Eric and the .NET Framework

How come nobody ever told me about LINQPad?

I need to know so much more about LINQ than I currently do. What I wanted was a “Query Analyser” for LINQ – rather than keep writing code inside Visual Studio.

I can’t tell you how excited I was when I discovered LINQPad.  It is written by Joseph Albahari who wrote C# 3.0 in a NutShell. It is an amazing tool – it does so much more than I expected and appears to be rock solid. Exactly what I was looking for. A big thanks to Joseph.

Even better – no install needed!

The "reddit effect”

Yesterday I posted on Developer vs “the others”.I started to notice lots of comments coming in and then a serious number of page views - probably 10 times my norm.

The reason was it ended up on reddit. This was all rather fascinating for me – I have never been on reddit before…

It is not my usual type of post. It is a post I have been meaning to do for a while and realised it would be something quite different for this 4 year old blog. It was an exercise to see what would happen next if I did it.

What did I learn? The impact of reddit (or any of those similar sites) is you suddenly get a lot of folks turn up on your blog who will literally read just that one post (I tend to read other stuff by the author – but maybe that is just me). They then can draw a huge number of conclusions about you as an individual from that one post. Impressive. Some can do this just by reading other peoples comments about you – without even reading your post. Very impressive.

I am therefore (in no particular order") – a “useless developer”, “have a heck of chip on my shoulder”, “loser, self centered donothing”, “suck”, “smug and arrogant” :-) (Ho hum – it is my review next week)

I learnt a lot about how a post like this would be perceived. Very useful.

Finally a few comments:

• The post is absolutely developer biased. Totally, utterly. That was the intention. I was firmly looking at how it appears from the eye of a developer.
• I wanted to draw attention to some of the problems I see developers have to face day in day out.
• I absolutely was not talking about the relationship with end users. This was about the internal relationship within software companies.
• I do not think developers are always right, can work in isolation or that “the others” serve no purpose. I have been one of “the others” in the past.
• It is not a dig at Microsoft. Sure I see some of the stuff I talked about in parts of Microsoft (and completely absent in other areas) but it is driven by my work with many software companies over the last 12 years.
• With hindsight I should have given more context to the type of companies I was thinking of – namely Independent Software Vendors where the company is about producing software for external organisations to use. Some of the comments back were assuming I was talking more broadly.

Developer vs “the others”

[UPDATED 25th - check out http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/archive/2008/07/25/the-reddit-effect.aspx as well] 

Software companies have (broadly)

• Managers
• Marketeers
• Sales people
• Technical people who don’t code
• Technical people who do code (much as you do) -  henceforth I will refer to these folks as developers. Managers, Marketeers and Sales People will be know as “the others”

What I find interesting is the dynamics of many companies and their approach to developers. The following all bother me…

• “why can’t you just do my job as well?” – “the others” will often try to offload some of their role/tasks onto a developer.
• Interestingly I have never seen a developer ask “the others” to write 50 lines of C++ before the end of the day. Hmmmm…
• “why don’t you understand?” – “the others” will get frustrated that a developer does not understand the “bigger picture”, the “end goal”, the “spreadsheet of numbers that proves it”.
• Interestingly I have never seen a developer get frustrated with “the others” when they don’t understand generics, delegates or JIT compilation. Hmmmm…
• “why don’t you agree?” - “the others” will get frustrated that a developer does not agree when they present a reason for the developer to do something – admittedly based on pretty much no facts, hearsay or a whim.
• Interestingly developers also get very frustrated with “the others” when they do not agree – although typically the developer will have a huge bunch of facts that prove why they are correct. Hmmm….
• “why do you need it?” - “the others” get confused that a developer needs 2 screens or a fast machine or a technical book or wishes to attend some training. By default “the others” prefer to resist any such extravagance.
• Interestingly a developer never gets asked if “the others” should attend conferences, take customers on expensive hospitality trips, huddle up together in offsite planning sessions or get the latest tiny notebook or phone. Hmmmm…

Underlying this is the simple truth

• A developer can do the job of “the others” – maybe (and often) not very well, but they can do it.
• “the others” can not do the job of a developer – not even badly.

