May 2005 - Posts
Now the situation is getting disgusting. The spammers have managed to post comment spam even for posts where comments have been closed. How do they manage it?
In yesterdays DNUG meeting we discussed FIT, NMock and Python. Ian Cooper presented FIT, Nick Hines did NMock and Stephen Turner spoke on Python. 20 or so out of 25 who signed up actually turned up which is pretty good.
FIT : I finally understood what FIT is all about. At first impression I thought it was just a means of letting customers provide test data which i reckoned could be done by rustling up a Windows/Web Form and writing the test data to an XML File which could then be read by the NUnit Harness. So i struggled to understand how it was different from NUnit but then Ian explained that we dont need to write the parsers that run over the word/html documents. The Word/HTML is also more free-form and will save us developers a lot of work. Looks like it will take some time and practice for me to more fully understand and leverage the benefits of this.
As Hitesh Khatri pointed out, the whole premise of this is that your customer cares. If all they want is the finished product and only care about a set of screens where they can click buttons, then all this is of no use (except to us developers, that is).
NMock: Excellent presentation. For a long time (some months ago) I couldnt get my head round Mock Objects and some folk here sent me some good links. At the office Steve Meyfroidt (our chief Software Architect) gave a good presentation using some examples in Java and i got to understand some more. Now Nick Hines gave the ultimate explanation worth its weight in gold. I wish this presentation was done a year ago!! I could have saved myself so much grief in my TDD attempts.
Python: Looks cool but i couldnt help thinking "So what?". I guess different languages are just sutable for different things and lend themselves more easily to specific kinds of programming challenges. My question regarding Python is - What is it that I can do in Python that i cant do in C#? Python isnt OO (from what I gathered, although everything is an object) which may or may not be good depending on your view of the software world. One thing Python has going for itself is that PLONE is a really powerful CMS written in Python so this language must be good for something eh? :-) Its also interesting that MS is working hard on IronPython. Can someone please enlighten me why I might need to learn this language?
Speaking of 'new' languages, what about Ruby? Whats that good for?
Its quite strange really. In an effort to combat comment spam I decided to disable comments for all the old posts since the conversations really are dormant now. Since I had to do this one by one, I missed a couple here and there and whaddya know, a flood of spam enters through those little 'gates'. It did help identify the posts where i missed turning off the comments flag so now there should be less. It does appear that occasionally these dirty people are able to hack into the system even when comments are turned off, but only i get to see those comments in the Feedback panel and in the email.
Still keeping the last couple of posts open (in a rolling forward fashion) since there are some good comments that i've received.
Looks like quite a few bloggers have already posted their thoughts on the Developer day event at Reading last Saturday. I'm last off the block now cos I was tied up at a client site (not literally :-) ) with no email for the early part of this week.
Overall I would say I was only 40% satisfied with the event. There were too many tracks and too many sessions in each track to do any justice to the topics. There could have been 3 2-hour sessions in each track. Some of the presenters visibly struggled with trying to finish up in time and skipped some good slides leaving us to go pick them up from the site when they become available. (No blame attached - i would have done that myself- still , its quite a pity). So here are my thoughts on the sessions i attended.
ClickOnce Deployment - I arrived late for the event so i missed the first half of the session. But the part i caught seemed interesting enough and well presented.
Custom Attributes: This was the most disappointing session - for my expectations that is. I attended the same topic presented by Jim Cooper at DDUG a few months ago which was quite interesting. At that session we had closed with a brief look at AOP and a pointer to the Advanced Attributes book. This time, when i read the abstract, it promised to deal with AOP so i decided to attend (even though i am generally familiar with the whole concept). But there was absolutely nothing (except a pointer to the book again). The chap next to me who was from a C++ background drifted off into a short nap. Jim could have explained even the WebMethod and the Serializable attributes and what they do to give newbies some context, but he didnt. Jim is a likable chap but this session didnt show him at his best.
FxCop: Talk about deflating a balloon. I never knew how hard it would be to write custom rules in FxCop. I really like the tool and wanted to see how they have improved it in Whidbey but we didnt get that far. I expected that we could use the CodeDOM and iterate through code using regEx to identify non standard patterns, but no joy. FxCop works at the IL level so you need to write code that can handle that level. It does help that there are some VISIT methods that can be overriden (that is if you fancy learning about 200 different overrides) but i dont think that i want to go down that route. And why didnt MS release some good documentation about it? Heaven knows!! My enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, but it doesnt mean i cant use the tools and enable/disable the existing rules as appropriate.
