Some Simple Thoughts

Tasks in Silverlight…

2011-09-02T09:41:00.001+10:00

Yep, the RC for Silverlight 5 now supports Tasks. You can do your own parallel processing in Silverlight 5 now.

Oh, and here are some of the other features:

P/Invoke (Native function calls)
64 Bit
Vector Printing
Remote Control and Media Command Support (I have no idea what this is.. time to do some reading)
DataContextChanged Event
In-Browser Trusted Applications
PivotViewer Control
Power Awareness

All in all, some cool features seem to be coming..

OMG It’s the Ribbon!!

2011-08-30T09:05:00.001+10:00

That’s what I’ve woken up to today. The web is ablaze about Microsoft’s decision to put the ribbon into Explorer in Windows 8. Everybody seems to be an expert about the ribbon, and the critics are all busy bagging it out. Exhibit A

Now, a lot of people may well be correct when they talk about the ribbon taking up extra room, and showing items that normally are not used. But I take a very different view on the ribbon.

In file explorer, 95% of what I do is hidden in the right mouse click context menu, or it’s done with shortcut keys. nice… But in this new world of touch screens, how does this work? I can’t just right mouse click or press Control + N as I no longer have a keyboard or mouse…

The ribbon provides common ground within the OS, allowing all form factors to perform the same tasks using the same mechanism. Is this a bad thing?

I think my only concern is to do with the one size fits all. Microsoft’s previous incarnations of Windows Mobile all tried to turn Mobile phones into computers.. It didn’t work. Finally they came out with Windows Phone 7, the phone OS that’s not a computer. Are Microsoft about to come undone in the same way with tablets? Are they trying to hard to force a PC based OS onto a tablet. I hope not.

If you have any thoughts, great opinions etc, drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you.

Ed.

Pure Speculation

2011-06-03T10:08:00.001+10:00

I’ve had a night to kick back and mull over the whole Windows 8 live tiles HTML 5/JavaScript thing. The more and more I think about this, the more interested I get in it. I need to clarify again that this is all speculation, based on a single presentation which lacked any information about technical aspects, but based on current implementations of various technologies we can come up with some fun speculation.

HTML, JavaScript and .Net are all interpreted. That’s probably the key thing about this whole argument that I find the most interesting. HTML and JavaScript have had a lot of love from the IE team, and more recently from within the Windows Team.

From various sources around the web, we’ve heard about Native HTML, and even the effort being put into a faster JavaScript engine. It’s the “Our JavaScript Engine is fastest” trend in the industry at the moment that’s driving a lot of this. Not so much the adoption within windows, but more the fact that Microsoft have a fast JS engine.

Just like JavaScript and HTML, .Net is interpreted at runtime. All .Net code is compiled down to IL, which is then JIT compiled on the fly. This isn’t a bad thing. What is a bad thing, is the current load time for .Net. The load time is still a pain for managed developers, and in fact, IE can now load and render a web site faster than even the most simple .Net apps can load. This isn’t a good thing.

So, we have 2 different technologies, one is lightning quick to load, while the other isn’t.

From here, we need to look at yet another trend in the industry, the “I want it now” trend. People expect PCs/devices to be running and usable in seconds, not minutes, and the Windows Team are busy playing this same game. This is pure speculation, but I suspect that by focusing only on HTML5 and JavaScript, they can have a “Start Screen” loaded and responsive well before the rest of the OS has time to finish spinning up services, pre-caching apps and all the other nice to have features used on desktop machines.

It’s this desire for a fast start up time that hurts .Net. Spinning up the .Net runtime is expensive at the best of times, and adding that cost to the start up time for Windows is expensive.

So, I would hazard a guess that this is the decision that the Windows Team were stuck with.

Now for my grumpy .Net Rant… It’s been the Windows Team that have done nothing for years to help the world of .Net performance, so in effect, this whole situation is probably of their own making. Had they put in some effort to help out, we may be in a completely different position today.

Now after this little rant, I’d like to say that I still hold out hope that yesterdays presentation was just a little poorly thought out, and the .Net is going to be treated like a first class citizen within the new tablet interface.

