The Silly Tum log

ASP.Net Legacy: CodeBehind vs CodeFile

2011-05-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

Just had a couple of hairy weeks with some asp.Net 3.5. We were getting a very irritating
File not found Foobar.aspx.vb error for two pages, and in the end it turned out that the pages were originally migrated for .Net 1.1 and has the page directive
CodeFile, which VS2008 doesnt complain about, but which at runtime gives a horrendous default.aspx.vb file not found error, even though the aspx file should be in the dll.
You should check your page directive and change as follows:

<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="Default.aspx.vb" Src="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="DevNamespace.Default_aspx"%>

<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.vb" Src="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="DevNamespace.Default_aspx"%>

Its been a while!

2011-05-25T14:07:00.001-07:00

So much to do, so little time

Everything becomes LISP

2010-02-21T09:28:00.001-08:00

I came across a couple of blog posts about various languages recently, and the common thread seemed to be features that originated in LISP. Lamba expression, new(ish) in C# would be one of those things. Now LISP has never really taken off. Franz Lisp's Allegro Common Lisp has done solid business down through the years, but I dont think anybody ever got a Lamborghini or an IPO out of LISP (maybe in the days of the LISPmachines, but who knows).
It seems to remain in the Influential category. I like to think of the ML language family as being LISP derived DSLs which just happened to mature into general purpose programming languages. Apple's Dylan started out as a Scheme dialect, and Python is very definitely a re-syntaxed homage to Lisp, and Prolog's lists are very definitely a slightly embarrassed rip-off of Lisps, er, lists.
Now not being a proper computer scientist I never actually studied Lisp in any detail but all the proper computer students always seemed to be blown away by it. It is remarkable that it originated back around the same time as Cobol and Fortran and yet it stays completely futuristic, the language whose time is yet to come -- Lisp.net anyone?

software components industry part 6

2010-01-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

the notes continue -- Ruby on Rails -- the main selling point, unconciously for most users, seems to be the code generation and OR mapping aspects of ROR which for Rails purists is probably a little beside the point but my contention is that without this simplification they would spend a lot of time on boiler-plate database access code and would have less time to concentrate on what they would consider more core and business oriented programming aspects

The System.Configuration Namespace Gotcha : also known as Arrrgh !!&/@x|%*

2010-01-29T15:17:00.000-08:00

From .Net Framework 2 onwards, you have to expliticy include a reference to Configuration namespace -- this is progress?
Otherwise you will get all sorts of strange errors -- having learned .Net programming with Framework 1.0
I keep getting caught by this ... It seems so ... VB6 (and not in a good way :-)
from menu
Project --> Add Reference
stay on .Net tab
scroll down to System.Configuration and select it (they are in alphabetical order thank goodness
click ok and the strange errors and most of the bad feeling will go away

10 million high tech jobs in Jeopardy?

2010-01-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

I hear there may be as many as 10 million high tech jobs in Jeopardy due to Chinese and Indian Competition.
My question is, and I know its been over thirty years since I did geography in primary school
and I haven't kept up and a lot of countries have changed their name, some more than once in
the meantime, but its still embarrassing to have to admit I hadn't heard of this Jeopardy place, and especially if they have 10 million high tech jobs going a begging on account of some sweetheart deal with the Asian powers -- must be a heck of a big country besides which their international diplomacy is top notch to do a deal that size with both India and China? I want to know why the European Union didnt get in there first and offer them double -- in free trade all is fair ... perhaps the Jeopardian government would have retaliated with some kind of trade sanctions but for that many jobs it would be worth annoying them, they may be amazingly technically sophisticated but if they were actually rich I'm sure we would have heard of them ... there was something about a NASA project in Jeopardy a couple of years ago but I thought CNN were mixing it up with Kazakhstan, who do moon shots for the Russians and get upset at comic movies

large and small (software components industry part 6)

2010-01-27T15:06:00.000-08:00

Programming in the small and programming in the large -- CMS's and Business Orchestration frameworks such as Biztalk would be on the large end and programming the Crystal Reports API would be on the small end. You need both but you would hope to need the API level as little as possible!

