Tim's Tech Talk

Developer, Engineer, or Architect?

2009-03-05T10:16:00.004-05:00

I read an article on IEEE today that just annoyed me. The article can be found at: computer.org - careerwatch.

It is an interesting question but I don't think it was an interesting answer. One particular sentence summed it up: "Engineering is scientific, quantified, and disciplined, whereas development is random, not based on metrics, and stays away from engineering discipline." Given this definition I think that few if any people would claim to be developers. That really removes the value of the question.

At this point I use the terms programmer, developer and software engineer fairly interchangeably. I would like to see a distinction but any distinction that dismisses a group as not really knowing what they are doing is just going to lead to the term not being used.

Thoughts on being a Solution Architect

2008-04-29T12:40:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Tom Hollander for putting together a list of requirements for a Solution Architect. I think this will be useful in justifying some more 'Architectural' effort as we continue to grow.

URL: Thoughts on being a Solution Architect

Schools Of Software Development

2008-04-14T13:30:00.003-04:00

I thoroughly agree with Martin Fowler's recent comments on Schools of Software Development. He says that we don't know which school is right but I would go a little further I don't think that there is even a single right. There is no single right way to prepare a steak so why should there be a single right way to build a system. As with a steak there are too many alternative solutions.

That doesn't change Martin's point - we need to respect the existence of different schools and coexist.

Fritz Onion on Silverlight 2

2008-04-10T11:58:00.002-04:00

I went to listen to Fritz Onion last night. I have to say that I was a little disappointed. The reason for my disappointment had more to do with my expectations than the presentation itself.

First I think that I have very high expectations of the well known names. I listened to a Presentation by Juval Lowy and I was just so impressed both by the content of the presentation and his knowledgeable handling of the questions. He is a hard act to follow.

Second I have significant reservations about Silverlight. This is partly because I can't see it being used in my company but also because we have been down this path before with Java and it hasn't really taken off. There are some differences a major one I suspect is that Java Applets were UGLY. They seemed to come from an earlier time. Silverlight has a subset of WPF that although it is missing the 3D features can still simply render some very beautiful user interface.

Sledgehammer for a nut Design/Process Pattern

2007-12-11T14:38:00.000-05:00

I came across this the other day and thought that it was worth writing down as a pattern. In our specific example we wanted to control the client caching of our pages. The solution that the developer picked was to write an HTTPModule. (The reason for this was at least partly the 'If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail' pattern). It seemed at the time like overkill but I didn't have this pattern to apply...

Several weeks later we realize that none of our scripts are being cached on the client. This used to work but now it doesn't... The problem was of course that the HTTPModule was setting the cache control to no-cache for everything rather than just the pages we needed it set on.

The lesson to learn here is that to keep solutions focused but it you do need the big hammer to take extra care of avoiding collateral damage.

Learning new stuff

2007-10-27T13:19:00.001-04:00

I have restarted a project that has languished for a number of years. I will save the description of the project for another post but the reason for doing this is to learn about all the new goodness in Orcas. So keep an eye out for more posts in this series.

Today I started to use a couple of new features. The first is the IEnumerable<> interface. We had the IEnumerable interface before but it has really grown up. What we have gained is a whole set of iteration based primitives. These include some simple ones like Contains. We could do this before on IList but now we have it on anything that is enumerable. The next primitive that I tried was the Aggregate function. This allows you to specify a function that will be used to combine each value in the enumeration.

I wanted to invoke a method (which returned a bool) on each element of the enumeration then combine these to see if the method returned true for all elements. I could do all this with one line of code:

m_parts.Aggregate(true, (prev, pred) => prev & pred.Apply(thing))

The true in there is the initial value for the aggregation. The second parameter is the new form for Lambda expressions/ anonymous methods. The way to read this is that the function takes two parameters the previous aggregate value and the next element. It combines the previous value with the value returned from calling the Apply method. It is pretty clever that the compiler can figure out all the types so this can be strongly typed without me having to specify them. The => notation is a very powerful thing but right now it doesn't feel very C# ish. I guess I need a little time to adjust.

The other new piece is actually more part of team suite - the testing support. I started just writing my tests using NUnit and running them through NUnit GUI (not as nice as resharper by far but functional). Then I found the add unit test menu item and I was taken down a different path. It is a pain that the attributes are all different but otherwise so far it seems quite workable. It handles the rebuilding and gives me the results in Visual Studio. There is plenty to try out yet so I will write more when I have used this more fully.