First thoughts on Windows 8

2011-06-02T14:07:00.001+10:00

I love it.. It’s different, vibrant and looks like it may be a massive winner on touch/portable devices. This is the exact area that Microsoft have been struggling in.. That would make this a Win++

Unfortunately, I have some massive issues that come to mind straight away.. I’ll do my best to explain, but while I do, please remember that I’m a desktop jockey, I’ve working in WinForms, WPF and Silverlight since .Net was first released.

Desktop Machines and Monitors

I work on PCs, I play serious PC games. Both my work machine and home machines have multiple/large monitors, and I always have a bucket load of apps running at any given time. Visual Studio can easily consume 2 screens, while a third hosts a browser, email, whatever. That’s three screens of content that’s needed at a given time.

From the initial view of Windows 8 (and yes, it’s still very early days), it seems to focus around a single application running in full screen mode. Multitasking is done via hiding the other programs, or even snapping 2 programs into onto a single screen. I’d like to see how this strategy works across multiple monitors, for what I consider “power” users.

The other thing I’d like to add to this is “Large” screens. I use where possible, the largest screens I can get my hands on at a decent price. 24” monitors are now cheap and plentiful. 24” touch screens are virtually non-existent.. The new UI, while it can be navigated with a mouse, looks to be way more fun and focused on touch. I’m really hoping MS know something about the future of touch screens and availability that isn’t currently available.

I’m not going to bother with the whole ergonomics of touch screens on desktops..

HTML5 and Javascript

The strategy is good.. Lets let all the little script kiddies to write apps for Windows… The more people we have the better.. Right??

It’s an interesting strategy, but one that I’m really hoping the guys in the windows team have thought long and hard about. As I noted about, I’m a desktop jockey. I write and support some apps that are just not suitable for the web.

I understand that “Windows” still exists under all the pretty tiles etc, but will this new interface be accessible to some of the existing desktop tools? It’s been no secret that WPF isn’t getting any love, and Silverlight’s life is being heavily evaluated. Am I about to be put into a position where I choose between becoming a HTML5/Javascript kiddie or going back to the dark ages and working with C++… I really hope now.

Windows Phone

This somewhat goes back to the whole HTML5/Javascript thing above. Right now, I have a nice, shiny HTC Mozart. It’s powered by Windows Phone 7. Apps on my phone are written in managed code, using Silverlight or XNA. Basically, apps are powerful, can do lots of things, and are very easy to write. What my phone can’t do is run apps written in HTML5 natively. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that, but why then, does my powerful desktop machine now have to run apps written by script kiddies, while it can’t run the same thing my phone can?

The rest.

Clearly, some of what I’ve written is quite possibly over the top. I hope that some managed languages continue to be supported as first class citizens in Windows 8, and that MS have their schiznitz together in the desktop department. I hope that Windows 8 isn’t so focused on winning ground in the tablet market that it completely abandons heavy desktop users.

As with most things like this, it’s still very early days. These are my first reactions (and appear to be the same as thousands of others based on my twitter feeds), and I can only hope that MS have a lot more information to announce over the coming months.

Really

2011-04-05T15:15:00.001+10:00

I’ve just been having a conversation with a college, and something very interesting popped up. It’s something that has been hinted at a bit through a few channels of late, but wasn’t until this conversation that I actually realised how bad it’s been.

The conversation was about Windows Phones. I have a HTC Mozart, which I flashed all around the office when I got it. The problem is, that nobody else around here has heard much about Windows Phone 7. Nada, not a peep. Now, being in the Microsoft space, I get bombarded with advertisement for all things Microsoft, but the conversation I had delved deeper into Microsoft Technology. We talked about Windows 7, IE9, Live Essentials, Security Essentials, Windows Phone, Silverlight etc but everything came back to the same “Really”.. The person I was talking to has not seen (or remembered) the smallest bit of advertising related to ANY of the newest things coming out of Microsoft.. Nothing, nada, zilch..