Virtual companies (software components industry part 5)

2010-01-27T15:03:00.001-08:00

Somebody said software was more like the movies than manufacturing -- and that the virtual companies that make movies would be a better parallel to what happens in programming. I must try to find the link

software components industry - part 4

2010-01-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

this is turning into a set of post-it notes, but never mind even if I'm the only reader it has some purpose :-)
Larger and or multiple monitors and better chairs, might increase your productivity by 10%? Seems like a waste -- high-level languages brought an increase in productivity of 5 times over assembly language (cant imagine what the jump from hexadecimal to assembly was, or from flicking switches and re-wiring patch panels -- I've met two people who were still doing wiring (known as 'knitting' in the nineteen seventies. Jeez.) and as languages without explicit use of pointers and garbage collection have probably brought another immense jump again (I know at least one C++ genius who would roll up his sleeves and used VB6 when he was in a hurry, and lots of C++ heads are unashamed in their adoption of either Java or C# when performance isnt the only goal)
But this is all a bit beside the point -- many of us miss the wood for the trees (self not excepted) -- techniques to increase our productivity by 10 or 50 or more times over current flat levels are required. Programmers are just too expensive. It is all very well spending 30 dollars a day on some guy in India or Eastern Europe when your business is entirely in the US where the equivalent programmer might cost your 200 a day, but you still arent getting a lot of bang for your buck if he is still producing 10 to 200 lines of code a day of plain boiler plate code -- you want a programmer regularly and predictibly producing the equivalent of thousands of lines of code a day. This is the challenge

On Script zealots

2010-01-23T15:28:00.001-08:00

Where did the religious war-fare in programming of script languages come from? It used to be an 'and' not an 'either/or' -- the fanatics should read something like "Programming Pearls" where Bentley is perfectly happy to write in Bash shell, Awk, Sed or Perl if it can get the job done and is perfectly humble about using a profiles and reaching for the C compiler if the interpreted language is too slow to get the job done

software components industry - part 3

2010-01-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

Also, the likes of iPhone application acceptance and the Windows verification programmes(?) taken to an industry-wide level
In the small -- programming language free patterns, templates and code generators, to a certain extent, the likes of programs like Codesmith already do some of this. It should be possible to formalize this -- there are only so many computer programmers out there, and rather than farming out the grunt work to the guys who are lucky enough to live in India and Ukraine it might be better if everybody was working at a higher level of productivity

software components industry - part 2

2010-01-23T15:22:00.001-08:00

I think it needs to be approached from both small and large levels.
1. Trust. Brad Cox is very good on this -- you need an infrastructure for trust-worthy computing, both in the large and in the small,
so things like
a. Code Escrow -- for both commercial and open-source code
b. code testing and verification
imagine the digital certificate agencies, and the likes of the Nevada Gaming Commission (their expertise was mentioned once in connection with trusted electronic voting) and the Defence/Military software agenies of different countries across the world setting up a testing and certification infrastructure for software components and ultimately (and much move complexly) entire software systems

software components industry - part 1

2010-01-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

Gottfried Leibniz wrote "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be regulated to anyone else if machines were used."
He was speaking of the lack of adding machines -- we have come on a bit, but the same sort of thinking needs to be applied to take programming to the next level.
Practically nobody writes their own GUI anymore, even as an exercise, and yet practically everyone still writes their own Database access code despite the existence of tried and tested code generators and Object relational mapping systems

Crying in the wilderness

2010-01-19T05:45:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled across Brad Cox's blog.
http://bradjcox.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html
I read part of his book, ahem, 20 years ago, and its kind of discouraging that most of what he was trying to achieve is no further along -- there are some software component libraries and Objective C got embraced by Next and then Apple, but thats not much of an improvement balanced against the way software has become so complicated in the meantime

The last Version of Windows

2010-01-08T13:54:00.001-08:00

I ever intend to buy ... is probably win 2008 server R2 -- I havent got around to it yet, but it is definitely a lot higher up my list than Windows 7 will ever be. I got a free copy of Vista Ultimate at a launch (win2008 launch ironically) and but for that I think I would have either downgraded to XP or like a lot of programmers I know, just given up and went for Ubuntu. Why would any developer want a brain-damaged version of an OS? By the time you have upgraded to the Ulitmate edition you might as well have bought a proper operating system...

Oh the embarrassment!

2009-11-29T09:15:00.000-08:00

I havent played a Windows game for years literally -- finally installed Prince of Persia 3D (itself not exactly new). Its been so long I couldnt even figure out how to get out of the first room. Thats got to be bad :-)

Gnustep

2009-11-29T09:11:00.000-08:00

One of pleasing things of last few months was getting Gnustep to run under Windows XP -- why you might ask, the answer being it might be a nice way of playing with Objective-C. It seems nice enough, I havent dived in deep so far, but it is a definitely more pleasant than AndLunux for instance, there is the same slightly uncanny feeling of running something Not Windows but so far it hasnt been confusing.