Tim Ewald speaks on REST

2007-09-19T20:27:00.000-04:00

The Boston architecture study group met tonight to hear from Tim Ewald on the subject of REST. Let me say to start that if you get the opportunity to hear him speak it is worth making the effort. He was passionate, knowledgeable and thought provoking. He talked about why he was so excited about REST.

I have to confess that I am not sure that I completely GET it. There is certainly one part that resonated with me that was why build up all these layers on top of HTTP when we already have lots of interesting capabilities in HTTP.

One part that I am not convinced about is that English prose in the form of documentation is a contract. At some level of detail it might be OK but it doesn't have the ability to reason about in the same way that a WSDL definition does.

He made the very good point that 'in the wild' this is the way things are going. The big web services sites are using REST rather than SOAP.

Busy Evening

2007-09-06T23:32:00.000-04:00

Went to a couple of events tonight.

Beantown.Net met and listened to a presentation by Richard hale Shaw on the state of WCF. I was hoping to find out more about tools to simplify WCF development but was disappointed. The talk was too much of a high level WCF overview for me but judging by the show of hands it was probably more appropriate.

O'Reilly hosted Ignite Boston. A better venue than the first. I can't complain about the free beer either - Thank you Google!

Ignite Boston

2007-06-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

I attended the ignite Boston event at Tommy Doyles last night. Nice venue (a little noisy with people networking at the back) with enough beer for everyone. The presentations were a mixed bag. Scott Burkin did a pitch for his new book on how hard it is to innovate and the tendency of history to make it look easy. Rick Treitman's 5 minute demo of Buzzword was interesting - a Flash word processor. Probably something that someone should have done a while ago. With Silverlight now released I think that Microsoft will be going this way with Word in the not too distant future.

Ignite Boston is a great idea. It will be interesting to see how this
develops.

Tim Bond

Dropped packets

2007-05-24T10:50:00.000-04:00

I love the little snapgear router that I have. Over the weekend I had some free time so I was cleaning up some issues with my linux server and I discovered that I could export the log from the snapgear to the linux box. Now I get daily reports of the dropped packets.
By far the most common packets are udp packets directed at 1026. This is apparently related to MSN messenger. Apparently the source of udp packets are very easy to spoof so I didn’t bother trying to locate any of them. The other one that I just started seeing in quantity are tcp packets to 7212. This is a port used by limewire and related p2p networks. Apparently most of these actually originate in China but for me I found one in Australia and one in

South Korea

2007-05-23T14:20:00.000-04:00

Listened to another edition of DotNetRocks. This one with Frank Savage talking .net on the XBox 360. Maybe this will be my next development platform. It is pretty scary how much horsepower these machines have now that .Net might become the game development platform of choice.

The XNA is something I am planning to look into.

Back in the saddle

2007-05-22T13:13:00.000-04:00

I have said it before and I am sure hat I will say it again but I am back trying to consistently generate some content here. This burst of inspiration from listening to Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/) on dot net Rocks.

Good Process is hard

2006-10-27T22:57:00.000-04:00

I guess this is not exactly rocket science but we were reminded today of the difficulties of creating and continuing to improve a good development process. A year ago we started an initiative to clarify our process framework. We started with enthusiasm and made some good progress in the early stages. Then at some point we dropped the ball and have been languishing for 6 months. That is not to say that we were slacking, we were busy doing important business value adding work. It just wasn't progressing our process improvements.

Hopefully we are back on track but we should learn the lesson and don't fall into that easy trap again.

Martin Fowler on Rails and Good Software Design

2006-07-10T09:54:00.000-04:00

Just watch an interesting video of Martin Folwer presenting a Keynote at RailsConf. He has some interesting things to say about Rails. One of my takeaways is that Rails is not trying to be everything to everybody but rather just aims at database backed websites. It makes a strong opinion about how this kind of app should be structured. Rails is a framework that breaks the mold about quick or well designed. In this environment at least it is possible to be both because Rails takes away a lot of the complexity and drudgery of plumbing.