I spotted Mike T had posted something similar – and Joel gives a good insight into how to make a developer feel valued.

Is this really me?

You may have spotted that the others in my team have caricatures – well, mine just landed in my Inbox. Cripes – is that really me? I look so … geeky :-)

Great WPF application?

Today I set aside sometime to watch some “random podcasts”. Ok, not that random in that I decided they either had to be about Entity Framework or WPF.

The WPF episode I chose turned out to be a great choice – a real world line of business application which tries to use many of the capabilities of WPF to great effect. I need to watch it once more to really decide how good it is – but certainly it is not another “Windows Forms application implemented in WPF”. Well worth a watch.

Couple of comments:

• This is a real app – hence no source code to share. Sorry.
• A sticky sample is mentioned – available at http://dotnetmasters.com/downloads/TechEd2008DemoCode.zip 
• Oh – did I mention it was all written in Visual Basic :-)

ReMix UK 08 Speakers announced

I will be attending ReMix but currently no one needs me to speak (phew – that would require a lot of learning!). The good news is there are some great speakers now lined up. Mike has called out some of the dev track speakers already but I wanted to quickly mention Bill Buxton. Bill is part of Microsoft Research and has focused on human-computer interaction after starting out in music! I have skimmed some of Bills work before and watched him on a webcast talking through some of the issues and challenges we need to tackle in the area of human-computer interaction. I am looking forward to seeing and hearing him live.

Oh – and nearly forgot to mention a certain Scott Guthrie will also be “doing his thing”. Sweet.

Converting from C# to Visual Basic .NET

I have been playing with tools to convert C# over to Visual Basic - given how many samples only exist as C# :-(. I posted a detailed list + recommendation over on Goto 100.

Biztalk Services adds Workflow – Orchestrate in the Cloud

Just spotted we have added workflow to Biztalk Services.  Sweet.

I am installing SQL Server 2008 – not that I planned to :-)

I am looking at the list of things I planned to do today. It does not say “Install SQL Server 2008 RC0”. Yet here I am at 7pm still playing around with SQL Server.

It went roughly like this.

• My notebook was only running SQL Server 2005 Express SP2
• Microsoft mandated that I applied a security patch a week or so back (I guess to protect Northwind!)
• Yesterday it tried to apply the patch
• Today it tried another 8 times
• By this point SQL Server 2005 Express no longer run.
• I went to VPN in and – failed the security check as I did not have a mandatory fix applied (see above)
• Hmmmm….
• I tried a few things
• Hmmmm
• I uninstalled Express
• I downloaded SQL Server 2008 Express RC0 (about 100MB)
• It installed – yey!
• It run – yey!
• I couldn’t connect to it with SQL Server Management Studio Express
• I couldn’t find a 2008 version to download
• I uninstalled Express
• I went to SQL 2008 on Connect
• I have kicked off a download of a full version of SQL Server 2008 RC0
• I may have it all working again by 9pm this eve :-)

Vista and CHM issues

Every so often I open a CHM and I get the table of contents but no actual contents. I have looked before for the answer, found it, remembered it for a few weeks – then forgotten all about it again.

Maybe if I actually write it down, I won’t forget again (I learn best by writing). The problem is Vista tracks if the file came from another computer (which is a good thing for it to do), marks it as such and “blocks it”. If you go into properties you can unblock it.

An example:

The solution:

The more I learn, the more I don't know...

Or to put it another way - my head is about to explode...

Ok - In real terms I  am on day 9 of my new role and my return to being a developer. I have learnt the following:

• I am very much enjoying looking at code again
• I am currently terrible at writing code (C# or Visual Basic)
• We shipped a lot of new apis and improvements to the languages since .NET Framework 1.1 (somehow the delta never looked quite as big when I was mainly thinking architecture rather than code)
• The world of development has massively moved on.
• There is more quality information to help developers out there than ever before - blogs, videos, screencasts etc. I am grateful to all those content producers in the community.
• Official documentation from MS is still very good - but it has gaps and far less samples than I would like.
• I am falling for Visual Basic 2008 (and I speak as someone with a ; heritage - although I also did a lot with 4GLs)
• Microsoft product groups are releasing APIs faster than I can discover they have released them :-)

How are you all doing?

