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I have lost interest in blogging. Consequently there are a lot less posts on my site. It seems the .NET dev landscape has changed. When I started blogging, every day brought some new adventure in .NET land. Lately the code that has been coming out of MS has left me a little cold. Take all the brewhaha over the Entity Framework. Congrats for figuring something out that some of us have been using for over 5 years.

I wanted to point to Frans Bouma’s post in which he outlines in great detail for the uninitiated developer that EF is not necessarily the greatest thing since sliced bread. Especially with marketing oriented PR that creates some sense of FUD. As in “oh my god we must use this thing from MS because its the future”. Baloney. I have used LLBLGen for 5 years and have staked my business on it. With a good amount of success I might say. So don’t believe everything you read in the MS propaganda.

Audi R8 - Wow

26 January, 2008 (20:27) | General |

My neighbor who writes for car magazines had this Audi R8 in his driveway. That is one sweet car.

420HP , 0-60 in 4.6 seconds. Base Price in the US about $110K - which is actually not bad for that sort of car. And it even looks pretty just sitting there. Audi really has come up with some amazing cars lately.

East German Restaurant in SF

22 January, 2008 (17:37) | General |

Most people who read this blog are familiar with my “other” claim to fame. Well it turns out that even though as they say “you can’t go back again” - meaning you cannot turn back time and revisit past points in your life, there are ways to have the next best thing. Here is a place in San Francisco I am really looking forward to visiting soon.

The Microsoft Missing-In-Action Pack

22 January, 2008 (15:48) | General |

I can see why more and more developers refuse to deal with Microsoft and turn to open source tools. Today I had a first rate experience with MS corporate nonsense. As you may know, for almost a year I have been back in the world of software consulting. We have done really well in this time and delivered a number of nice projects for companies like Chevron, Kaiser, NxTV and more.

Recently I became interested in furthering our marketing and educational goals by joining the Microsoft Partner Program. On the surface this seemed like a good idea. Any small business can stand some help from larger manufacturers, especially when that business is reselling technology of that large corp. Its a nice symbioses when it works. (Please note that you need a MS Live ID to access the site)

As a Partner organization, one of the most appealing benefits was the availability of bundled software for the purpose of testing and in-house development. Its called the Action Pack. When I called to obtain a license for this Action Pack I entered the ninth circle of hell - namely Customer Support.

For some reason MS has a requirement that every company that signs up for the Action Pack needs to watch some form of training video and take an assessment exam. No problem - lets do the quickest one because time is money. Lets do the 30 min presentation on Expression Web.

No dice.

When I navigated to the assessment page it wasn’t working. Three calls to the support line at the Partners Program resulted in more frustration . I wasted almost two hours on something that should be a no-brainer and just work.

Support personnel didn’t even have the most basic answers. When I asked them why Microsoft makes you watch a novice level 30 minute video, in order to obtain sever software that requires years of experience, nobody had an answer.

At some point I asked for a supervisor. “Oh they can’t talk to you, they are busy on other calls.” I left my number and was assured someone would get back to me. When asked how long I would have to wait the answer was - you guessed it - “Oh I don’t know…. I dont know how long their call is”.

I have yet to hear back and its been about five hours. That’s some darn long call those supervisors are on ! Probably another ticked off customer.

The only reason support personnel can act this ignorant and lazy is because management allows this.

I have for many many years held the position that most developer certification programs are absolute bogus. My experience with the MS Partner Program is really starting to remind me of the cert system. Its leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Maybe someone at the Partner Program comes across this post and cares enough to answer.

UPDATE: I went back to the site and tried the ASP.NET exam. That one worked. Without needing to see any video one could start the assessment. I still don’t get the value of having people answer “How do you tell VS Express to use a different page than default.aspx as start up ” in order to qualify for server software. I still hope someone from the Partner Program reads this and hopefully calls whatever manager is responsible for Customer Service on the carpet.

Yes Alice… WCF is fast

7 January, 2008 (19:16) | General |

Forgive the Honeymooners reference. I came across some statistics by Steve Maine that are quite noteworthy.

Now even if you take these numbers with a grain of salt, it looks like WCF is darn quick in comparison to Websphere. Actually its quick in comparison to ASMX web services as well. Something like 30%-50% faster. Nice.

