust REST? Well, the short answer is no. But the longer answer is, yes, just as much as we trust SOAP. The brilliance of SOAP is the contract is carried with the data, or at least that data is transported in a container with which the contract may be validated. So is that really better? Well, the underlying truth is that someone else wrote a bunch of helper code to help us perform the first level of validation in the message--form. But what about content. Yes, schema validation can do some content validation as well, especially of the type type of validation. Beyond that, it's up to you pretty much.

Validation Bottom Line
Ultimately the value and robustness of a web service, whether you use REST for it's simplicity or SOAP for the niceties of automated tools, will be determined by the code you write to validate and execute and respond with an appropriately formed response.

Consider Your Audience
Back in my poor old days as a technical writer, I had to always keep in mind and understand my audience. It really does matter. For example, my mother would not understand a single word of this post. If you are publishing web services, you must consider who will consume them. Will they be a hodge podge of PHP, JSP, ASP, and many other forms of "server pages" technology? Or will they be hard driving Visual Studio SOAP users who would rather have the tool do the heavy lifting and eliminate the need to parse?

Give your users what they want. And to do that, you may have to give them both SOAP and REST. I guess that won't hurt us too much. After all, a hot shower is always a good combination with a good night's rest.