Some of this is due to the extra ceremony .NET adds as a tax on you and your development time. Most of it's due to my ignorance. I've been honest about that: my ignorance of the overall strategies and thought-processes present in .NET takes full credit for most of my pain.

I've known for a while that I need to read something to "get in the know," and I've been putting it off until I had time. Thanks to a conversation with another developer (who shall remain nameless, unless he tells me he wants credit) this morning, I've decided now is the time.

I'm looking for books that give a strategic overview of .NET. I'm looking for ASP.NET and Windows programming (Windows Forms) to start with. I'd also like to see some strategy guides for Active Directory and Sharepoint. Seeing as I'm sore from fighting so much, a guide for pain-free coding in .NET might also be in order. (I'm going to buy that book since I know the author is a good one.)

I can easily do a search on Amazon for .NET books. O'Reilly has a ton of them. But I don't know what's good or bad or how to tell the difference. Further, except for one person (who shall also remain nameless) I sent an email to this morning, I don't know who to ask.

Well, that's not entirely true. I know there's a crowd of good developers with diverse experiences reading this weblog. So I'm asking you:

What is TFM on .NET? Any suggestions welcome. Short reviews of why it's a good book (or article online) get bonus points.

Exceptions should be thrown when something exceptional happens. Maybe encountering a null value was at some time, exceptional. But in today's world of databases, form fields, and integrated disparate systems, you don't know where your data is at or where it's coming from - and encountering null is the rule, not the exception.

Expecting me to write paranoid code and add a check for null to avoid every branch of code where it might occur is ludicrous. There's no reason some sensible default behavior can't be chosen for null, and if I really need something exceptional to happen, I can check for it.

Really, aren't you sick of writing code like this:


when you could be writing code like this:


I think this is especially horrid for conditional checks. When I write if(someCase) it's really just shorthand for if(someCase eq true). So why, when someCase is null or not a boolean should it cause an error? It's not true, so move on - don't throw an error.

Someone tell me I'm wrong. It feels like I should be wrong. But it feels worse to have the default path always be the one of most resistance.

What do you think?

Tim broke his watch, and ...

Imagine my joy as I realized that I could make it 11:30 again, and go enjoy another lunch. Meeting at 3:30? No problem, just turn the hour hand up to 6:00 and go home! I can sleep as long as I want as long as I turn it back to 8:00 when I get to the office. All my work estimates are now "five minutes", and I complete them every time.

...

But people still try to mandate velocity.

My ultimate beef though is not a practical one. It's an idealogical one. We should encourage those who succeed to lead as examples for others so that they can see that success is something that's worth pursuing. The more successful people and companies we have in this country (or any country,) the more successful the economy at large will be, and the higher the standard of living we'll have. And individually, it's rewarding to see your ideas through to production, and moreso on a mega-scale.

Bill Gates has earned the right not to comb his hair on TV, and I'll bet that even Brooke Shields would like the same right. The cowering masses of admirers aren't what the real winners seek. They're a side effect of doing something that nobody else has done, and doing it exceedingly and emphatically well. Everyone admires Bill Gates, whether or not they'll admit it. He's a man of action, a man of success, and for some, the picture of what they can not aspire to be. They think that because they can never become like him that they should instead try to seize some of that which he has created (as in with lobbyists or legislation.) To slice off a chunk for those who will never do the things he has done, and will not lift a finger to that end.

That's where they're wrong. You can aspire to be as great as you like. You can pursue your path to the end of your days. Nobody is going to give it to you, and they shouldn't. It's the 'hard' part that makes it so great. If you don't make it to be as successful as you had aimed by the time you die, you won't be walking around cursing the fact.

.NET and Java are both prime examples of object-oriented programming gone stupid. Their class libraries have become so utterly huge that it becomes damn near impossible for an individual developer to suitably grasp anything more than a small portion of them.

Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with .NET or Java. It's easy to get lost in whether we need a FileInputStream, or whether we should wrap a FileInputReader in a TextInputBuffer, and so forth. Give me fopen() any day.

Thoughts and discussion are always encouraged.

In any case, there is an "enterprise" license that costs a couple of thousand dollars to get you around most of those limitations. The only exception is the limitation to three build agents - you can buy extra licenses for that at $299 a pop. I can't foresee the need for even two, but that might be because I have yet to see all the functions they serve.

Anyway, if you've been paying attention at least partially, you'll know I'm a huge fan of the DRY principle, especially as it relates to source code. In that case, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of my favorite features is this:



I haven't yet found a way to make the build fail for duplication, but seeing the reports is nice. I was also a bit disappointed it didn't catch code like this:


But, it's nice to know it will at least catch copy-and-paste reuse.