.NET 3.0 hosted on IIS with an Http binding and XML encoding offers 124% better throughput than the fastest WebSphere/EJB Web Service implementation tested; and 46% better throughput than the JDBC (no entity beans) WebSphere implementation tested.

.NET 3.0 self-hosted over Http/XML offers 225% better throughput than the fastest WebSphere/EJB Web Service implementation tested; and 113% better throughput than the JDBC WebSphere implementation tested.

.NET 3.0 with binary encoding over a TCP binding offers 488% better throughput than the fastest WebSphere EJB Web service implementation tested; and 284% better throughput than the JDBC WebSphere implementation tested.

Its good to know .NET

4 January, 2008 (17:01) | General |

“…Late last month, Info-Tech Research Group said its survey of 1,850 businesses found .Net the choice over Java among businesses of all sizes and industries, thanks to its promotion via Visual Studio and SharePoint. Microsoft is driving uptake of the .Net platform at the expense of Java,” says George Goodall, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech.”

Excerpted from an InfoWorld Article on how Java is becoming the new Cobol.

Beverly Hills has changed

10 December, 2007 (19:27) | General |

I went to pick up a present this morning - in Beverly Hills. Had not been down Rodeo Dr. in a while. Its not my kind of place. Tourists like it though.

So there I was walking along Via Rodeo, with a gaggle of tourists from all over the world, seemingly the only people up on Rodeo at the ungodly hour of 10AM, when I saw some of the decorations and thought a picture tells it best.

Locals will tell you that Rodeo is not at all what it used to be. Somewhere during the recession of the early 90’s a lot of the smaller unique specialty shops went out of business and were replaced by Pottery Barn and The Gap.

Yes there still are some international mega-boutiques. Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton - all the usual suspects. But strictly local shops have dwindled away. And what good is Louis Vuittin or Tiffany when you can find them in every upscale mall in the country. Rodeo at one time had stores that you could not find anywhere else.

As I walked along, all I could think of was a visit I had with the brokerage of Drexel Burnham Lambert over twenty years ago. I worked for a gentleman at the time who was a member of the family that owns Pep Boys. He and parts of his family did business with Michael Milken, the broker who almost single handedly created the Junk Bond Market of the 80’s. Milken worked out of DBL until he was busted and went to Club Fed for quite a number of years.

It seems ironic that the street that once, more than any other on the West Coast, stood for incredible wealth and decadence has been taken over by the Pottery Barn’s of this world. And if you are a tourist who wants to see some unique stores and very chi-chi LA Westside merchandise as opposed to mass manufactured kitsch - I recommend you check out Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

With the white-flight of the past 20 years…. oh excuse me, that was so un-pc ! With the shifting demographic percentages of the Los Angeles populous, and the ever increasing westward pressure of immigrants it seems that Santa Monica has become the new favorite locale of smaller merchants. (Hey don’t laugh, I am an immigrant too)

Nice idea

6 December, 2007 (06:16) | General |

Just a quick link to Eilon Liptons Generic ASP.NET control. She asks ” Did you ever want to have a Repeater<Customer> control on your page? And its events were all strongly typed to recognize that each row was bound to a Customer object?”

ScottGu bucks the trend and runs the risk of….. succeeding !

3 December, 2007 (10:41) | General | No comments

Oren Eini has a post that doesn’t pull any punches. All I can say is ditto! At the same time I am so impressed with the direction Scott Guthrie has taken. Don’t know how he manages not to run into the same bureaucratic hassles but it seems that his team is making some good choices. Yes MVC will be the talk of the town for a while, but the real story to me is using Subsonic based code for data access.

There are two reasons I am saying this. First of all, MVC while nice and cool when baked into System.Web, is something that Dan and I have been using for quite some time. Our framework PathNET has had MVC for almost 2 years. Thanks to Dan mostly (gotta give the guy some props). So having MVC is not as big of a deal as the data access story. To me this is where the real interesting stuff takes place. Data Access has been one of those MS genetic afflictions that they’ve messed with since the days of the Dynaset (remember that?) .