This person doesn’t hide in a closet, he’s out playing with Android Phones, Linux, anything that you can possibly imagine a geek playing with. Despite his love for tech, none of the Microsoft Advertising has made it his way… He’s seen Apple advertising, he’s seen ads on TV for Android based phones, Junk Mail with full pages dedicated to android etc.. But where is the Microsoft Advertising.

Microsoft have really turned the corner with the last wave of releases, their software if looking nicer, working better, and all round just awesome. Yet despite this, Microsoft just haven’t had a chance to capitalise. Being good is one thing, but you also have to make sure everybody knows it..

I think this is part of what’s killing technology such as Silverlight and WPF.. Microsoft just aren’t pushing them… With a small bit more work, they can become very compelling products, but what they really need is more advertising dollars thrown at them.

Microsoft failing with Windows Mobile 7 in Australia

2011-03-18T09:49:00.001+11:00

Today Microsoft announced MSN Onit, “The essential guy’s guide” for windows phone 7. I thought I’d take a peek, because, you know, I like guys things (including my blue crocodile skin shoes)..

The reviews looked good, I found it in the Marketplace using Zune then *bam*… There is no download button.. It seems that Microsoft (or MSN) has decided that this application should be locked down to only the US and a few other regions.

I understand that there are issues relating to copy write, licensing and all sorts of other legal nasties that can pop up when working across multiple regions, but it seems to me that Microsoft are happy to release everything to the US market without any thought of other markets. This is further evident with the lack of music available in Zune Marketplace.

It this something we should be blaming on Microsoft as a whole? Or is it something that the Australian branch of Microsoft has just been unable to work on. My bet is that it’s a combination of both. Unfortunately the result is that Windows Mobile users in Australia continue to have a broken user experience (don’t get me started on location based searching) when using Windows Mobiles. I really hope the Microsoft is working hard on getting these things fixed, particularly with the major update for the platform later this year that really targets business users. Right now there is no way I can recommend a Windows Mobile as a business platform with this lack of support outside of the US.

Ed.

Where is it?

2011-02-23T09:41:00.001+11:00

Where’s my phone update.. I want it now..

Ok, let me slow down a little.. I have a HTC Mozart, I love this phone. It does everything I need it to do (though copy/paste would be useful because I’m to lazy to write down the occasional phone number).. Microsoft are in the process of rolling out a small update to improve the update process before they release the much anticipated NoDo update..

So, the update updates the updater and does nothing else for me… So why do I want it so badly..

/sigh

Technical Debt

2011-02-16T10:56:00.001+11:00

We’ve all head this phrase before, we all know it exists, but yet it always seems to be the one thing that all projects carry around. Technical Debt tends to be more apparent in larger, longer running projects but I think it tends to stem from 2 main sources.

Change

As projects continue, more often than not you’ll find that the original assumptions made at the start of a project turn out to be incorrect, or that the system was designed with set requirements in mind but may not suit requirements that will pop up in the future.

The other thing that adds to “change” are phased project implementations. It’s implementing a core system that will have future features implemented.

Technology

Technology is the other key to technical debt. I know that the software I write now is massively different to the software I wrote 3-4 years ago. Dependency Injection, Linq, Entity Framework, Unit Testing, Mock Frameworks, Continual Integration, the list just goes on. The problem is that retrofitting some of these new technologies that can help to make your development efforts more productive, more testable and everything else costs time and money.

In addition to this, larger technology shifts like Windows Forms –> WPF/Silverlight are often not feasible.

Mitigation

I’ve read a lot of articles about how to reduce the risk of technical debt, and a lot of it is focused around Agile. “Embrace Change”. Well, this is all well and good, but there are still issues with this. The assumption is that the system(s) were developed in the first place with a full suit of unit test, encapsulation and everything else you can imagine to reduce the risk of change. The simple fact is that this very rarely happens.

The other end of this is the cost. Any project that will help to reduce technical debt needs to factor this work in, and unfortunately, it’s one of the first things dropped from a project because of time/cost constraints. Businesses just don’t care about it, as long as the application continues to run.

So, my question is, how else can you deal with Technical Debt in a way that has little cost on business?

Plan B?