ASP.Net 2.0 Up Close and Personal 2

2006-06-11T17:03:00.001-04:00

The afternoon was learning more about ASP.Net 2.O and things coming in the future. The big news here is Atlas. Still in a beta stage but they hope to release before the end of the year. Atlas has a couple of components. The simplest way to use it is the updatable panel. This will catch postbacks and convert them to more efficient callbacks. There is also a complete client side framework that is part of Atlas and this holds some interesting alternatives for programming the client. It all compiles down to JavaScript but if it saves having to learn a new language its got to help

The biggest challenge for me is going to be persuading someone to use 2.0 rather than 1.0

ASP.Net 2.0 Up Close and Personal 1

2006-06-11T17:03:00.000-04:00

My pre-conference Lecture was a view on ASP 2.0. The first part was overviewing the new features of 2.0. There really are a bunch of things that they have made very easy. One of the biggest things is that they have wrapped much of the extra functionality with 'provider' interfaces. This means for example that we can use our own authentication and still use their built in controls just by implementing a provider interface to our API.

TechEd First View

2006-06-11T11:54:00.000-04:00

I feel like a real newbie. I have been to other conferences before but I
don't think that any of them have been on quite the same scale as TechEd.
The Boston Conference Center is totally overwhelming.

Good article on SP or not SP

2006-06-08T10:03:00.000-04:00

Adam Mechanic has written a great little article supporting the use of stored procedures as the only way to access Databases. I think he is pretty much right but there are always exceptions…

http://www.simple-talk.com/2006/06/06/to-sp-or-not-to-sp-in-sql-server-an-argument-for-stored-procedures/

On Using 'using'

2006-03-07T15:27:00.000-05:00

I read Richard Hale Shaw's recent post and while I don't agree with the article he refers to I don't agree with his suggestion to avoid using using.

As Richard states when the using includes the declaration it is a useful construct and significantly you DO get the compiler generating an error if the object is used outside the scope.

In the case where the object is declared before the using I don't think that it is any easier to remember to not use an object after calling Dispose than it is to remember to not to call it outside the scope of the using. Also support from the compiler is equally lacking in both cases.

It seems to me that just because it can be used to write invalid code is insufficient reason to ban a statement that make code clearer and with clearer scoping of IDisposable objects.

SD Best Practices 2005

2005-09-26T19:31:00.000-04:00

In Boston for SD conference for the week.

This morning attended a tutorial "A brief tour of responsibility based design". It was very brief. My little group seemed to want to miss the point of the design exercises and there wasn't much time for them either so I was disappointed with this one.

The keynote was interesting. Michael Schrage was talking about the software development process and was talking on the theme of the software development process being a market i.e. driven by market forces. In support of this he quoted the "Perverse incentives => Perverse Outcomes" idea. He also had some interesting facts about the Win95 Beta program and how Microsoft got so many beta licenses (400,000 ) that they got about a $Billion in subsidy to help them fix their product. He didn't really take any of these ideas to a conclusion though so although it was entertaining I was left pondering.

The afternoon was spent with Ken Schwaber. He is an excellent evangelist for Scrum and we had an entertaining afternoon even if it was not as described (no Bud Selig).

Code Camp 4

2005-09-26T19:27:00.000-04:00

Another wonderful event Thom did a great job. Didn't attend a huge number of talks but I enjoyed the ones that I did. Chris Bowens did a nice run through of CLR 2.0 things that I will probably borrow for Wednesday.

ILMerge utility

2005-08-22T10:21:00.000-04:00

This sounds pretty interesting. Nice way to simplify installations if nothing else. ILMerge

Evening with Rocky Lhotka

2005-04-07T23:13:00.000-04:00

The coolest evening I have had in a while. I had been planning to go to the Beantown User Group and then our Magenic contractor invited me down to have dinner with Rocky. He gave a brief presentation on his pet subject but the real deal was to get to talk to him for the evening. Sorry Sam I really will try to come to the next meeting.

First Boston Code Brew

2005-01-19T21:56:00.000-05:00

We didn't actually brew any code but it was an informative session. The topic was security, with particular emphasis on developing as a non-admin. Maybe a quarter of the people there were doing this to some degree. I think everyone agreed that it was a good idea in an ideal world but I think that the majority (myself included) felt that the support from the OS was not there yet. There are enough challenges in developing code without having to fight for permission to do things on your machine. If you are interested Robert Hurlbut's Blog has some links to further info.

Boston .Net User Group

2005-01-14T10:41:00.000-05:00

Richard Hale Shaw was talking again this week. This time on Framework 2.0. There is so much there it is going to be a significant learning curve.

I also gave my review of the book that I have been reading Building Solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework(needs registration). The bottom line was that although it is probably a good introduction it didn't really include what I was looking for. So does this count as sharing the stage with Richard Hale Shaw?