Web Services: Contrary to many peoples' opinion, I thought Benjamin Mitchells session was really good. The session has to be understood in context. A vast amount of advancements in .NET relating to Web Services is in the WSE stack. Ben was dealing with the improvements in the .NET framework core which obviously is less flashy than what they are doing with WSE. The summary slide is something I can make use of at work in a future knowledge sharing session in my company.
Scrum and Iterative development: Fairly good stuff. Interesting that they used sprints of 30 days. IMO 3-4 weeks is better than the XP style 2 weeks.
Career Development: Very interactive session since it was about the job market and CV /interview tips. Didnt mean much to me personally since im quite comfortably esconced in my current job, but the other attendees seemed to love it.
Would have liked to attend Ian Coopers session on Data Access Patterns, but then i was late anyway.
Todays DNUG session on FIT, NMock and Python promises to be interesting. Lets see how it turns out.
I will never understand MS and their ideas on software distribution. I have an MSDN Universal Subscription which usually means that you get all the goodies on DVD regularly. For a while i was content to download stuff occasionally and only when VS 2005 came out did i decide to change my media pack to DVD hoping to get my hands on Whidbey. Unfortunately, Yukon beta 2 was available but no sign of Whidbey. So i steeled myself and setup a download process on a spare workstation. The wretched thing took 3 or 4 days to complete and kept getting interrupted. Thankfully one of my colleagues helped me out by restarting it whenever he saw it had failed cos I was away on the BTS training course. It was a grand total of 3.75 Gigs. DOnt know what happened to our network either. When i downloaded a 76MB Office 2003 SP recently it took just a few seconds early in the morning for all 76 MB, but this proceeeded at 21 KB per second or something (for VS).
Anyway, heres the irony. I then went on Saturday for the DeveloperDeveloper event in Reading and what do I find but hundreds of DVDs kicking about.(By this time I had also ordered the DVD while waiting for the download to complete). So i happily helped myself to it.
This is what I dont understand, if Yukon beta can be distributed on MSDN and VS 2005 so freely at an event, why not send the VS 2005 DVD as part of MSDN ? I guess part of the reason maybe that we now have a MSDN Premium Subscription to consume VS 2005 and hence with a Universal subscription you dont get it (but I do recall reading about getting upgraded easily to Premium). Anyway, it doesnt matter now, but MS could have saved us a whole load of grief.
To make things worse, an acquaintance just emailed me to let me know that in his office the workstations do not recognise the DVD set given out at the Developer event !! :-( . Bah! humbug! so much for free DVDs. Let me see what happens on my workstation.
A declaration thats very popular among politicians these days. Nothing so fancy here though. I've just had to remove the comments option for all my posts to date to avoid the comment spam. I'm waiting for Sahil Malik to send me the utility to bulk migrate my posts to CodeBetter as that seems to be a decent blog site. But then again I could probably just create an account and start posting there and leave this dormant.
One thing about CAPTCHA is that it can be tricky when you post genuine comments. I was trying to reply to a post on the new CMS 2002 book and i wrote a long reply and then couldnt get the Captcha text correct so it rejected my post. Serves me right. I should have saved my comments in notepad first. Anyway, i didnt bother rewriting my post. I hate CMS 2002 and the bad experiences with it are probably better just left buried in the past rather than digging it up again, inflaming old wounds and angering its fans (are there any really?)
So what am I doing right now? Im on a BizTalk training course (one thats run specifically for Microsoft partners) in Basingstoke (near London. Its quite good. Theres only about 8 of us and the trainer is a decent chap. Unfortunately due to some probs with BTS on VPC2004 some of the latter labs dont work so we have to watch Shockwave simulations to see how the execution of the lab exercise works.
Still, I'm rather looking forward to going back to work and trying out this stuff to refresh my memory. The problem is landing a BTS project to practice this. My colleagues up north are working hard at a huge integration project (lucky chaps + poor sods) and I wish i could roll up my sleeves and get to do some of it. But if im lucky there are some exciting project prospects in London itself that should kick off pretty soon.
Gotta go now, the next session is starting.