Wednesday, November 05, 2008
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The Obama landslide was just what we needed; finally after eight long years of poor leadership we have the potential to make progress once again. I have high hopes for Obama and the Democratic congress.
At the same time we raise our glasses in celebration of Obama's victory, I must pour off a few drops of wine in sadness for the behavior of my fellow Californians. I cannot understand how every major elected leader, Republican and Democrat, Schwarzenegger to Pelosi can urge us to vote no on Prop 8, and still, flush with money from out of state sources (mostly from Utah) Prop 8 can still pass.
So while it's a happy day for civil rights in that we have our first black president, it's also a sad day when the most populous state in the country chooses to amend their constitution to specifically discriminate against a group of people.
-Andy
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
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For us Americans today is the big day. Go vote people, now is the day to make our voices heard.
Ok, that was the general get-out-the-vote message, now my viewpoint:
Do we get four more years of the same old thing, plus a VP who doesn't know a foreign country from a hole in the ground, or do we get some new leadership, some real leadership?
Go Obama!
And for those of us in California, do we actually alter our state constitution to discriminate against a group of people? Prop 8 is not about marriage, it’s about bigotry.
Don’t let the bigots win, vote NO on 8.
-Andy
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
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I've gotten my hard drive with all the PDC 2008 goods on it. Very cool.
Windows 7 demo what very cool in this morning's keynote. Really what Vista should have been, but I guess they needed the baby step of Vista to get to Win 7. I look forward to loading this OS up and trying it out.
Scott Guthry had a good keynote on WFP and Silverlight. Interesting news: silverlight outside the browser. Something we've asked for and are excited about....
ok, batteries low.... gotta go.
-Andy
Monday, October 27, 2008
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I met Jeff Julian of GeeksWithBlogs, and got my official GWB t-shirt with my blog URL.... Very cool....
Thanks Jeff!
-Andy
So, as a thousand bloggers have probably already blogged.... Today at PDC was all about the cloud: Windows Azure. Not sure where MS is going with this, but it is interesting. I've got a couple of ideas for things I might want to try out with it on my personal time...
More interesting to me and my immediate development projects was ASP.NET MVC. This is what my project wanted a year and a half ago and on ASP.NET 2.0... Oh well, better late than never.
Also interesting was MS's support of jQuery. Why my current project went with Prototype, if Microsoft is going to support jQuery in the IDE and use jQuery in example projects it might be worth looking at switching over. At the very least it's interesting seeing Microsoft involved with an open source project.....
Tomorrow we get "the goods", USB hard drives with Window 7 on them. That should be interesting....
More tomorrow
-Andy
Thursday, September 11, 2008
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It's been a while since my last post.... So what have I been up to?
Javascript - up to my eyeballs
Silverlight - which will be really cool, in a couple more releases. v2-b2 is nice, but needs some oomph.
Code reviews - a tech lead's life is all about telling other people why their code sucks
Interviews - hiring good people is a full time job. Finding web developers with real Javascript/CSS/.Net knowledge is very difficult. Every bozo who writes a web page includes javascript/css on their resume, but ask them what a closure is, or why to namespace your js classes and you get heming and hawing. Ask how to identify and fix memory leaks on the browser and you get a lot of blank stares.
Oh yeah, and turning 40 (yesterday) - gack!
I'm going to PDC '08! So I plan on sharing what I can here....
-Andy
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
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So, VS Live San Francisco 2007 is coasting to a stop. No keynote address after lunch today made for an awkward gap after lunch. We'd already seen all dozen vendors, many times over, the low-energy of the whole conference didn't lend much to discussions. The Gold-pass only "VIP" room was full of people watching "Poseidon Adventure" (2006 version).... Snooze. I really want to bag it for the day, but there's a talk at 4:30 that sounds interesting.... Thank god for remote access to my work desktop. At least I can get a few things done....
My overall impression you can read on my other entries..... I'll stick to the positive here. Scott Cate ruled the talks. Topical, packed sessions with lots of good info on Ajax. Second place was Walt Ritscher with some good info on WPF and WPFe.... Obviously with these things I didn't attend every talk, but of these were the best of what I attended.... I plan to Goggle these two, check out their blogs, they seem to be worth listening to....