Excellent. TDD xUnit in Ruby

2009-09-09T09:24:00.003-07:00

Somebody else usually gets there first (fortunately) :
http://rubyeyeforthejavaguy.blogspot.com/2008/09/xunit-in-ruby.html

simply VB Unit

2009-09-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

My sucessful conversion to the xUnit section of "TDD By Example" as mentioned in last post, made me think that the boot-strapping technique might be fun to try out with Ruby, Smalltalk and my old nemesis VB6. Looked at VBUnit site while thinking of SimplyVBUnit and realised from the steps that I never used SimplyVBUnit properly, hence my total lack of progress. This could be getting interesting. Will report more, but for me the problem was not having "Break on Unhandled errors" not checked. Cant think why not. (Didnt think is more like:-)

Zowee - into Unit testing at last!

2009-09-09T07:51:00.000-07:00

I have languished at chapter 2 of"Test Driven Development by Example"
the classic by Kent Beck, but unfortunately after 3 years or so, I still find it nearly as unreadable as Craig Larman's majestic but insomnia-curing
"Applying UML and Patterns" -- so today I jumped to the half way point, like a bad murder mystery reader, and discovered part 2 which is a joy where he boot-straps a unit testing framework from scratch in Python.
It is completely enchanting and transcends the whole yawny 'you-should but why bother' reaction brought on by the first section. Almost entirely my fault of course, but the combination of starting from scratch and the test and run cylcle with an interpreted language just brings the whole business to life -- finally I think I am getting it

Great solution - whats the problem again?

2009-09-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

On first glance this seems great but when you dig deeper it starts to seem to make less sense -- HTML to native? Isnt that the opposite of the way we are all going?
http://www.appcelerator.com/
Except almost definitely in the mobile space where pathetic describes the on-board resources and a bit of native would be a god-send.
Having said that the most attractive short cut would be writing apps for the iPhone without having to learn Objective-C (yuk twice, its always made me feel uncomfortable). But not on anything except a Mac with the iPhone SDK though -- why would you bother? Unless of course you wanted to build a Hackintosh first :-)

http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-to-build-a-hackintosh-with-snow-leopard-start-to-finish

Another tech that wont die

2009-09-09T01:47:00.000-07:00

'Classic' ASP is still out there, unloved and almost forgotten, but not by the programming community!
People have been working on MVC and ASP.Net-friendly frameworks for it ...
ASP to ASP.Net:
http://code.google.com/p/claspdev/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/asp/ClassicAspFW02.aspx

ASP MVC:
http://robrohan.com/2006/09/19/simple-mvc-asp-framework/
(use 7zip on the zip file, windows doesnt recognise it as a file)

http://zend.lojcomm.com.br/goodies/asp-xtreme-evolution/

Nice article on web based apps

2009-09-09T01:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/
Some nice links as usual on SEO and suchlike (goes right over my head but however:-)
Also mention of Ruby on Rails, I must track back through his previous posts

playing with Django

2009-09-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

the framework, not the guitarist :-)
Finding it very like Ruby on Rails so far, not a surprise. The pleasure with the two (RoR and Django) is that they pretty much Just Work and get out of your way, unlike certain other frameworks which pretend to be MVC. I've never been particularly a fan of MVC but there is a logic and rhythm to them when you work through an exemple with Rails or Django. Incidentally, on the language level I still dont warm entirely to either Ruby or Python, they seem like re-threads of Smalltalk -- but the web frameworks definitely know how to win friends and influence people