I was set up and running my duplication checks in a few minutes, but finding everything you need is not as painless (setup is mostly painless, finding reasons for build failure and editing is not as easy). It's not hard, by any stretch of the imagination, but they set such a high standard on the "add" part that even the minor annoyances I encountered on the rest seemed large. A lot of that is being new not just to the technology, but some of the terminology they used as well.

Anyway, I've not dived in deep enough to see how or if it might work for other languages or platforms, but if you're using Java or .NET, I'd recommend you give it a try.

Kate hit the deploy button and started packing her things, getting ready to leave. Just a quick verification on the live site and off she'd be.

"Oh jeez, what's wrong now?" Kate asked herself. "Why can't anything just work?" All the unit tests had passed. All the integration tests had passed. All the acceptance tests had passed. All the tests-by-hand had passed. What was the difference between the test site and the live one?

The error messages were largely useless. The last time Kate was getting useless error messages, there was an issue with differences in credentials to AD, SharePoint, the database server, or any combination of them. Kate proceeded under that assumption - it had a relatively high degree of being correct.

Twelve hours into three rewrites (trying different strategies to do the same thing) and several hundred WTFs later, it finally hit her:

"OMFG," yelled Kate.

She noticed that it worked in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. After another round of WTFs and some time spent wondering why the different browsers caused a server error, and then some time wondering why SharePoint should error out on its own browser, she realized: The issue wasn't with her code at all - it never had been.

The form was supposed to be a normal form - nothing to do with ASP.NET at all. But ASP didn't care - it wanted to see EnableEventValidation in the @Page directive to let you submit your own form - but only through Internet Explorer.

Kate's story is a tragedy: the essential complexity of the problem took her a couple of hours, while the accidental complexity ate up twelve. It cost her a couple of pints and some good fun on the field.

Luckily, you can avoid twelve hours of useless re-work if you just learn the lesson from Kate Libby's horrific tale: isolate errors before you fix them. Otherwise, you might spend a ridiculous amount of time "fixing" the parts that already work.

1. Initially, Microsoft envisioned the controls running in several places: perhaps the browser, a printer, or a zoo. But three and a half major versions in, we're still required to pass the same attribute with the same value for every control. Couldn't they drop the requirement and make it a default if they decided to add more valid values?
   
   
2. They wanted a constant reminder to novices that this code was running on the server. This way, people wouldn't ask why changes weren't occurring on the browser before posting forms to the server.
   
   
3. They wanted to remain consistent in having to tell the computer everything at least twice, à la Object obj = new Object();. However, in this case, it seems more like Object obj = new Object(type="Object");. I'm not sure why that is.

Can you think of any other possible reasons? Please enlighten me, so I can forgive and forget this minor annoyance.

Then ContentBoxVariation includes ContentBox like this:


You might think that the ContentBoxVariation would pass it's Title to the ContentBox, and that the result would be "Welcome to Sam's."

Unfortunately, it does pass it's title, but the title hasn't been changed from its default of "" at the time it happens. As far as I can tell, the instantiation happens in this order:

1. Instantiate ContentBoxVariation
2. Instantiate the composed ContentBox
3. Set ContentBox's Title to the variation's title, which is currently "". Even if setting it to a different variable, it seems to stay blank as if that variable doesn't exist, even though it does and no error occurs.
4. Set the variation's title.

The order makes sense if you are looking at it like that, but being in templates and looking at it from that point of view, it is surprising.

The solution is to explicitly set the title for ContentBox in code, like this:


Hopefully that saves someone some time.

1. JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA: An awesome IDE for Java. So great, I don't mind spending the $249 (US) and using it over the free Eclipse. The Ruby plugin is not too shabby either, the license for your copy is good for your OSX and Windows installations, and you can try it free for 30 days. Martin Fowler thinks IntelliJ changed the IDE landscape. If you work in .NET, they also have ReSharper, which I plan to purchase very soon. Now if only we could get a ColdFusion plugin for IntelliJ, I'd love it even more.
   
   
2. Programming Ruby, Second Edition: What many in the Ruby community consider to be Ruby's Bible. You can lower the barrier of entry for your favorite programmer to using Ruby, certainly one of the funner languages a lot of people are loving to program in lately. Sometimes, I sit and think about things to program just so I can do it in Ruby.
   
