My main issues with MS MVC is the fact that it tries to be something very similar to RoR. I feel this way because Model View Controller can be done without MS MVC. As a matter of fact as I have mentioned ad-nauseaum Dan and I have built and MVC driven framework a while back. So if I am interested in just the simplest most straightforward way to plug MVC into ASP.NET – thats the way to go – just build a small and simple action framework / router. No tag-soup either. I suppose I have to revisit this after ASP.NET 4.0 is out because it will incorporate routing.

Having said all that as a preamble, I would be silly not to study up on MS MVC. There are some aspects I really do like about it. The great enforcement of separation of concerns for starters.

As I looked over the web to find some decent examples of people who have blazed trails in this area I came across Karl Seguin’s Canvas MVC sample app. It was written with one specific purpose in mind: as a simple learning application that illustrates a good way to build an MVC app. In my opinion this app is a resounding success. It has enough code to illustrate the majority of work that one has to deal with (i.e. data entry, paged lists etc). And it doesn’t try to throw every possible scenario in the mix. The result is a well structured easy to follow sample. Believe me I have looked at numerous different ones out there and this is by far one of the better designed samples. Love it !

I would also like to juxtapose the opinions of Sam and Fowler with the absolutely shameful way that MS has been acting toward Jamie Cansdale who had the gall to be smart enough to figure out how to create a VS Express Add-In without using MS’ plugin architecture and keys. This whole scene stinks to high heaven. No wonder people are leaving the realm of MS centric development. And the more people leave the more brainshare alternate technologies gather. In addition the more people leave the more pressure there will be on companies to implement projects with alternate technologies. I remember the days when VB was very young and most corporations were advertising for PowerBuilder developers. We are now in a similar cycle. For Pete’s sake if you have guys like Scott Hanselman going to Ruby conferences and blogging that he is a “closet railer ” (ok thats my term ), then you know somethings up.

UPDATE 6-3-07: Frans Bouma who is an ISV responds at length to the ridiculous crap the MS is pulling with Jamie. You know, the “anything but MS” camp has been accusing MS for many years of this crappy behavior. I always thought there was a lot of posturing but it looks like they were right all along. MS really is a bully.

Some would argue that code behind files are the equivalent of the controller in an MVC model. That assumption is incorrect. Code behind is more akin to a View Helper but not the same as a controller. The reason being plain and simple that in a well constructed MVC system, the controller can be used to drive all sorts of front ends and in our Softie world the code behind is pretty well married to either a web page or windows form.  

I have to tell you that without some of the work we did for SkillJam Technologies in 2005/2006 I would  not know or appreciate these systems. Again, as a typical Softie one has very little exposure to this approach. It reminds me of trying to explain the color blue to blind person – or being married to a single person. Its an experiencial thing. But once you’ve seen it work … oh boy you don’t ever want to go back to the old way of building apps.

It is remarkable to me that both the Java based world of Struts and Ruby on Rails world have the notion of a routing table. In the .NET community there is no equivalent, save perhaps the Windsor project and PathNET ( to tout our own horn a little bit) The PathNET framework that Dan and I have deployed at SkillJam contains a routing table . As a matter of fact, PathNET is essentially very similar to Struts and RoR in its ability to map a call like http://download.skilljam.com/WebSite/Site/Downloads/Login to an action that intercepts the Request and based on a routing table takes appropriate actions (hence Action Framework) . The whole concept is so similar to RoR and Struts that it just tickles me.

There are other aspects of the Java / RoR universe that maybe foreign to Softies.We are just now getting into the idea of entity objects and a first class Object Relational Mapper in ADO.NET 3.x ( all the LINQ technology). Mind you the best product of this breed has been around for 5 years – LLBLGen. Trust me when I say it is better than LINQ and better than even Hibernate. But alas, I imagine Microsoft’s Evangelism and Marketing engine will advertise LINQ  to such an extend that those few of us who are pointing the way to a better product will be drowned out completely by the collective hype generated. Bummer. I am really not looking forward to all the wannabe’s who have been spreading the Gospel Of The Stored Procedure changing their tune and talking about ORM technology as though they had invented it.

Anyway is there a point to this post? Why yes! I want to go on record as saying that PathNET with its ActionFramework and usage of LLBLGen can hold its own with many of the areas of Java Frameworks and RoR.>We even have scaffolding thanks to a beta that LLBLGen is putting out.