Every couple of years without fail someone would come up with yet another version of data access. After so many years it does get tiresome. Therefore any change from the dominant paradigm of data access at MS is welcome. I know, your probably saying “what makes you think that this new code wont change just as much as the old code did”. Your right. I don’t know. But the fact that Scott is able to get this stuff into ASP.NET is big on so many levels. And frankly….. I have more respect for Rob Connery and his skills than some of those folks that have been trying to reinvent the wheel at MS without looking at a schema of a wheel. Wadda mess!

Windows does the strangest things

28 November, 2007 (20:26) | General | No comments

A friend of mine sent a link for an MS KB - What to do when your computer starts to play classical music.

How depressing

28 November, 2007 (13:14) | General | 2 comments

Generally I am not a fan of Michael Moore at all. I dislike the man quite a bit. But here is something that makes aspects of our day to day existence somewhat depressing.

Thanksgiving on the Internet

24 November, 2007 (08:17) | General | No comments

I would hate to be newegg or fry’s today……

Project Server 2003 - the database from hell

22 November, 2007 (08:52) | General | No comments

Been doing some work against the db that ships with Project Server 2003. Oh boy! Count your lucky stars if you dont have to touch that thing. Its awful. Anyway, my customer was kind enough to send this link to a series of steps to configure a VM of Project Server 2007 ( VPC Image ) . That’s useful. PSS 2007 has a somewhat better structure in its db than 2003 but its still a big buggah (and that’s a technical term right there).

Connecting the data access technology dots

11 November, 2007 (15:53) | General | 1 comment

Both Roger Jennings and Rick Strahl are pointing out, each in his own way, that LINQ isn’t getting a lot of love in some quarters. Roger connects the dots for slow thinkers like myself and points out that Rob Connery’s contribution of SubSonic to the ASP.NET team actually means that there is a real honest to goodness trend toward using an OSS based tool. And that this choice actually shows a preference of sorts. It would not be suprising if ScottGu denies that connection . But it doesnt matter. What matter is that he took steps to hire Rob and to get people like Phil and Hanselman on his team. Good stuff.

I love SubSonic and have cheered Rob on from afar for as long as he has been toiling on it. At the same time I have not been the biggest fan of LINQ simply because in comparison to other tools it just seems rather lacking. To me. My opinion. Yes its subjective I know. But one reason why I like it when opinion makers like Roger and Rick mention alternate technologies is simply that it helps me when I try to convince a customer to use a particular non-MS tool. I am still amazed on a daily basis how many IT Managers will not consider any tools that don’t come from Redmond. Wow. Talk about drinking the kool-aid. Anyway. Time will tell. For the moment I am excited about the changes taking place in the ASP.NET group.

Of course having some sort of LINQ compatibility is probably in the cards for many tool vendors out there. But in the end, as Roger points out, the fact that LINQ is lacking some very necessary aspects for an ORM just means the alternate solutions will hopefully end up winning the day.

Update: Rocky Lhotka has a way with words and explains in one short paragraph what the core problem with LINQ is - it produces IEnumerable resultsets that are not live updateable. His CSLA framework has been one of the most widely used business object architectures in the .NET industry. He knows what he is talking about.

Oooops

8 November, 2007 (08:37) | General | 1 comment

Yesterday I took part in a meeting with the technical management team of a customer. Picture a room full of about 12 people. Programmers, PM’s, Managers and even the CIO of the company in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was a presentation on the architecture and design of an application we are producing for this company.

I went through the slide deck and explained various aspects such as WCF, Dependency Injection etc. just humming right along. Part of the presentation dealt with the notion of entities and object relational mapping. In a previous meeting I mentioned that a generic datatable or dataset is not the same as a business object. Companies derive a lot of value by modeling the intelligence and domain knowledge of their organization in the form of business objects.

The CIO stirred in his seat and became visibly agitated. He jumped in and made a bit of speech to the effect of ” I don’t care about business objects because they take so long to produce. Most of the time its much faster and efficient to produce a resultset and hand that resultset back from the database to the front end. “

This was my very next slide in the deck. Talk about irony. But it also illustrates some of the difficulties faced by development teams who report to management that was raised on the predominant data access technology produced by Microsoft over the past 15 years. These are the fruits of sowing the seeds of Dynasets, Recordsets and Datasets. Life is funny though.