   If they've already got that, I always like books as gifts. Some of my favorites from this year have been: Code Complete 2, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices which has a great section on object oriented design principles, and of course, My Job Went to India. I have a slew of books I've yet to read this year that I got from last Christmas (and birthday), so I'll have to list those next year.
   
   
3. Xbox 360 and a subscription to XNA Creator's Club (through Xbox Live Marketplace - $99 anually) so they can deploy their games to their new Xbox. This is without a doubt the thing I'd want most, since I got into this whole programming thing because I was interested in making games. You can point them to the getting started page, and they could make games for the PC for free, using XNA (they'll need that page to get started anyway, even if you get them the 360 and Creator's Club membership to deploy to the Xbox).
   
   
4. MacBook Pro and pay for the extra pixels. I love mine - so much so, that I intend to marry it. (Ok, not that much, but I have been enjoying it.) The extra pixels make the screen almost as wide as two, and if you can get them an extra monitor I'd do that too. I've moved over to using this as my sole computer for development, and don't bother with the desktops at work or home anymore, except on rare occasions. You can run Windows on it, and the virtual machines are getting really good so that you ought not have to even reboot to use either operating system.
   
   Even if you don't want to get them the MacBook, a second or third monitor should be met with enthusiasm.
   
   
5. A Vacation: Programmers are notoriously working long hours and suffering burnout, so we often need to take a little break from the computer screen. I like SkyAuction because all the vacations are package deals, there's often a good variety to choose from (many different countries), most of the time you can find a very good price, and usually the dates are flexible within a certain time frame, so you don't have to commit right away to a certain date.

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, and thanks to all you who read and comment and set me straight when I'm wrong - not just here but in the community at large. I do appreciate it.

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share (or ones you'd like to strike from this list)?

What we really need here is a way to filter the collection while looping over it. Move that extra complexity and indentation out of our code, and have the collection handle it.

In Ruby we have each as a way to loop over collections. In C# we have foreach, Java's got for(ElemType elem : theCollection), and Coldfusion has <cfloop collection="#theCollection#"> and the equivalent over arrays. But wouldn't it be nice to have an each_where(condition) { block; } or foreach(ElemType elem in Collection.where(condition))?

I thought for sure someone would have implemented it in Ruby, so I was surprised at first to see this in my search results:


However, after a little thought, I realized it's not all that surprising: it is already incredibily easy to filter a collection in Ruby using the select method.

But what about the other languages? I must confess - I didn't think long and hard about it for Java or C#. We could implement our own collections such that they have a where method that returns the subset we are looking for, but to be truly useful we'd need the languages' collections to implement where as well.

Of these four languages, ColdFusion provides both the need and opportunity, so I gave it a shot. First, I set up a collection we can use to exercise the code:


Then, I exercised it:


Obviously, that breaks because don't have a cf_loop tag. So, let's create one:


It works fine for me, but you might want to implement it differently. The particular area of improvement I see right away would be to utilize the item name in the where attribute. That way, you can use this on simple arrays and not just assume arrays of structs.

Thoughts anybody?

It seems you need an army of programmers to make even a decent game now.

But then people started releasing game-development frameworks that could help you get past the technical hurdles. However, by the time I thought about something like that (or had the capacity to think it) I had almost long forgotten about my dream to make games.

And even if you're using a framework, what do you do about the monetary hurdles? A computer to program on is one thing, but where would you find the cash for a good 3D modeling studio? What if you wanted to deploy to a console? That license is in the tens of thousands of dollars (or so I've heard).

But as some of you have known for a while, and I only found out as recently as August, Microsoft is helping to solve those problems. They've released the XNA framework, which lets you deploy to XBOX 360 or PC (Developer Center, Creators Club, XNA Team Blog).

I'm only three weeks in and I've got quite a decent start for a game. It's cartoon-like, so it doesn't require the type of art you'd find in Gears of War (though I could still use the help of a 3d modeler if you're offering). It works mostly how I want it to, and I need only a few tweeks. Most importantly, I've got a nice framework written that allows me to add levels and new game objects with relative ease (not WYSIWYG just yet, but that might happen at some point in the distant future).

So that only leaves the soundtrack. Unless you don't plan to distribute your game, licensing songs may still be an prohibitive issue (barring that you're good at making your own on the computer, and have a good sound-editor to do it). For that, I'm trying to get the band back together over the winter to record an impromptu soundtrack. Getting back in the studio with those guys would be reward enough, but I'll have a game to go with it. Thanks XNA!

As always, thoughts are appreciated. I'd especially like to hear from you if you know or are a member of any community where free(ish) 3D models and textures are available.