Visual Basic samples for WPF book - Applications = Code + Markup

Once again, Ged Meads work on WPF catches my eye. A big thanks to Ged, Young Joo and Evan Lim for converting the C# samples over to Visual Basic for Petzolds book on WPF (Only 3 left in stock at Amazon UK - lets get those sold as well - but be warned, the style/approach of this book may not appeal to everyone).

You can find the samples for all 31 chapters on the MSDN Code Gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/petzoldsamplevb. This was a great initiative - I would love to know of any more examples.

P.S. Lets see if we can drive the downloads up - 1320 as of 17th July 2008 :-)

Three good reads on REST

Since 2002 (and .NET Framework 1.0) many of us have digging into Web Services based on SOAP, WSDL and the WS-* specification universe. In 2005 I started to get concerned about the complexity that WS-* was bringing, when ultimately in many scenarios I just wanted to "get something from A to B". I found myself increasingly steering folks away from anything more than simple SOAP - and from time to time I started pointing at a HTTP+XML based solution over SOAP to get great interop. Then in early 2007 I came across REST (short for REpresentational State Transfer) and liked what I heard. A year on and REST is moving away from a niche approach (albeit with a vocal following) to being mainstream (still with a vocal following). Visual Studio 2008 gave us REST support in WCF, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 introduces a REST only way of working with data and operations (ADO.NET Data Services) and the upcoming SQL Server Data Services will be delivered with a SOAP and a REST based interface.

Hence - there couldn't be a better time to understand REST in more detail. Which is why these InfoQ articles caught my eye. I would recommend you set aside 30mins to give them a read through. Enjoy.

1. A brief introduction to REST http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction
2. Addressing doubts about REST http://www.infoq.com/articles/tilkov-rest-doubts
3. REST Anti Patterns http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-anti-patterns 

I especially liked anti-patterns and the first one "Tunnelling everything through GET". I can easily see why folks might do this. I have seen it already in Architecture sessions we have done in the UK. To be clear - this is bad:

http://example.com/some-api?method=deleteCustomer&id=1234

But you will probably need to read the articles to be certain why it is bad :-)

And finally, some more fun with Zoho

Which UK Developer Bloggers do you read regularly?

Over the last two weeks I have built up an impressive FeedDemon collection of top notch bloggers on Microsoft development technology (which is pretty much making my head explode). I have been surprised to find that I have added very few UK based folks to my collection. Surely this just means I haven't looked hard enough yet!!! I would love recommendations (if you have a spare minute to share). I will collate here - but also will try and get something into an upcoming MSDN Flash (which reminds me, I'm away start of next week, therefore I best write the next Flash this week).

UK Dev Bloggers I regularly read are:

• MSFT
• Mike Taulty
• Mike Ormond
• Ian Cooper

Which is a terribly short list. I have others on my list which do some great stuff  (Richard, Guy, Ian etc) - but I am after folks who:

• Dig Deep or Think Deep AND
• Blog in detail about the above AND
• Blog often

Oh - and don't be shy to mention yourself!

Ron Jacobs is back on Channel 9 - endpoint.tv

Ron was the great host of ArCast.TV for many years but he (like myself) has switched role and elected to return to Visual Studio and late nights getting code to run :-) Ron switched to be a technology evangelist like myself - but with a specific focus on WCF an WF. I was wondering how long it would be before he was doing his thing with the camera again. July arrives and he is back on Channel 9 with The Total Noobs Guide to WCF as part of endpoint.tv. This coincides with a new cross team blog just focused on WCF and WF (long overdue?).

The approach he used in his video on WCF is interestingly different to the "norm" - he expects (dare I say demands) that you pause the video and play in Visual Studio for a while before continuing. This is actually what I prefer to do when watching videos - but the extra "prod" worked great for me. What do you think? it is relevant to me as I need to start creating screencasts as part of my new role - and this format appealed (although without my piccy top right!)