-Andy
So no real fiascos today. Some good talks on Ajax from Scott Cate, and WPF from Walt Ritscher.
I'm still amazed at how scaled down VSLive is from past years.
Last night was the big party night. They had some contests and we giving some prizes away. A few nice things like a portable DVD player from one of the vendors, but the "big prizes" were production licenses of Sharepoint. Woo, hoo, snore. Come on, sure it might be worth 5 grand, but I'll bet nearly every developer there would rather have had a $500 Xbox 360.... Our companies buy sharepoint, we want stuff a developer can use, that we don't already get to play with from our MSDN subscriptions....
Anyway, while some of the talks are good, the overall quality and size of VSLive has just evaporated. If you can only go to one conference a year, I'd skip VSLive and go for TechEd....
-Andy
Monday, March 26, 2007
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Ok, so I've been to quite a few VS Live's and I've seen the good and the bad, but here's my first impressions from VSLive 2007:
1st Keynote by Prashant Sridharan was good. Demo (by Sam G. (I think)) was clear and informative...
Nima Dilmaghani has some really interesting things to say, but his presentation quality--Well I've already blogged about that....
Lunch - Ok, they've gone away from the cold box lunch of past years; good. But they need a major lesson in crowd control. The lines were way, way too long.
Partners - Hello, anyone there? There's fewer booths than I've ever seen at a VSLive. They need way more, quadruple would be a start.... I've never been to a conference with this few partner booths.
The "Hands-On Center".... Uh. ok. It's a bunch of machines with XP and IE6.0.... No dev tools, no Vista, not even IE 7.0.... Ok, so I can check my email, but at a developers conference you'd think a "Hands-On Center" would allow you to play with the tools you're hearing about in the conference. Seriously sucky.
The VIP Lounge, ok nice yeah, a couple of widescreens running XBox-360's, and movies. The snack area is out of drinks, and the "private computer lab" seems to be two of the "Hands-On Center" pc's stuck in a corner.... Hmmmm.
Gotta go, my feet hurt. Yeah, no chairs in the "Hands-On Center" either.
-Andy
Ok, so Nima Dilmaghani needs to work on his presentation skills...
Nima gave two talks today at VS Live about Vista development--a subject I was quite interested in. But man, watching his presentations (both of them!) was just painful. It appeared he had done no preparation, and he was unfamiliar with Vista, Powerpoint, and Visual Studio. Now the guy might be a genius, he might really know his stuff, but on stage you had to be sorry for the guy. Really Microsoft, give someone else the presentation duties. Spare us Nima ever again.
Unfortunately I really wanted to know what he was trying to convey. I can only hope the slides and demos from his talk will be published later.... (although I doubt it, more on that later....)
In contrast, Scott Stanfield from Vertigo Software did a last minute demo of some new WPF demos his company has been working on. As he described it, he was asked to do the presentation only about an hour beforehand, but his talk was smooth and polished. The demo was very cool, and everything was really put together.
Such a contrast...
-Andy
If you see me, stop by and say "Hi"...
-Andy
Friday, March 23, 2007
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I've been coding some generic stuff lately and discovered something very cool, and something odd....
The Cool:
public IList<T> SomeMethod<T>(IList<T> listOfStuff) where T : ifoo
Can be called the normal way:
IList<foo> listOfStuff; // Somehow we get a list...
IList<foo> myStuff = MyObject.SomeMethod<foo>(listOfStuff);
However it can also be called:
IList<foo> myStuff = MyObject.SomeMethod(listOfStuff);
You don't need the <> definition on the generic method.... Very cool when refactoring from a type-specific method to a generic....
The Odd:
IList<ifoo> iFooList = (IList<ifoo>)new List<foo>();
List<ifoo> iFooList2 = (List<ifoo>)new List<foo>();
The first line (with the IList) will compile fine, but cause a runtime error, with a message that a list of foo cannot be cast to a list of ifoo.
The second will not compile, with a message that a list of foo cannot be cast to a list of ifoo.
Seems like if the compiler knows #2 is no good, it should know #1 is no good...
Of course what would be really cool is if you could cast it.... And yeah, I know you can't, still seems like the framework should be able too...
