Christian Nagel On .NET Enterprise Services

The Upperaustrian .NET Usergroup has another interesting event coming up: Christian Nagel will be talking about .NET Enterprise Services this Wednesday. Don't miss it!

.NET Rocks TV

Cool, one of my favorite podcasts, ".NET Rocks", is now complemented by its own videocast ".NET Rocks TV". Some topics such as "Databinding in .NET 2.0" or "ASP.NET Webcontrols" simply require screen captures for through understanding. Video downloads are available via BitTorrent.

Borland Dumps Delphi And JBuilder

In other news, and somehow connected to my previous posting: Borland bows out of the IDE business altogether. So it's farewell to Delphi and JBuilder. Reminds me that I heard that a local software vendor was about to revamp its flagship product using Delphi.NET. I considered that a weird choice back then, and it looks even worse today.

Well, it also makes me wonder what will be left of Borland. IDEs are a commodity today (see Eclipse or NetBeans), and even Microsoft is giving away Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition for free. Borland's press release states that they are going to concentrate on Application Lifecycle Management Solutions instead. Good idea after all, as many decision makers in large corporations enjoy buying this kind of stuff for hundreds of thousands of dollars (just to find out later they are trapped in a typical vendor-lockin, so no way to get rid of it even when there are better suited solutions available at a fraction of the original costs).

I still remember the good old days of Turbo Pascal under CP/M and DOS. Turbo Pascal was unbeatable at the time, both in compiler speed and IDE featureset and usability. That was the time when Borland was about the same size as Microsoft, and Philippe Kahn's success in developer tools really bothered Bill Gates (see the "Delete Philippe"- and "Stick it to Philippe"-incidents). The story goes that Bill Gates even dated Kahn's ex-wife... oh well.

Java Studio Creator

Over the last ten years, I have worked with a couple of Java IDEs, namely (in consecutive order):

• Symantec Cafe


• Symantec Visual Cafe


• IBM Visual Age For Java


• Sun Forte


• Borland JBuilder


• Eclipse


• IBM Websphere Studio Application Developer

For one reason or another and although it had been one my radar for quite a while, it wasn't until some weeks ago that I took a closer look at Sun's NetBeans platform resp. Sun Java Studio Creator, which is built on top of NetBeans. And what I have seen so far is quite astonishing.

Great toolset, lots of RAD features, refactoring, J2EE at a breeze (Java Server Faces come to full strength with this IDE). Creator's main focus lies in the web development area, but NetBeans and Creator also include the best Java rich client UI designer I have ever seen, namely Matisse. As a sidenote, with Creator I really have hopes for the return of Swing for desktop applications. I was always very fond of the Swing API, and the native Look&Feels have gotten much better over the years. Swing always was brandmarked as being slow, which might have been true when it was introduced - but believe me, if it feels clunky today, that's the fault of the application programmer.

For a quick intro you might want to check out Java Studio Creator 2 in Action. And by the way, Sun gives away Creator for free!

ITunes

Stanford on iTunes - subscribed!

BTW, it seems as if the latest iTunes 6.0.2 client for Windows solves that annoying flickering-when-dragging-the-scrollbar-bubble-issue - just in case someone encountered the same problem.

Update: I had rejoiced too soon - flickering still happens... :-(

JetBrains ReSharper

If you - just like me - are in the unfortunate situation that you cannot migrate all your Visual Studio 2003 projects to Visual Studio 2005 yet, and grow increasingly jealous about those cool new VS 2005 productivity enhancements like improved IntelliSense, refactoring or code snippets, there is a remedy: JetBrains ReSharper. It comes equipped with a rich set of features, such as intelligent coding assistance, on-the-fly error highlighting and quick error correction, support for code refactoring, and a whole lot more. We have been using it under VS 2003 for a while, and it has saved us tons of time.

Disclaimer: I am by no means affiliated with JetBrains.

Spamusement

Bad Bunny. Bad, Bad, Bad Bunny.

Cartoon courtesy of spamusement.com
Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines.

The Perils Of JavaSchools

Just a little follow-up to my posting about Joel Spolsky's "The Perils Of JavaSchools". Please don't get me wrong, I enjoy very much coding in Java (even more than in C#), my only point was (and also Joel's, I think) that students who have been taught programming solely in Java are missing some important concepts about how things work under the hoods. And the knowledge about how lower-level stuff is being done is very important in order to be able to build high-quality software systems on other platforms, such as C or C++. Just learning a new language syntax will not be sufficient in those cases.

.NET User Group Upperaustria

I figured out a little bit too late that the "Upperaustrian .NET User Group" has been formed already back in November. Next week Tuesday their third meeting will take place at the University of Linz, including a presentation about "ASP.NET 2.0 and Web Parts". Definitely a good reason to go there and check it out.

Bindows

I still have to dig deeper into it, but Bindows looks like one of the coolest AJAX frameworks out there.

Startup Or Corporate Group?

Which place is more likely to bring out the best in talented and motivated developers, small startups or large corporate groups? Well, it's a double-edged sword.

