There and Back Again : MSDN Magazine

brownfield development – other ideas?

hdierking — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:23:48 GMT

If you haven’t been following it over the last couple of months, we’ve been running a series of articles about brownfield development – authored by James Kovacs, Kyle Baley, and Donald Belcham. The big idea here is that rather than have yet another article or set of articles about implementing some new technology from the ground up (and usually in some kind of contrived scenario), we wanted to show how you can drive incremental improvements into existing codebases (hence the term “brownfield” as opposed to “greenfield”).

For the first of these series’, we wanted to address Web development – traditional ASP.NET development to be more specific. Therefore, we have taken an existing open source project, ScrewturnWiki, and have systematically refactored it along a bunch of different dimensions to produce the following.

Getting Your House in Order	This is part one of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This first part helps to get your house in order with good development practices on an existing codebase, including version control, issue tracking, and automated self-contained build scripts. ASP / ASP.NET; Test / Debug; Web
Testing	This is part two of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This second part focuses on automated testing. ASP / ASP.NET; Test / Debug
XHTML and CSS Improvements	This is Part 3 of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This third part focuses on XHTML and CSS. XML / XSL; Web; ASP / ASP.NET
JavaScript improvements	This article will focus on refactoring ScrewTurn Wiki’s JavaScript using jQuery, and testing it with QUnit.
Improvements Using jQuery and jQuery UI	This is part 5 of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This fifth part focuses on jQuery and jQuery UI. ASP / ASP.NET; Web
Separation of Concerns	This is part 6 of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This installment focuses on improving separation of concerns in Web applications.
Death of a Singleton	In part 6, we moved away from the UI a little and worked more in the code behind the pages. In this article, we’ll continue that work and focus on a specific pattern that is used through the codebase: the Singleton. ASP / ASP.NET
Disentangling Our Tangled Web	This is part 8 of a multipart article series about improving an existing "classic" ASP.NET Web application. This installment focuses on better ways to wire together loosely-coupled applications using dependency injection and an inversion of control container.

So as we bring this particular series to a close, I have 2 areas where I would love to get your feedback.

First, what about this particular series worked – what didn’t? Did you like the intermingled videos – was it helpful that you could also read the articles on Channel9 – did you even notice?

Second, I think that the whole “brownfield” series concept is a repeatable one. What other series’ would you like to see? Some things that come to mind include:

Breaking a monolithic architecture in to something more service oriented
WinForms refactoring – could go a bunch of different ways here
Leveraging the cloud in existing apps
Bring exposing workflows as first class citizens
etc?

Thougts?

2010 Column Planning

hdierking — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 02:55:02 GMT

It’s that time of year once again where I go through my column lineup to see how individual columns are performing and then use that data, along with various other inputs (like what topics I think are emerging and want to get ahead of, etc.) to determine next year’s column lineup. I want to extend my process to you and get your feedback on which columns are working well and which ones aren’t. Additionally, just to give you a bit of additional insight, here is some of the data that I’m looking at as I go through the process. Obviously, this is just one dimension of performance, but it’s also one that has a pretty large sample size so I generally trust it more than I do other measures, such as the “5-star” ratings.

So give me your thoughts. If it were up to you, which columns would you run more frequently? Which ones would you cancel? Or more generally, is there anything on this chart that surprised you?

Out On Paternity Leave..again

hdierking — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:31:54 GMT

You may remember the last time this happened. Well, it’s here once again. I’ll be away from the office, off of email – and more importantly, not processing your article submissions from 6/22 – 7/20. Feel free to go ahead and submit them to mmsubmit@microsoft.com – just don’t expect a response until after I get back and get through the mounds of email that I will inevitably have.

We’ll be traveling all over this time, from St. Louis, MO to Houston, TX to Birmingham, AL – so if you’re in any of those cities, maybe I’ll see you around!

Announcing a New Series: From Web Dev to RIA Dev

hdierking — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:24:31 GMT

I’m sitting here in my hotel room at MIX 2009, where a ton of really huge announcements were made today. In a much more scaled down attempt at continuing that tradition, I want to announce that starting in May, we are launching a 9 week series focused on introducing ASP.NET Web application developers to creating rich internet applications – and introduce a few other patterns along the way to help create better Web software.

The approach will take an existing Web application that has been written in classic ASP.NET and refactor parts of it based on the goals of each installment. Some of the specific details are still being worked out, but I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to James Kovacs, the guy who’s going to be working them out, hopefully with some help from you. I’ll let James post separately on his thoughts and initial items that he would like feedback on, but wanted to at least be the first one to tell you all how excited I am about this upcoming series!

I’m Moving…

hdierking — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:47:06 GMT

Well, kind of. One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve watched the traffic patterns for this blog is that you good folks come here more out of interest for stuff related to MSDN Magazine (or actually, thanks to the long tail, developer certifications). That, combined with an invitation from a community of folks that I both highly respect and also consider to be friends outside of work, has prompted me to move my more technical-style posts over to the CodeBetter community. You can find me there at http://codebetter.com/blogs/howard.dierking/. I’ll continue to post magazine-related topics here and may actually expand that a bit (if you’re looking for certification topics, please check out Gerry O’Brien’s blog) – but if you’re interested in what I have to say with respect to software design and coding, please update your links to my new home at CodeBetter.