2011-02-16T10:05:00.001+11:00

I was just made aware of an open letter from a few “young” Nokia Shareholders who seem to be a little less than happy with the latest happenings at Nokia. While reading the open letter, all I could do was laugh.

My thoughts on the new strategy are fairly straight forward.. Nokia’s brand is declining and they have a large amount of money being sunk into two different smart phone operating systems. If Nokia don’t do something soon, they will start loosing money at a massive rate. The cost of bringing Symbian up to scratch is going to be huge which leaves them with Meego.

The problem with MeeGo is that there is no app or developer eco system for it, which will mean that if/when the OS is ready, they will be on the back foot fighting for developers. The time lag between releasing the OS and phones running it is likely to be long, and the whole time Nokia will be losing more Market share and shrinking any money they have left in the bank.

Taking up another OS may not be an ideal solution for a company that has always stood on it’s own, but it is a strategy that can be executed quickly and can ensure the brand continues in the short term. This is the only reason (in my opinion) why Nokia are moving to an existing Smartphone OS. It’s about turning the company around quickly, with the biggest profit margin possible to allow them the freedom to execute a longer term strategy to differentiate themselves from the market.

Plan B in my option, would be the ultimate mistake for a company that’s lost it’s way, and would only speed up the decline of the once leader in the mobile space.

IE9, Windows Phone and More

2011-02-15T11:35:00.001+11:00

What an exciting time.. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d know that I’m a heavy user of Microsoft Technology, it’s part of my job, it pays the bills and all that other stuff. Sometimes, working with Microsoft Technologies can be painful. I have had several older windows mobiles, and cursed nearly every day, I’ve worked in office environments where IE6 was the standard, and cursed at older versions of SQL Server. You name it, I’ve played with it.

But lately, I’ve been really excited about the software coming out of Microsoft, and the announcements from the last week are no exception.

IE9

Last week, the IE9 RC was released. I’ve been using the Beta since it was released, but the RC just blew me away. It’s performance was impressive, leaving the beta looking like panda bear on pot. The hardware rendering is awesome, start up time quick,and in general just feels extremely responsive.

This has all been achieved by:

A new Java Script engine
Hardware accelerated rendering through via GPU
Running the Java Script engine in process (no more COM interop)
Multi-threaded support
Reduced Memory usage.

The biggest punch with this release is the new Anti-Tracking protection. This is something that had been hinted at but nothing had been shown until the RC.

Usability has also had a big working over in the RC thanks to lots of feedback from the beta. Tabs are now by default next to the address/search bar, but can be moved to sit under the bar like they were in previous versions.

I think Microsoft are on a winner with this, and I hope they keep this sort of innovation up for future versions of IE.

Windows Phone

The first update for Windows Phone should be out in the next few weeks (March??), and this brings with it a few small updates related to 3rd party app performance and copy paste. Both of these features are nice, but not killer inclusions.

What IS exciting, is the talk about the first Major update which should ship this year. The update is now looking like it will include IE9 (sure, trimmed a little for mobiles) with the same rendering capabilities of the desktop counterpart. And by “same”, Microsoft are even talking hardware accelerate via the phones GPU!!! This I can’t wait to see.

The other big part of the announcement is the support for running apps in the background. Yes, I know, other mobile platforms have this, even the old windows mobile had this.. But it’s still big news for WinPho7..

Last but not least is the feature that I think is going to increase the uptake the most (besides the Nokia announcement) is the integration of Sky Drive. Right now, office documents are stuck on your phone (unless you have SharePoint), but being able to load/save documents in the cloud is a HUGE update, and one that was sorely missing. This one feature is probably the biggest inhibiter of businesses picking up these new phones.

And then..

There are lots of other bits happening as well, like Win 7 SP1, NuGet, the fast approaching VS SP1 and lots of other projects that have been popping up around the place.

I think in general, Microsoft has really turned a corner and seem to be shipping quality software again with fairly regular releases.

I think it’s a great time to be involved in the MS Tech space.

Windows Phone on Nokia

2011-02-12T09:23:00.001+11:00

It seems that the rumours were all correct, Nokia and Microsoft have announced (finally) that Nokia will be dropping the Symbian OS that has been their staple platform for over a decade in favour of Windows Mobile 7.