The joys of Project Euler

2009-07-31T03:20:00.000-07:00

Many years ago (well, about twenty two years ago actually, but thats more than half a life-time, my life-time so far) I used to be able to do quadratic equations in my head. I only discovered this remarkable fact when I did a college maths exam and completely forgot that I had a calculator with me (at the time calculators were still banned in state exams so I had been used to not using one)
I had never been a math wiz, in fact I had barely scraped by and had been uncomfortable with most aspects of the subject. I only took it as a university subject because there were compulsory subject mixes and I didnt think I had a choice. Suddenly around age 20, when most real mathematicians are ascending to the height of their powers, I suddenly got it, became deeply interested and actually enjoyed quadratic equations, differentials and other arcane stuff. However, the opportunity to use them never really came up, and only over the last couple of years I was getting nostalgic and looking around for something a bit out of the way to stimulate my brain, and even borrowed an advanced post-graduate college text from a friend. But it has just been sitting there.
Then, about two weeks ago I stumbled across Project Euler. I'm pretty sure I had come across it before but it never appealed, but for some reason this time I was intruiged enough to join up. So far it has been great fun. Some of the problems are gimmicky, parlour game stuff and sub-Sudoku numerology tricks,
but some are serious maths and a lot of them are very hand for exercising your brute force programming skill. The forums are great as well, I felt that much more intelligent just reading some of the ingenious solutions other people had come up with. Interestingly, I have found myself using different programming languages, from the stage when the numbers got beyond the integer range of most of the older programming languages. It is a good test of the casual use of a language and interesting to see how flexible some of the languages are. I have been particularly impressed by Python and Ruby, although so far I have only got around to using Python. Less impressed with Ocaml, which doest quite do it out of the box, its legendary efficiency seems to get in the way of the casual user. Will probably also try out a modern implementation of Fortran such as G95 and Common Lisp and maybe some obscure Basic dialects for a laugh.

Das Bomb

2009-06-17T09:35:00.001-07:00

I cant understand it -- I was doing a blogging software evaluation, got Wordpress and Textpattern to install no bother -- just followed the steps for Joomla! and all went well, had it down to about fifteen minutes by the time I got to Textpattern and both of them look fine, but I decided to go one further and try out Das Blog, being a Dot Net sort of guy.
Sadly, this did not go at all well -- tried the simple copy option and failed dismally, so then decided to try the Web Platform Installer route -- this was a disaster -- it may have been down to my virus checker, but first I had to install WPI 1 before WPI 2 would install and had to restart my browser several times. Finally, all went well, but it really didnt inspire confidence -- I wont be recommending Das Blog to anyone, either from a technical or usability stand point -- found it very bare compared to the competion

Sample Apps and Best Practices

2009-06-03T04:32:00.000-07:00

I kind of like the .Net Pet Shop, and the lesser known French rival PetshopDNG -- a lot of their stuff is in, uh French, cos they are French, but some of if has a translated version www.dotnetguru.org/articles/us/PetShop20/PetShop_20.pdf -- because they come with lots of explanations about design decisions and so on, which a lot of sample and best practices examples dont. It would be great if there were maybe two teams on a lot of these projects, one to write the code and a second to document the thing behind in great details

Finally used to Vista

2009-06-03T04:28:00.001-07:00

I'm finally at home with Vista, even the whole UAC annoyance thing -- I actually turned it back on :-)
And I'm moving towards Virtual PC as a platform anyway, so when there is something unbearable or unsupported I break out the XP or Win2003 Server image -- its not perfect but it beats having half a dozen PCs.
Ironic then that the Windows 7 hype is passing me by -- it installed very obediently, about 75 minutes, practically no stupid questions and runs smoothly. But am I bovvered? Not likely.
It er, looks a lot like Vista, and there have just been too many operating systems for me to get excited. I installed AndLinux the other week, which seems very nice, but again, bought the tatty t-shirt

Useful MSDN Article on Azure Blob Storage

2009-05-28T15:35:00.001-07:00

The Cloudy in Seattle blog is always good, and this article is a good back up to the hands on labs on storage
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2008/10/29/walkthrough-simple-blob-storage-sample.aspx

he refers to the following MSDN article which saved my bacon
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203057.aspx

I might have missed it in the Labs, but the on line one is very good, especially the note and table referred to:
"Note: The Endpoints listed on the summary screen are not the URLs that you will use to access the storage services if you are using the StorageAccountInfo type in the StorageClient library in the Windows Azure SDK samples. Please see the table below."

I dont know myself

2009-05-28T11:23:00.001-07:00

After yesterday's experience - only posted today -- of the helpful Asp.Net message, today I find myself reluctantly praising Azure Web Services. A lot of rough edges, and I mean a lot, but as I do more of the hands on labs I get more ideas about how this could be A Good Thing. If the Good People at Redmond can restrain themselves and come up with a reasonable pricing structure, they could give Salesforce a run for its money. I need to have another go at Google App Engine, I was definitely taken with the Pythonic way of doing things, and all respect to Jon Udell, using Python on Azure Web Services as it exists at the moment seems well, a bit masochistic. Ta but no thanks.