And more importantly PathNET has something that RoR or equivalent Java tools do not have . It’s called ActiveContent, and it is basically the marriage of an Action Framework to a Content Management System which builds on the unmatched capabilities of ASP.NET.  Microsoft did “wrap” all aspects of a web application when they released ASP.NET. We take advantage of this fact by providing a way to relate content to actions and those actions to server controls. I know this sounds a little abstract, especially if you have never seen an Action Framework do its thing, but trust me this is some very cool technology. I hope to find some sort of paid project work that allows us to continue the work on this tool. Imagine being able to change the way an application executes without having to mess with the code of the app.

At SkillJam we dealt with a company that had 100+ partners, each of which had a slightly different looking site (some more drastically different than others) . Rolling out a Partner Site was always a pain point for the team, especially when there was a lot of custom work to be done. PathNET was well on its way to allow non technical people to change a site design including the way code executed and the workflows of an application without writing code.

Unfortunately SkillJam imploded under some business management issues. If we would have had another 6  moths of concentrated develioment we could have finished this tool. Bummer.

Anyeway. PathNET does stack up pretty well in a comparison. We are short on some of the Testing goodness that is built into RoR. And while RoR has migrations we have versioned instances of ORM models.  Nonetheless PathNET has best of three worlds in severla key areas

The ActiveRecord approach requires exactly one line of Ruby code and no YAML or XML. Simply create the class with the right name:  class Person <ActiveRecord::Base; end

Did you see that? 1 line of code !

Ok, I am a big skeptic when it comes to frameworks and tools. They all work nicely when you have an ideal environment, but what if you have to manipulate them under the hood. What if you are working with the legacy schema from hell? Well, there are examples that show what to do and how to override functionality to make ActiveRecord do your bidding.

I’m not a Java developer, yet I found this book well worth my time. Hope you will too.

Did I get your attention? Good!

I am reading “Founders at Work” – Stories of startups early days – a collection of interviews with the founders of ArsDigita, Blogger, Marimba, 37Signals, Lycos, Flick, SixApart, PayPal and many more, written by Jessica Livingston and published by Apress.

It is part educational, part entertaining and part infuriating – in short it’s a pretty good read.

One of the more interesting bits I came across were the opinions and experience of Philip Greenspun, founder of ArsDigita.  

When discussing the profession of programmers, Greenspun said the following:

“ Programmers have not been professionals [in the way of a lawyer of doctor –TW] because they haven’t cared about quality. How many programmers have you asked “Is this the right thing, is this good for the users?” They reply “ I don’t know  and I don’t care”.  It’s no surprise that programmers salaries are headed down to what an illegal immigrant working at a slaughterhouse in Nebraska would get paid. …. You never know what most programmers have accomplished…. Its hard to say what the average programmer working at a large company has accomplished. Maybe he or she knows, but from the outside the projects are so big and their contributions were so small….”

Most readers of my blog would vehemently disagree. That’s because most readers of my blog care very much about their work. At the same time I must say that Greenspun has a point about the decline of the value of a programmer. People who were Software Engineers in the 90’s magically became Architects in the last 5 years. All the while the term Architect as used by a majority of companies I’ve talked to simply stands for “ A developer who knows his stuff “.  Seriously. The currency of Architect these days is the same thing that used to be called Lead Devs. That’s before .NET and various Java frameworks came along and folks with a little something on the ball started talking GoF and Patterns. Hey you know Patterns? You must be an Architect. Who can blame them.   

The evolution of our industry continues to amaze and abhor me in equal amounts.  From people who write entire applications by copying whatever they can find on Google, without much understanding of what they are building, to Managers and Decision Makers who really are completely lost when it comes to current technology. It’s scary.  And somebody please tell me why our industry continues to attract these business plan astronauts who have no clue whatsoever when it comes to managing a good tech company.  E

Even Greenspun points out that his company made a mistake of hiring the wrong managers. All in a quest to grow quickly. Here is another quote from the book: “ Consider McKinsey which holds itself out as one of the worlds leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business. They say they’ll never grow their company more than 25% in a year because otherwise its too hard to transmit corporate culture. So if you are trying to grow faster than 25% ask yourself what you think you know about management that McKinsey doesn’t know. “

Its not just the business aspect of management that has been under fire. How tech managers do you know who are not familiar with anything remotely based on the current crop of technology. Heck I work with .NET every day and even I feel somewhat lost when it comes to latest batch of wonderful stuff from Redmond.  Are we on  .NET 3.5 ?  Holy smokes ! Most people are barely scratching the surface of 2.0.  