Oh yea, and did I mention we had a baby?

hdierking — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:14:05 GMT

In my last entry, I mentioned that I was back in the office because of the recent events in the economy. Even with that, I realize that I’ve been pretty sluggish with respect to blogging – probably uncomfortably sluggish for those of you waiting on my to review your article submission.

But really – I had good reason! On January 24th, my wife and I welcomed Sarah Katherine into the world.

Now, I’ll get right on those article submissions…

Back on the Grid...

hdierking — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:48:05 GMT

Well, as it turns out based on recent economic events, it doesn't make as much sense for me to go off on parental leave in February. Therefore, I will be back to reviewing articles shortly. Perhaps I'll even find the time to do some technical blogging again...

Off the Grid in February

hdierking — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 09:51:52 GMT

I know it's been a while since I've blogged. It's not because I don't have a lot of stuff to say - I just haven't really had time to sit down and write it all out (I seem to remember Glenn actually having this same problem - perhaps I'll have to try his approach for being a more effective blogger.) At any rate, this post is more of a news bulletin to let you know that if you submit an article idea any time in February, it will likely go unanswered until March. The reason is that I will be off on parental leave taking care of a new little girl (actually, I'll be the one taking care of her sister while mom takes care of the newborn).

At any rate, I wanted to make sure and let you know so that you wouldn't assume that a lack of response on our part indicated a lack of interest in your article idea.

The Road To a New Web Site - Your Thoughts Please?

hdierking — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:20:07 GMT

We're currently in the process of stepping back and taking a critical look at our Web site to see how you all are using it - and how we can redesign parts of it (big or small) to make that experience better. We are continuously receiving your feedback on existing frustrations and we are working hard to remedy those (as a general fyi, most of the frustrations have to do with navigation). However, in order to get a sense of whether we need to look at some of the more fundamental metaphors for the site experience, we have created a short survey which seeks to get an idea of the types of tools and degrees to which you interact with some of the modern social Web applications.

You can access the survey here. It's only 8 questions, so it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

Thanks in advance for helping us to create a better online experience for you.

More Code?

hdierking — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:13:45 GMT

I received my monthly progress report today on how good a job you all feel we're doing on the MSDN Magazine Web site. In short, it seems like the numbers are down a bit from last month, and in culling through the verbatim responses, there was one theme that I was surprised about. Many people that responded to our survey said that they wanted more code.

I have to confess that I need some help clarifying this one. Nearly all of our articles have code in the body of the article - and at least 1/3 of them have a complete sample application that can be downloaded as reference.

So can you help me better understand the "more code" request here? Are you guys wanting...

more articles with complete sample applications?
more code displayed in the body of the article?
better integration of our code explorer tool with the article?
something else entirely??

Call for Papers on Software Testing

hdierking — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:15:37 GMT

One of the fun aspects of my job is that I get to work with some really brilliant folks - and every now and then they give me the opportunity to participate in some of the things that they are involved with. One of those cases as of recent is the 6th International Conference on Information Technology. Test Run author, Dr. James McCaffrey is heading up the software testing track for the conference and invited me to also participate as a track chair.

Check out the software testing track description here, download the template for submitting a paper, and send it to James here.

"Pimp Your IDE" Sweepstakes

hdierking — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:27:02 GMT

So firstly, let me just answer the question that I'm sure you're asking: No. We weren't able to get Xzibit.

(seriously though - X - If you want to break into the software game - email me...)

With that out of the way, I did want to let you know about a sweepstakes that we are sponsoring in partnership with TechWeb. As with any sweepstakes, the game is simple - go to the website and register. That's it. At the end of the day, we're going to be giving away up to $10,000 in software from a variety of different companies. Check out the website for more information.

SharePoint Goodness

hdierking — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:57:06 GMT

SharePoint is one of those technologies for me that is large enough in scope and ambition that I am simultaneously in awe of it and confused by it. To elaborate on the confusing aspect, SharePoint feels like it has multiple masters - more specifically, it's hard to know who should be paying attention to it. Is it a system admin type of product? Is it a developer platform? Is it a collaboration portal for use by regular users. The answer, which speaks both to the power and the confusion, is "absolutely yes".

I personally buy into the vision of SharePoint as a web application platform. I don't think we're there yet, but it makes a lot of sense to me that we'll get there. That said, it's still really confusing as a developer to know where to get started with SharePoint (although Ted has done a fantastic job at trying to help dense folks like myself). I was recently forwarded an email, however, with some great resources for getting started as a developer. First, there's the Web site http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/ - there are a lot of great jumping off points here. There's also a great set of getting started Webcasts. For more information on that, check out Paul's post.

Check it out.

TechEd 2008 - Great Time/No Voice

hdierking — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:50:07 GMT

This year's TechEd was a fantastic experience - thanks again to everyone who came out to the MSDN Magazine booth and to everyone who came to my session on how to be an author - even though I had completely lost my voice. The XBox 360 giveaway was a huge success as you can see from the pictures - congrats to everyone who won!

Following are some pictures from the event - enjoy - and hope to see you next year!

TechEd Slides

hdierking — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:50:00 GMT

Hi everyone - well, it's now time for life to get back to normal. Parental leave is over. TechEd is over. Back to the grind for me. Thanks to everyone who come out to my TechEd session on how to become a MSDN Magazine author. I hope that you found it to be good information and even mildly entertaining given the fact that my voice was shot.

I've posted the slide deck as an attachment to this post. If you weren't able to make the presentation, there's a bunch of helpful bits in the deck to get you on your way to becoming the next world's best selling technical author!