Love at last?

2009-05-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

I think I'm finally beginning to like ASP.Net -- it actually helped with my debugging -- I was so used to it being useless that I only noticed the very specific message when I had given up for the day and was shutting everything down, including the - as I thought - gratuitous aspx error page. Who would have thought. But after grinding away at it for five months, it could be the Stockholm Syndrome (where you end up liking your torturer :-)

Missing Something with Vista UAC

2009-05-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

When you run an ASP Web site project in certain circumstances, it will refuse to load up properly if you dont sign into Visual Studio as Administrator. This seems bizarre in the extreme to me, only certain aspects such as changing the public directory structure of the website, copying the web site and changes to the database seem to be Admin activities to me, everything is should be runnable as a sand-boxed user, otherwise, what is the point of having security settings at all?

Language madness

2009-04-16T08:27:00.001-07:00

Over the last couple of days I installed and got working both Iron Python and its big brother F# (Microsoft's reimplemenation of the OCaml language, itself a reimplementation of ML which is sort of a Python-esque compilable language for mathematicians which I have always been fascinated by but never managed to write anything useful with ... something to do with being able prove a theorem in fifty lines and taking ten lines just to open a file same as in C++)
At a loss how to try them out though, maybe I will follow Jon Udell and try writing Azure Services with them!

Arrrggh Part 2

2009-04-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

I noticed that this week there is a new Microsoft Azure Services Training Kit released in the last few days, and dutifully re-installed the January Toolkit -- I see now there is a March CTP, but just for now I wont go there :-)
Thing is, I started back on the infamous WCF hosting example and to my great surprise, got it to work. Eventually. With some restarting and other tinkering, but nothing I didnt do back in January. So I havent actually learned anything, and to me WCF has yet to attain Just Works status. Not has Azure Services, but despite my self I am starting to like it. Fingers crossed so far.

Anders Hjelsberg

2009-04-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

Interesting interview with the always interesting Anders here:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/an-interview-with-anders-hejls-1.html

If I understand it correctly he says that dynamic languages are a fashion because Java is too complicated but that they, like their ancestor Smalltalk, are great for small to medium projects.
That would be fine, but how many people actually do Really Enormous Projects from scratch anymore? In something like Grails, which sits on top of Hibernate and Spring, the scripting language is leveraging the non-dynamic Java platform under it, turning a Large project into a small one Anders is probably right (I am a compiled language fan myself) but for many, perhaps most non Java/.Net Framework size projects, it doesnt really matter. And the predicted scripting language disaster have yet to happen. As I said previously, despite the 'back to the future' feeling, I am won over by Python and Ruby and the other 'new' languages

I hate it when this happens

2009-04-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

I finally got Groovy working on Windows XP. I did nothing different from what I did the last time, so totally baffled. It is only the second time I got it to work, and I never got much use out of it last time, so going to dive right in and see what all the fuss is about

Some successes

2009-04-01T14:49:00.001-07:00

Installed and working with ASP.NET MVC -- very impressed so far.
Installed and working with DotNetNuke -- again, very impressive -- not completely painless, but quite smooth and there seem to be ways around any problems

Some fails

2009-04-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Continue to have problems installing Ruby on Rails on any Windows PC -- well it installs but never quite works properly. Mysterious. Also Turbo Gears. Also Groovy and Grails -- never got them to work at all on Windows

Online PHP book

2009-03-30T08:58:00.001-07:00

I have high hopes for this online book, finding it a good read so far:
http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp

PHP - where's the code?

2009-03-30T02:08:00.000-07:00

I had an amusing exchange with another programmer recently, he is looking into Drupal at the same time I was looking at Joomla! It wasnt a religious flame war, more a mutual moan.
"Dont know quite what to make of PHP" I said. "Yeah" he said. "Its great of course, but its not really like a programming language"
"Cant find structure" I said. "Must be there but dont see it yet"
"And where's the code?" he said.

And so it goes on. I dont know why I have such a problem, I even get Rails to some extent, and PHP is very reminicent of ASP and JSP -- I suppose its so long since a single line of script to run a GIF of a little man running around a box was a big deal that very short snippet of mark-up no longer does it for me as a persuasive argument. Still, lots of big site run PHP so I'm going to stick with it a while longer in search of enlightenment

WCF - a link to a link!

