Methods & Madness
There is no better time to start a new blog than the start of a new year. My interest in .NET has been waning for a while now. I know GWB is a technology community, not just a .NET community but I think it best to have my own site and the like. I want to thank Jeff Julian and John Alexander for the outstanding community and allowing me to set up shop here. Keep in touch. Here is my new blog
I was a bit alarmed by this little jewel from former White House CyberSecurity Advisor Howard Schmidt: Hold Developers Liable for Flaws. However, a bit later, I found this: Hold Developers Accountable, Not Liable. What a schmuck! There is no way I would ever agree to be held liable unless I owned the project, the budget, and could control all inputs and outputs. I have to wonder if the backreeling was from Schmidt, a known idiot, or from ZDNet. If from Schmidt, well, that doesn't say much about his...
I was chatting with former NTeam-er Jonas Antonsson a few weeks ago and the topic of why finding developers for open source projects is so difficult. I guess finding those interested is relatively simple but actually getting contributions is the difficult part. Of the 50 that signed up for NTeam, only eight that I can count have contributed. This struck me as very strange and I mentioned it to Jonas and his response was that most developers are intimidated by the complexities of open source projects....
I have been prototyping a FSM over the past two days and their usefulness is amazing. FSM is just a fancy term for workflow engine but I guess it goes well beyond that. I see only one problem. The size of possible actions which in this context would be a transition matrix, gets increasingly large with each possible branch. Add to that possible crossing branches and it could soon become a nightmare. The gold at the end of the rainbow is being able to tell which state an action is in at any possible...
Part ISo, this is a good story. My father-in-law bought a Compaq Presario about two months ago and has all ready had a major issue with it. Saturday evening, he shut down the pc and Saturday night he booted it up again. The 'System Restore' screen came up and he was unable to get past the screen. He was willing to restore the pc since it is fairly new and he just uses it for games. Anywhoo, he brought it over for me to look at. I tried a new hard drive, cables, etc, etc. Finally, I started a live...
Doug gave an excellent introduction to Indigo at last night's meeting. Any one who missed it will have some catching up to do. I was amazed at the reduction in code to implement security, transactions, and transport. Wow. From 57,300 lines to just 3. What a hoot. Web services may actually become fun. ;-) What really interested me was the Indigo 'pipeline'. What a concept.I have just two questions:1. Will there be any support for Indigo in VS.NET 2003 or will we have to wait until VS.NET 2005 is released...
Time Weaver has a great thread going on his blog concerning the difference between a Software Engineer and a Software Developer. Read and contribute if you can
I have posted a new version of my CodeGen tool Gen.NET 0.5.1. There are no new major features but you can now generate projects compliant in VS.NET 2002 and 2003 as well as create stand-alone class files instead of creating a whole new project. The binaries are here. The sources are here
I keep seeing this in books, hearing it in casual chatter but is it really true? I would not consider the best three programmers I have had the pleasure to work with prima donnas in any way, from my view at least. If they are prima donnas, is it worth keeping them around? I have also read that the most productive developer will be 400% more effective than your least productive and 10% more productive than your 'average' developer. There are bad programmers every where. I know of a few. When comparing...
What an outstanding book!!!! If you have not read it, you should do so immediately. Here is Amazon's link. The author is Michael Cusumano (also the author of Microsoft Secrets). Chapter 2: Strategy for Software Companies: What to think about, was so good, I read it three times. And chapter 4: Best Practices in Software Development: Beyond the Software Factory discusses some of the details of Netscape's fall (and it wasn't really Microsoft - if anyone else knows of any other independent sources of...
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