While we are on the subject of new and wonderful improvements in .NET Who amongst you does not like LINQ? Dan Madoni and I were commiserating the other day about the state of affairs in ADO.NET. Why try to bolt some declarative semi-SQL like syntax on top of ADO. Where is the syntax checking? Trust me, ORM’s can be built just as efficiently in a way that utilizes all the advantages of a compiled language. Look at Frans Bouma’s product LLBLGen. It does everything that LINQ can do and does it better.  Maybe it’s not so fashionable these days to come down on the side of compiled languages. What with the success of RoR and Ruby.  I’ve been working with RoR on the side, just doing some basic exercises, and you know what –it’s the same friggen problem. I mistyped one little word in Notepad and at runtime everything goes to hell. This sort of stuff is caught in the IDE in C# long before it gets into the compiler. OK, granted both Ruby In Steel and Komodo profess to handle this, but I haven’t worked with them and can’t say.

This weird evolution I’ve been watching does not stop with developers and managers. I’ve also witnessed changes in customer behavior. For whatever reason in the past 3 years I have heard more and more about customers who engage tech companies without any sort of deep reference check. Most of the time it seems that it is the Business Units themselves who engage these tech providers. Consequently there is a distinct lack of tech knowledge at the customers side. The bigger the companies the more prevalent the problem. No reference checks or hard product tests. These sort of sanity checks  used to be done by the customers IT Management .  In many cases the in house IT teams are not able to keep up with the technology used by the consulting and tech solution providers.  In some cases the in house teams were decimated by dreams of offshoring grandeur, or some other aspect of business reorganization. That may also contribute to this issue.

Certain companies take a different, more pragmatic approach. These organizations enter into contracts in a manner that shifts all the risk onto the vendor. I completely sympathize with these companies.  Essentially they stipulate that the project will be built on the basis of a small engagement fee. The customer will not pay the lions share of the money due until the project is done and working.   Of course I’ve also heard it told that these terms were creatively designed by the solution providers sales team.  ( nee Business Mgmt Astronauts) No matter who came up with the idea,  put yourself in the shoes of the management of the tech corp that just signed a LOE or contract containing these terms.  That company is going to be under tremendous pressure because the entire transaction is running in reverse. Instead of selling already built and tested code base, what is frequently being sold is a modification of the company’s product and as such will be susceptible to all the issues and fallacies of new code.

Some shops with very strong quality practices can pull this off and prosper. Most shops I’ve seen can’t. Most shops I’ve seen do not work from the basis of a consistently designed architecture. Instead, whomever is free at a given point is assigned the task to make modifications to the core product. I suppose this is done because Management doesn’t understand some of the finer details of the work. Programmer become blocks on project plans that can be plugged in and moved around as needed. (never mind the fact that this is a huge misconception)  Couple that mess with the fact that  programmer rather rewrite code than refactor it and you have the makings of a continued mess.

I’m not surprised that these various external forces drive so many good programmers into situations where they just become glorified puzzle solvers. If you are part of a good team with high standards of quality, count your blessings. If you work on a solid product that can withstand the vagaries of continuing changes in the business, count you blessings and if on top of that you work in a company that is driven by a sensible sales and growth strategy thank your lucky stars or God or whatever force you believe in that helped you find this place. It is indeed a rare company.

Automatic RadRails configuration: if your choose your Instant Rails “rails_apps” subdirectory as your workspace, then all of the RadRails paths (to ruby, rake, ri, rdoc, etc.) will be automatically set.

Well hot dog it really worked. So now I’ve got some nice way of working with RoR. At least until the next neat IDE comes along.

“…..Ruby does not support multiple-inheritance. Personally, I have mixed feelings about that, but the fact of the matter is, you can accomplish almost exactly the same thing using modules.

Consider this ActiveRecord scenario. In Basecamp, we allow files to be attached to both messages, and comments. One way to do this would be to have both messages and comments inherit from a common ancestor, via single-table inheritance. Alas, the two models (in our case) are different enough that STI is not a viable option here. ….”

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