Usually at startups, the environment is more challenging. Stakes are high, but so can be the gains. No politics, no messing around, just one mutual goal. There is no place for dorks to hide. They are either not hired at all, or identified within days. A great working experience if the right kind of people get together. But then still nine out of ten startups fail (the number varies depending on the definition of "failure"), so it's quite likely that all those efforts are lost.

With big companies, this is less likely to happen. Heck, they even back doomed projects for years. This doesn't necessary imply that they are going support a winner project accordingly either, but at least it increases the chances they will. Unfortunately working in large companies can be cumbersome, especially for the more gifted employees. Committees that are unable to make decisions, projects stuck in the conceptual stage for years, proteges and "know-it-alls" meddling with your venture, and if there is no management buy-in, you are going to fail no matter how hard you try.

So what's the best place to work at? It might be a combination of both. A startup-like department or subsidiary inside a large organization. That alone is not enough, you have to be able to attract highly-qualified people, your management has to trust you and give you the time you need, and of course you still have get the job done. Then this is a likely scenario for joy of work and project success.

Ineffective Development Practices

Via Günter Obiltschnig's Weblog: Steve McConnell lists 36 ineffective development practices in his classic book "Rapid Development" (I certainly got a copy of "Rapid Development" on my bookshelf, just like "Code Complete" and "Software Project Survival Guide")

People-Related Mistakes
#1: Undermined motivation
#2: Weak personnel
#3: Uncontrolled problem employees
#4: Heroics
#5: Adding people to a late project
#6: Noisy, crowded offices
#7: Friction between developers and customers
#8: Unrealistic expectations
#9: Lack of effective project sponsorship
#10: Lack of stakeholder buy-in
#11: Lack of user input
#12: Politics placed over substance
#13: Wishful thinking

Process-Related Mistakes
#14: Overly optimistic schedules
#15: Insufficient risk management
#16: Contractor failure
#17: Insufficient planning
#18: Abandonment of planning under pressure
#19: Wasted time during the fuzzy front end
#20: Shortchanged upstream activities
#21: Inadequate design
#22: Shortchanged quality assurance
#23: Insufficient management controls
#24: Premature or too frequent convergence
#25: Omitting necessary tasks from estimates
#26: Planning to catch up later
#27: Code-like-hell programming

Product-Related Mistakes
#28: Requirements gold-plating
#29: Feature creep
#30: Developer gold-plating
#31: Push me, pull me negotiation
#32: Research-oriented development

Technology-Related Mistakes
#33: Silver-bullet syndrome
#34: Overestimated savings from new tools or methods
#35: Switching tools in the middle of a project
#36: Lack of automated source-code control

A Luminary Is On My Side (II)

A luminary is on my side (hey, not for the first time):

• Joel On Software (December 29th, 2005): The Perils Of JavaSchools


• Arno's Software Development Weblog (October 4th, 2004): Knowing Java But Not Having A Clue?

As A Software Developer, You Don't Live On An Island (Part II)

Yesterday I talked about the fact that as software developers, we should be prepared for change.

But of course, there is the other extreme as well. Self-taught semi-professionals missing real project experience as well as the feedback of more adept peers. Those who jump on the bandwagon of every hype, but do so in a fundamentally flawed way.

Like the guys who took the "a real man writes his own web framework"-joke for serious, and invested several man-years in a doomed attempt to create a chimera that combined web user interface components and object-relational mapping (and by "combine" I mean tight coupling, you bet) - just because they didn't like Struts or Hibernate, and quote: "Java Server Faces are still in Beta". They also didn't like the Java Collections API, so they wrote their own (interface-compatible) implementation.

Another developer was so convinced of webservices and any other technology that he could possibly apply that he suggested to compile report layouts into .NET assemblies, store those assemblies in database BLOBS and download them to the intranet(!) client using webservices (byte-arrays serialized over XML). Need to say more?

As A Software Developer, You Don't Live On An Island (Part I)

Maybe my expectations are too high, but how come that so many software developers suffer from the ostrich syndrome? They have been doing their RPG or Visual Basic or SQLWindows or <place_your_favorite_outdated_technology_here> programming for ten years or longer, but during all that time they never managed to look beyond their own nose. Now they suddenly face a migration to Java or VB.NET, or they must provide a webservice interface or the like. OOP, what's that? Unicode, what's that? XML, that looks easy, let's just do some printf()s (or whatever the RPG counterpart to printf() is ;-) ) with all these funny brackets. Oh, and when there is something new to learn, those folks of course expect their employer to send them on training for months.

I always thought this profession would mainly attract people who embrace change. Seems I was wrong.

Besides everyday project business, I try to stay in touch with the latest in technology. Readings books, magazines and weblogs, listening to podcasts, talking with colleagues who are into some new stuff, and the like.

Reading one book a month about something you haven't dealt yet (may it be a C# primer or a Linux admin tutorial or whatever) - that's the minimum I recommend to every software developer with some sense of personal responsibility.