Rants Tagged with “Coding”
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I just read this blog entry for Michael Earls and it got me wondering. I am one of these neanderthals that has been coding since before I could drive. I see the value of “Patterns” as a common language to help solve problems, but I am not a huge fan of “Everything is a Pattern” mentality that peeked sometime in the late nineties. I was talking to Chris Sells one day about patterns and we came to the conclusion that patterns are great because they created a common language for stuff that we've been using for years. The problem comes in when a developer tries to fit every problem into the GOF patterns.
At the end of the day, we all use patterns, even if we refuse to call them that. Both extremes have their own problems:
- “patterms are everything” developers tend to waste time trying to fit their domain problems into the GOF patterns;
- “I don't do patterns” developers tend to miss the point of reusing common solutions for common problems.
“I don't think in patterns, but I certainly do them...”
This Outlook Add-In from MS Research and Maryland U. is particularly interesting. It may be a little more of than another consuption of extra CPU cycles in an age over-zealous animations, but I think there is something useful here. There is an intuitiveness to what they have in mind that is very useful.
It adds itself as an Outlook Add-In but doesn't take over any standard functions so don't be worried about what it will do to Outlook. Let me know what you think...
After a short break to catch up on a lot of things, I am back to ranting...
A blast from my Gen<X> development days. I was surprised to see this was still in development, but glad at the same time. Sure, it'll take a week to compile, but it will run like the devil!
Someone let the cat out of the bag about what software version numbers mean. I get you for this!
I have been spending a lot of time writing about technology lately. After a phone conversation with Tim Ewald, it got me thinking. During the first half of writing the book, I was working full-time writing ATL/C++ apps mostly and trying to get up to speed with ADO.NET at night. While my girlfriend minds, I don't really.
While in this phase of the project, I learned a lot about the technology and the class signatures, but it was very hard to grasp the big picture of the real problems that people will/are facing.
Soon after I got a full-time position developing a large scale .NET application. This really helped me appreciate the nature of the techology. I started to get really excited about how ADO.NET would help people solve these problems. Later on I started doing a tour of .NET User Groups to talk about ADO.NET and this was enlightening as well. People were asking me real-world questions that I did not always have great answers for. In the end, both of these experiences definitely helped me write a better book IMHO.
So the quandry, do I go out and try to find a position helping build large scalep projects to stay sharp with the trench warfare that is coding or simply move to being a full-time writer/editor? I don't want to lose my edge of understanding the code, but trying to do both is exhausting.
In the end, I hope to find somewhere in-between. Work on designing large scale projects while being able to write/edit about feels like the good middle ground.
As a primarily .NET Guy, it has been fun watching from sidelines what Sun is
trying to do for Java...
I've wrote a bit of Java here and there, but I could never find an IDE that
was worth a dime. Sun seems to finally trying to address Java's biggest
weakness, development tools. Sure, hardcore Java heads will tell me that I am a
lesser man for not doing everything with the command-line. This thinking is even
permeating .NET lately talks.
Sun has had a ten year head start on .NET. I wish they would have gotten
religion about tools before. This is one thing I give MS a lot of credit for. As
much as I bitch and moan about the IDE's of the last five years, they really
have made me more productive. And that's what it is really about in the long
run.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like to depend on wizard code or designers, but
they do take the tedium out of a lot of development efforts. Back in my youth,
developing windows with the SDK just sucked. No getting around it. Too much time
spent in trial and error. If I never have to hand-edit a .res file again, I will
be a very happy man.
I think Sun developing a good IDE for Java will just increase the competition
between Java and .NET. That's a good thing. I am ultimately a consumer and
competition is good for the consumer.
Throw Borland's hat into the .NET IDE ring and I am a very happy man. Having
MS and Borland fight it out, feature for feature, works for me. I want to write
code...sometimes a lot of code...and the better the development environment, the
more time I get to spend away from the keyboard.
After seeing the story about Justin Frankel and his departure of Nullsoft, it
got me thinking about code as self-expression.
I just spent the last week completing two projects. First, I re-architected
http://wildermuth.com and I recreated
TypedDataSetGenerator so that I could extend it. I learned a couple things about
how much I like to write code.
- While it might not be 'self-expression', I sure do enjoy writing code.
- .NET has made the experience even more enjoyable.
Don't get me wrong, the days of C++/MFC/ATL/COM were a rollercoaster ride.
Using ATL source code as the documentation was like flying without a parachute.
In constrast, using .NET has made me appreciate what development can be with a
wealth of documentation.
My only beef is that I do wish we could walk into the .NET code from time to
time to understand what the heck is going on. Wonder who I need to cajole at MS
to give us the .PDBs...