2009-03-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

A link to WCF screen-casts by Michele Bustamente
http://www.simonrhart.com/2007/12/wcf-tutorials-and-resources.html
You have to register and they only run on IE 6 and above but might be worth a look if you prefer screencasts to just reading

A day of Ruby

2009-03-27T08:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was a Day of Ruby. I'm impressed again -- previously my reaction to Ruby and Python has been ugh, more Smalltalk clones, back to the future again! But having warmed up this time, I get it a bit more -- some of the features, such as mix-ins, seem so natural that it's hard to believe they are not in more conventional languages, and never mind the excellent technical reasons why they are not.

Joomla

2009-03-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I successfully installed Joomla! on top of the XAMPP stack on Windows XP, following the video tutorial
http://www.veoh.com/collection/screencasts/watch/v1802750A7Mnpe7z
Impressed. By both the tutorial and Joomla itself -- pretty painless compared to (cough, cough) Sharepoint - which needs win 2003 server in the first place

Oh Yeah! Unit Testing for WCF

2009-02-03T13:28:00.001-08:00

Seek and you shall find...eventually. I cannot even remember what search term I used on Google to these, but for your delectation and information:

http://richardsbraindump.blogspot.com/2008/10/unit-testing-wcf-services.html

http://www.typemock.com/wcfpage.php

http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2007/03/14/Configuring-WCF-Services-for-Unit-Testing.aspx

WCF

2009-01-28T02:15:00.000-08:00

As a result of the enthusiasm of the excellent Jon Udell blog, http://blog.jonudell.net/
I decided to give Azure Web Services, Microsoft's latest toy, a whirl. So far so good in that it seemed to be a GUI-fied version of Google App Engine...up to the point where I had to create a WCF service in one of the Hands On Labs -- then it all fell apart, and I spent a big chunk of the last four working days trying to get a (any) WCF service running in Visual Studio 2008, despite all the wizards and much searching of news groups and help files. Now, I may have mentioned before that I'm not your natural programmer, so maybe it's down to poor reading skills. Finally I found
http://www.thatindigogirl.com/ (the blog of the lady who is the WCF team leader) and downloaded followed the pdf of Chapter One of her book very carefully indeed, right down to cutting and pasting the configuration file text. As you would expect, she is very thorough and goes into so much detail that even if you miss something, as I still managed to do, there is suficient detail to cross-reference. If you are having trouble with WCF, I highly recommend her book, far over the other WCF books I have come across.
And so finally I have a working WCF service and all that remains is to get the WCF service in the Azure example working and then its off to the races. I hope. In four days I could probably have learned Ruby on Rails, is what I'm thinking :-)

The future of programming is wide screen

2008-08-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

I have to confess, I didnt get it until I actually saw it for real - I was trying to program on my new(ish) laptop in widescreen, at 1280x800, which was killing my poor old eyes, which are just too good to use spectacles but not good enough to use a small high-resolution monitor, so I switched to a free-standing TFT monitor which only supports 80x600. Vista very obligingly reset the laptop monitor to matching resolution, and because I didnt choose to share the view across the two monitors, it showed the same. To my surprise, I could see much more of Visual Studio 2008 on the laptop monitor -- an AHA moment, this is probably what the research on higher programmer productivity on larger monitors is all about. I'm convinced. Now all I have to do is find a wide screen 21 or 24 inch that doesnt give me head-aches :-)

Update on Google App Engine

2008-08-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

I've only played with it for a couple of hours so far, but I'm quite impressed. The command-line problem I had originally was the biggest hurdle, everything else after that seems to be well thought out and the documentation is very straight-forward and easy to understand. I've been meaning to learn Python Web programming for some years but never quite got around to it, so my initial difficulties might be down to this, and maybe its early adopter time, but I think Google could put some time into making it all more accessible to the hobbyist and dabbler -- I'm looking for something which is less of a productivity sink than ASP.NET and but for the buzz of the AppEngine and the fact I had other work to avoid I dont think I would have persisted:-)

An aside on difficulties with Scripting Language Web Frameworks
I dabbled with Grails, Trails, Boo, Castle, Turbogears and some others best forgotten, and yes, Rails, and they all defeated me comprehensively. Of the lot, Ruby on Rails would be the one I'm most likely to have another look at -- the setups are the problem always -- say what you will about ASP.NET, Asp and JSP with something like Tomcat, you pretty much always know where you are -- it either works out of the box or you need to reinstall or apply a patch (sorry, service pack). But with the rest, you are always wondering if a space in a Windows Path may be causing the problem you are having. Still the BitNami Ruby and Rails stacks are amazing, head and shoulders above and really give the casual user the chance to check out these technologies without having to take a six week course