-Andy
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
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Update: it looks like Jeff fixed my comment (and removed the comment I left afterward that basically said, gee my comment got messed up) rendering this post pretty much pointless.... Oh well.... Thanks for fixing my original comment Jeff!
So I wrote what was suppose to be a funny bit of ridiculous code as a comment to a comment on Jeff Atwood's blog about Curly's Law: Do One Thing.
His comment software ate the bulk of the code rendering the joke, well, on me... so if you're getting here because you clicked on my link on the comment, here's the original comment:
"Does that mean you have to not re-use i for loops? :)"
Clearly it means you should only code a for-loop once. I can only assume the prescribed code would look something like this:
public delegate void LoopProcessDelegate(int ndx);
public void Loop(int startNdx,
int endNdx,
LoopProcessDelegate process)
{
for (int i = startNdx; i < endNdx; i++)
{
process(i);
}
}
public void TestLoop()
{
Loop(0, 9, new LoopProcessDelegate(
delegate(int ndx)
{
Console.WriteLine(
string.Format("{0} : Hello World", ndx));
}));
}
Isn't that much better?
-Andy
<disclaimer>
For the humor-impaired, yes, this is a joke.
Nice article Jeff...
</disclaimer>
Yeah, so it's not that funny. But hey I haven't written an entry in while...
-Andy
Thursday, January 18, 2007
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Yes, yes, I know pro-ASP.NET Theme people will say "you can use CSS with themes, it's not an either-or!" but my thoughts on this matter are the interaction between Themes and CSS is weak and not well integrated.
In a large sense Themes and CSS are attempting to accomplish the same thing: abstract the presentation, and assign uniformity throughout a web site. The problem I have with Themes is they don't really seem to offer many advantages over CSS, they introduce problems when using CSS, and CSS is really the standard when it comes to this sort of thing in a modern web site.
Issue #1 : All CSS files in a Theme are automatically linked into all pages that use that Theme. But wait! I have CSS files for specific controls that I only want linked to pages that use that control. Ick, I want finer grained control.
Issue #2: Backwards inheritance. We're coding in ASP.NET, we're familiar with the concept of classes, and subclasses, and how downstream classes can override behaviors from upstream classes. OOP 101, and something that flows very nicely with the CSS concept of Cascading. It's very useful too, say when you have a high-level CSS style that needs a minor tweak on a single page. In Themes it's the theme that rules, if a given page needs a minor tweak, tough.
Issue #3: Multiplicity. One Theme per page, no exceptions. Pretty inflexible in my mind. With CSS I can assign any number of classes to a markup element, and several CSS files per page. That's been quite useful in the past for me.
Ok, ok, let's look at some of the "positives" of Themes: (I'm afraid I'm going to go into sarcasm mode here....)
You can use skin files to add markup to common elements. A common example often suggested is to setup templates for GridViews. Yeah, because all my grids on my pages are exactly the same.... Oh wait, that's actually really rare...
You can use Default Themes or Themes created by Microsoft or other third parties. Woo-hoo, just what I want, my web site to look exactly like some other web site. Thank you, no.
Organization: your images, CSS, JavaScript, skins, etc is all neatly contained in a single directory structure. Ok, yeah, but I can do that with my own structure and CSS too. In fact Themes can introduce some odd resource reference problems with combined with CSS.
Ok, ok, so do I think Themes suck? No. They have a purpose, and some web developers might find them really nice and useful. However, I don't think that CSS and Themes play all that nicely, and if you're looking at doing a really CSS-based UI for your web site, you probably don't need the extra baggage that Themes bring along.
Am I missing something? Have a good example of CSS and Themes interacting? Can you offer up a solution to Issue #1 above? I'd love to hear it, leave a comment....
It's entirely possible I'm completely missing the boat here, but I don't think so....
-Andy
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
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Hell yes!
I've been reading his book and I'm really impressed with this man. He understands what's wrong with partisan politics of today. He understands that most issues are not binary, black and white, neatly fitting into 2 second sound bites.... Everyone, Democrat or Republican should read he his book, and I for one really hope he runs in 2008....
He's got my vote already.
Find him here.
-A