Chad mentions a measure he used to assess a job candidate's depth of knowledge in Java: a question of how to make the JVM crash.

I'm definitely lacking in this regard. I've got a pretty good handle on Java, Ruby, and ColdFusion. I've done a small amount of work in .NET and have been adding to that recently. I can certainly write a program that will crash - but can I write one to crash the virtual machine (or CLR)?

I can relunctantly write small programs in C/C++, but I'm unlikely to have the patience to trace through a large program for fun. I might even still be able to figure out some assembly language if you gave me enough time. Certainly in these lower level items it's not hard to find a way to crash. It's probably harder to avoid it, in fact.

In ColdFusion, I've crashed the CF Server by simply writing recursive templates (those that cfinclude themselves). (However, I don't know if that still works.) In Java and .NET, I wouldn't know where to start. What about crashing a browser with JavaScript?

So Chad mentions that you should know the internals of JVM and CLR. I should know how JavaScript works in the browser and not just how to getElementById(). With that in mind, these things are going on the to-learn list - the goal being to find a way to crash each of them.

Ideas?

For web developers, InfoQ let us know aboutBrowser Shots, which is a service that will test your web sites in tons of different browsers and present screen shots to you. It lets you choose whether to enable Flash, Javascript, or certain media players, and allows you to set the color depth and screen resolution. It's quite slow at the moment (set it and come back in four hours or so), but it shows us what can be possible! (Screenshots of codeodor.com, as they are coming in more will pop up)

Also, InfoQ completed its first official year. It was "pre-released" (I forget the exact term they used) I think in May 2006, but it went officially live a year ago Friday. Congrats to Floyd Marinescu and the entire InfoQrue! (And they have a lot of relevant news (to me) I'll be posting links to today)

The first item where I see a distinction that needs to be made is on, "what do we mean when we are talking about XML?" I see two types - XML the paradigm where you use tags to describe data, and the XML you write - as in, the concrete tags you put into a file (like, "see that XML?"). We're talking about XML you've written, not the abstract notion of XML.

The second idea: what is code? What is data? Sean Corfield offers what I would consider to be a concice, and mostly correct definition: "Code executes, non-code (data) does not execute." To make it correct (rather than partially so), he adds that (especially in Lisp) code can be data, but data is not code. You see this code-as-data any time you are using closures or passing code around as data. But taking it a bit further - your source code is always just data to be passed to a compiler or interpreter, which figures out what the code means, and does what it has been told to do.

So is XML code? Certainly we see it can be: ColdFusion, MXML, and others are languages where your source code is written (largely) in XML. But what about the broader issue of having a programmatic configuration file versus a "data-only" config file?

Is the data in the config file executable? It depends on the purpose behind the data. In the case of data like


I think (assuming there is nothing strange going on) that it is clearly data. Without knowing anything about the back end, it seems like we're just creating a data structure. But In the case of DI (and many others uses for config files), I see it as giving a command to the DI framework to configure a new bean. In essence, as Peter notes, we've just substituted one concrete syntax for another.

In the case of XML, we're writing (or using) a parser to send data to an intepreter we've written that figures out what "real" commands to run based on what the programmer wrote in the configuration file. We've just created a higher level language than we had before - it is doing the same thing any other non-machine code language does (and you might even argue about the machine code comment). In the configuration case, often it is a DSL (in the DI case specifically, used to describe which objects depend on which other objects and load them for us).

While we don't often have control structures, there is nothing stopping us from implementing them, and as Peter also notes, just because a language is not Turing complete), doesn't mean it is not a programming language. In the end, I see it as code.

Both approaches are known to have their benefits and drawbacks, and choosing one over the other is largely a matter of personal taste, size and scope of problem, and problem/solution domain. For me, in the worlds of JIT compiling and interpreted langages, the programmatic way of doing things tends to win out - especially with large configurations because I prefer to have the power of control structures to help me do my job (without having to implement them myself). On the other hand, going the hard-coded XML route is especially popular in the compiled world, if not for any other reason than you can change configurations without recompiling your application.

I don't make a distinction between the two on terms of XML is data, while programming (or using an in-language DSL) in your general-purpose language is code. To me, they are both code, and if either is done incorrectly it will blow-up your program.

Finally, I'm not sure what value we gain from seeing that code is data (and in many cases config data is code), other than perhaps a new way of looking at problems which might lead us to find better solutions. But that isn't provided by the distinction itself, just the fact that we saw it.

Comments, thoughts, questions, and requests for clarifications are welcome and appreciated.