Trying out Google App Engine

2008-08-01T15:54:00.001-07:00

Trying Out the Google App Engine

Maybe this is implicit for all hardened Pythoners, but for the uninitiated, using Python with Windows seems to be more of a struggle than it might otherwise be (I know, I should revive my Linux partition -- but what about everyone else?).
So here for other pilgrims --
I'm still suspicious about "C:\Program Files" in the path of any application -- although the problem seems to be that you probably need to open a command line window (thats choose Start then Run then type cmd and click OK)
and type python before anything in the App Engine documentation (assumes C:\Python25 in your path, if this doesnt make sense, G help you and run away, dont walk )

eg
google_appengine/dev_appserver.py helloworld/

becomes

C:\Google:\>python google_appengine/dev_appserver.py helloworld/

simple, and possibly obvious, but it wasnt to me, so for anyone else out there struggling.

So I got it working, although as I had Ruby on Rails using port 8080 I had to stick in --port=8000 in the middle, fortunately nothing else was using that port

C:\Google:\>python google_appengine/dev_appserver.py --port=8000 helloworld/

Hiatus

2008-07-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

And no I havent forgotten about my MVC series, rather distracted by Amazon S3, Google App Engine and Force.com -- so many technologies, so little motivation...

Partying like its 1989

2008-07-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

I looked into learning Python recently -- and discovered that most of the 'new' stuff is techniques and technologies I already know from programming Smalltalk 20 years ago. I dont know whether to be discouraged or elated -- it means I only have to learn new syntax, not concepts, but at the same time, here we bloody go again

Silly Tums down

2008-05-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

The Avis car rental site has the most dismal search I've seen on a big corporate site -- It seems to expect a booking time, without giving any option to enter -- I then figured maybe if I put in the flight number it would give the booking time -- but it didnt recognise my flight number...Atrocious bad design, required fields which dont exist, and reliance on a search field (flight number) which could change, with new values possibly being added which are outside the control of the site operators. The Big Silly Tums down to Avis.co.uk and Avis.ie

The tribes of MVC/P

2008-05-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to decide which camp I belong to -- the Event for Every Class crew or the Generic Event Service crew -- I lean towards the Generic Event Service crew -- Jeremy Miller has a whole article just on the concept in C# -- it would be a nightmare in VB6 but I'm going to try it. The Event for Every Class method is what I have done so far and I'm reluctant to publish the code (sorry, reader team of one :-)

Vb.Net Appreciation course

2008-04-30T08:50:00.001-07:00

Working with VB6 after a couple of years away makes me appreciate VB.Net -- and lately I've tried to migrate my dotNet knowledge to C# and I find it seems to be a lot more long-winded that VB.Net, you can do everything of course, and you're right down there with the framework, but some things seem to take an awful lot of typing...

The Pattern has landed

2008-04-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

I've been very quiet, trying to absorb the MVC/MVP patterns. Last Saturday I finally wrote my first MVP example program, actually it was copied almost directly from Steve Knight's Hacking Hat example http://www.hackinghat.com/index.php/windows/mvp-aka-mvc-in-vbnet
I say almost as there are some nice features of VB.Net that you dont have in sad old VB6 -- constructors are very useful for instance. Nevertheless, I might very well post the code to my website as a help to anyone else out there insane enough to try it in VB6.
If you want to see a longer and more complex example at http://codefornothing.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/mvp-implementation-details/
but it uses Excel as well which I havent got my head around that yet -- when I do I'll have a shot at translating Jeremy Miller's BYOC stuff from C# to VB.Net to VB6 (sheesh!)

Programming Patterns and Parenthood

2008-04-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented ...

