Category: Opinion

ALT.NET–>NOT.NET?

Posted on by Scott

I came across this James Avery post via Mike Gunderloy’s blog.  Avery attempts to make a similar point to one Martin Fowler puts forward about the best developers moving away from the .NET platform.  Beyond the sort of anecdotal evidence I’ve read, I don’t see much abandonment of .NET as a platform.

When I read this post by Dave Laribee, I decided that Avery missed his point.  The point of ALT.NET isn’t as a bridge to a different set of tools, but to recognize two things:

  1. The best solutions on the .NET platform won’t always come from Microsoft.
  2. The best ideas from other software development communities can work very well on the .NET platform.

The existence of tools like NUnit and log4net, frameworks like Spring.NET and rules engines like Drools.net is more likely to keep developers using the .NET Framework than it is to encourage them to switch to Ruby on Rails.  Because a lot of ALT.NET is free and open source, there’s plenty of incentive to use it instead of the Microsoft alternative (which increasingly comes with hefty licensing fees).

Strongly-typed datasets and queries without matching select clauses

Posted on by Scott

I learned an annoying lesson about these late last week.  I’d created the dataset by dragging and dropping the necessary tables from SQL Server in Visual Studio 2005.  Then I added a query to one of the tables that didn’t include every one of its columns.  Unfortunately, a number of the columns my query didn’t return didn’t allow nulls.  I ended up modifying my query to include those columns, even though I don’t use them.  I didn’t try removing the columns from the dataset, but that probably would have worked too.

Ruby on Microsoft

Posted on by Scott

This piece by Martin Fowler interests me more for his contention that the best technical leaders are abandoning .NET than for what he writes about Ruby. It’s the sort of argument that seems true because anecdotal evidence seems readily available.  I’d be interested to see if there’s more quantitative backing for the assertion.

Some poking around on Google did reveal at least a couple statistics:

My 2 cents on the iPhone

Posted on by Scott

This Sunday’s Opus comic strip captures the hype perfectly.

I did get to play with one for a few minutes at an Apple store in Maryland yesterday.  It handles its primary job (being a phone) very well.  The sound quality was good.  The interface really is as clever as the advertising suggests. A quick finger swipe moved whatever you needed in the right direction.

Typing with the iPhone turned out to work better with your index finger than with your thumbs.  Whatever logic they’ve got in there for guessing what you meant when you mistype something works extremely well though.

That said, I don’t see myself coughing up the dough for an iPhone anytime soon.  Functional and attractive as it is, I don’t need that much of an upgrade over the Razr (which while it has plenty of shortcomings, fits nicely in my pocket and only cost me $100).  Besides, if version 1 of the iPhone is this good, imagine version 2 😉

Unlocking Value at Microsoft

Posted on by Scott

I came across this article, via a post from Mini-Microsoft. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a software product manager to be able to write code. I would expect them to be more technology-savvy than this guy appears to be. Whether he was trying to be funny or not, this will certainly add more fuel to the fire for the legion of MBA-haters that already exist.

While I’m not a Microsoft employee, I have my doubts that he’ll be successful in his role without a better understanding of the technology. As someone who has a computer science degree and an MBA, I’ve found that the combination gives me an advantage in explaining technology choices in business terms. The other thing working against him is his product. The vast majority of individuals and corporations that own copies of Office only use a fraction of the functionality available in the older versions of the suite. Getting any company to pay more for a newer version of something that already meets their needs sounds like an impossible task to me.

Guiding principles for developers

Posted on by Scott

This list comes courtesy of Patrick Cauldwell, an architect at Corillian Corp.  I’m definitely in favor of most of their list, especially test-driven development, continuous integration, and buy vs. build.  I’m not so sure about the Windows authentication point simply because it takes so much effort to get developers access to our databases at work.

Safari on Windows

Posted on by Scott

I’m trying it out on my laptop at work to see how I like it (I’m all Mac at home now). In regular use, the speed advantage Safari is supposed to have over Firefox isn’t really noticeable. Most sites I visit render correctly, except for the occasional message in Yahoo! Mail. It has the sort of problems I’d expect rendering ASP.NET web controls, but so does any browser that isn’t IE.

At least for now, I wouldn’t ditch Firefox for it. I might use it more on my Macs though.

Requirements

Posted on by Scott

Eric Sink’s post on requirements is the best and most concise treatment of the subject I’ve read yet.  The document vs. database treatment of requirements and his comparison of traceability to a compiler are inspired.  He even touches briefly on the shortcomings of bug-tracking systems as requirements management systems.

I haven’t read the book he recommends in his post (Software Requirements, by Karl Wiegers), but I have no doubt that it’s good.  The book on requirements that I can vouch for is Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design.  It has tons of great advice on the process of gathering requirements.
If you analyze, design, build, and/or test software, read Eric Sink’s post.  If you manage technology projects, you should definitely read it.  Highly, highly recommended.