Anyway, I hope to convince this gentleman just through sheer productivity that there is another way…..

Everyone is a Vice President - Completely Agreed

1 November, 2007 (16:10) | General | No comments

Wes has a neat post about the “Title Wave” that is sweeping the country. In short, it points to a strange demographic that shows an absolute abundance of VP’s.

Well, I can personally attest to that. Having been a VP of Server Dev and a Sr. VP of Technology, the interesting part of both positions was the fact that I still coded my butt off whenever possible. And I hated endless meetings where PM types couldn’t figure out why software wasn?t being built faster.

And while I may personally not give a lot of credence to titles, there are plenty of HR propeller heads that do. Therefore having a bona-fide honest to goodness record of holding a VP rank ( as opposed to the self-made CEO by filing corporate papers) makes all sorts of difference when it comes to salary evals, job search engines and benefits negotiations. It is easier to jump from a start-up VP position to a different company VP level than it would be going from Architect or Director to the same destination. So yes there is a wave, but I don’t blame folks participating.

A good example of Moore’s Law

30 October, 2007 (17:04) | General | No comments

I was discussing the idea of maybe buying one of those fancy WD Terabyte External NAS drives with Jeff Gilbert today. A little while later I came across this image. Times have changed……

If you could work anywhere in the world… where would you go?

29 October, 2007 (17:25) | General | 3 comments

Last night my wife and I were discussing the future. She brought up the idea that once our daughter goes to college we could move somewhere else. She literally said ” well from the looks of your business, you could really work anywhere in the world…”

There is some truth to that. Have you noticed a trend in information workers in the past three years? Seems we are becoming more mobile. WebWorker Daily has some posts on this. And I noted with satisfaction that jobs are staying in the US but moving to smaller towns.

My knee-jerk reaction was that I would love to move to Maui. Rick Strahl shouldn’t be the only German expat .NET guy on the island. Besides he isn’t there half the year anyway :)

Or maybe Kauai might be nice. If I understand it correctly there will be a .NET vacancy on that island in the near future….

The point is that I love the islands. Understandably so because I grew up in a very cold and winter oriented small town.

Well until that point in time when I can sit under the banyan tree in Lahaina with a laptop, I have a wonderful painting on my office wall that allows me to zone out and travel back to the islands as needed.

If you could work anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Hidden costs of offshore software development

28 October, 2007 (07:04) | General | 8 comments

map Rocky pointed to an article called “Considerations in Evaluating Onshore versus Offshore Software Development” which I wholeheartedly agree with. Having led a distributed team in India and two time zones of the US, I can tell you that its not all cake.

Some of the problems we came across ranged from the typical cultural differences to actual management issues within the Indian company.

As far as cultural issues are concerned, it would be typical that the Indian team was given an unrealistic deadline ( mea culpa ) , and everyone would sign up for it without much feedback in terms of how possible the deadline was in the first place. I’ve seen this happen with several organizations and as best as I can tell, there is a real disconnect in the feedback cycle. So when asked ” Can you get this done” the answer was always “Yes”. No matter how ludicrous the schedule.

Another important aspect is the preference of Indian teams for very structured and requirements driven development. I have seen only 2 out of 20 developers who were able to incorporate agile methods. For the most part companies thrive on CMM certifications and “big design / big process up front” development. It is so much part of the culture that I had people leave my team to join CMM Level 5 companies. In a way that is understandable, because being thousands of miles removed from the customer makes it hard to be agile, so big design up front goes a long way toward saving the programmers sanity.

Last but not least another cultural observation. This particular experience may have been due to our Indian vendor / partner having some pretty weak technical management. Whenever there was an unknown factor or an architectural decision, our team would debate as a group for hours on end to find an appropriate solution. That sort of discussion happened several times a week and impacted the schedule quite a bit. I wonder if that something only germane to our specific partner org .

In any case, after months of schedule delays I decided to move the production of a particular piece back to our US team and had made more progress in 2 weeks with 5 developers locally than a team of 20 devs and qa people had made in India in 2.5 months.

Makes me wonder if my experience was just an extreme case. If you have had successful offshore projects, I’d love to hear how it was done. And did you save money in the end ?