To my embarassment I learn that there is a new Edition of Craig Larman's book, the last edition of which I have owned and struggled with for years, not making much progress, I struggle to grasp (pun partly intended) patterns and the particularly the groups of patterns such as GRASP which are covered in the book, although I keep getting pointed back at it by blog references, I came across mention of this time via Moserware: What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer? and a link to David Hayden's site GRASP - A Methodical Approach to Basic Object-Oriented Design ...- here is the time to pay tribute to D. Hayden, how does he do it, I know in person other programmers with young families who somehow manage to keep on top of all this techie stuff and still have time to have a normal human life...it's beyond me, you make the time when the situation demands it I suppose

On being a semi-retired, semi professional programmer

2008-04-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

-- wanting to be more than mediocre, discouraged by the no-good, and downright bad programs -- due to low standards of the 'monkey could do that' Visual Basic non-programming culture, and the extremely poor quality example code that used to be available ...in the patterns world they talk about 'bad smells' in programs -- most VB programs stink!

This guy Jeremy is a hero!

2008-04-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

I wonder is he in Microsoft's book? Must look it up. Following on in my quest for the Elixir for Old Code, his Build your own CAB is great reading. Heavy going, but inspiring
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/tags/Build+your+own+CAB/default.aspx

Techludd

2008-04-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

I went to TechLudd: The Irish Start-Up Monthly Networking Event

last Thursday evening. Due to poor planning (thats me:-) I couldnt stay long, having another engagement, but I quite liked the setup. There was free drinks and a couple of verging-on-invisible non-presentations by dotmobi and Locle.com. Even there I heard some carping about dotBomb 2.0 and that we were all participating in such a vacuous love-in on the evening. Maybe, but a vibrant and resilient network of people who dont run for cover when the going gets tough would be nice to see, so let's try it and find out.

Start up infrastructure

2008-04-02T05:48:00.000-07:00

Or the lack thereof. Ideally of course, such an infrastructure should pay for itself -- I dont know if aspiring entrepeneurs would be willing to pay to be told that they are completely barking up the wrong tree, but if it ended up saving them a fortune, years of effort and heart-break?
Anyway, on a more positive note, this is one exampleof what I had in mind: 2008 Startup School

Example of a Niche

2008-03-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

I think it was Joel Spolsky, or maybe it was Eric Sink, gave the example of a niche of a web site for professional programmers. Maybe this was an invented example, or maybe not. An acquaintance who is a pro photographer in US was enthusing about the power of liveBooks http://www.livebooks.com/
compared to the frustrations of trying to maintain his own web site (web site maintenance not being a core activity for a professional photographer ... Photoshop etc yes, but Dreamweaver no :-)
It makes perfect sense, and just shows that with a bit of imagination high value customers will stump up the sheckels if you deliver

Oh Envy!

2008-03-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

Shows it can be done. Might wake up the Irish Government about the lost opportunities
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/electric/20080326/ttc-irish-brothers-make-millions-on-onli-70a53e7.html

The Winner Takes All...

2008-03-25T14:24:00.000-07:00

Or Maybe Not

The winner takes all hypopthesis is that if enough people have a certain word processor, other people will be forced to buy it too if they want to be able to read the documents, thus putting other word-processor companies out of business. Of course it doesnt always quit work that way -- the following extract is a good explanation

Reconsideration of the winner-take-all hypothesis: complex....

Elixir for tired old code

2008-03-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to coax some life back into an old VB6 system, and have been digging around for inspiration and came across the following delightful article
Model View Presenter in Visual Basic 6. Part 1
Very much worth a look if you want to program the New Way using an old ad-hoc system
Hats off to the author!

microfinance

2008-03-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

Its an area I dont know enough about, but here is a link to a local
example
http://www.first-step.ie/
and a gateway site which I havent got through myself but maybe a starting point
http://www.microfinancegateway.org/

psuedoScience

2008-03-21T03:45:00.000-07:00

I see the Kondratieff wave is back in fashion again -- it seemed a great idea when I read about it first, but now the absurdity of a supposed systematic explanation of economic data which span time periods longer than a human life strikes me very strongly.
We all love trends and neat explanations, see the likes of
http://www.moneyweek.com/file/3075/housing-boom.html
and
Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, by Fred Harrison
but the trouble with all these analyses is that the world isn't that neat. We should have had a bigger correction in 2001/2002, if Alan Greenspan hadn't decided to inflate his way out of trouble in 2002. That might have sorted everything out temporarily at least, and would have thrown all these neat 18 year and 75 year cycle theories out of whack

The Second Bounce

2008-03-21T03:35:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading

The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity by Ronald Cohen
Quite an interesting book, he sounds like one of the good guys, and he mentions some of the things that I mull over in my intellectual moments, such as micro-finance and enterprise versus learned dependency