With Nokia’s declining market share at the cost of both iOS (iPhone) and Android, Nokia really needed to do something and quick. I believe there were 3 options that Nokia could of taken:

Upgrade Symbian
Android
Windows Mobile

Upgrading Symbian as far as I’m concerned was the least optimal solution. The cost of bringing Symbian up to scratch (Modernisation) would cost a large amount of money, and leave Nokia in the phone OS Market. By dropping Symbian, Nokia now has the ability to cut the fat from their business and focus on more innovating hardware.

Both Android and Windows Mobile could have been options, particularly when you look deeper into the announcement. This isn’t just about the phone OS, it’s also about the eco system including Maps, Advertising and Search.

The other part of the announcement is what I believe the real clincher for Nokia was. By dropping it’s focus on the Mobile OS, it allows Nokia to continue working on areas where it still leads the market. That is innovative hardware and it’s market lead in mobile imaging.

I believe that this move is going to be huge for both Nokia and Microsoft in the long term, but unfortunately the announcement has already been met with a log of negativity, including Nokia’s Developers staging a walkout, and compounding Nokia’s problems with a falling share price.

Personally, I’m excited, and can’t wait to see where this new partnership heads.

Geek Rage

2011-02-11T10:50:00.001+11:00

I thought I’d give it a few days to let the dust settle before I threw my opinion out into the world about Red Gate’s recent announcement about charging a fee for .Net Reflector.

This tool has been effectively free for a long period of time, from way back when Lutz Roeder first created it, right through the purchase by Red Gate. Not long after the initial purchase, Red Gate broke the product into two versions which were Free and Pro. As you can imagine, one was free and the other not.

This next part is purely speculation, but I suspect that Red Gate have not made very much money from the Pro Version because the Free version was adequate for most people. I mean, lets face it.. I don’t actually NEED .Net Reflector. It’s just a nice to have tool.

This brings me to the point of my post.. Red Gate are a commercial company. No commercial company is in the market to not make money. Even those big and nasty open source companies are in the business of making money, but they work by generating revenue through services.

But it’s $35 dollars.. Yep, the free version is now $35 dollars. I don’t know about you guys, but I spend more money than that on Coffee each week.. It’s also not even close to amount of money that most .Net Developers spend on tools like ReSharper ($199 for a personal license) or many of the third party control libraries out there.

I don’t think $35 dollars is a lot to ask for to ensure that a tool used by a large amount of the community continues to be maintained for future versions of .Net, and I think Red Gate have the right to do this.

That’s my though on the issue, and I know that if/when I need to use reflector again, I’ll happily suck it up and spend my $35 dollars (Tax deductable of course) .

Windows XP, Powershell and Deployment

2010-12-22T14:04:00.001+11:00

Anybody who has read my blog would understand some of my frustration with running in environments with out-dated operating systems. Well, this post is another in a series of mini-rants about how new technology running on old platforms, mixed with half-hearted implementations has again contributed to sub-optimal solutions.

I’m currently running Windows Powershell 2.0 on a Windows XP machine. A large majority of servers are still running 2003 Server. This “antiquated” environment outright rules out the use of powershell remoting for updating servers during deployment.

This shouldn’t be a problem, as powershell comes with very useful, built in commandlets that allow you to interrogate processes on remote machines, connect drives and do a lot of other really fun things. Once again, this is where my environment comes into play. Production Web Infrastructure doesn’t use our internal Active Directory for Authentication. This decision was made many years ago for security reasons. The result of this is that we need to pass credentials to both Get-Process and New-PSDrive to allow retrieval of processes and to map network drives. Lets look at each of these commands.

Get-Process

A quick look at this command (get-help get-process –full), reveals that it doesn’t allow input of credentials. The only way to use this command is to be pre-authenticated with the target machine, and have the correct permissions.

NEW-PSDRIVE

This command seems to be a little better, it actually has a parameter for credentials. This surely must be a winner.. Right??

It turns out, that the parameters are just passed through to the provider specified using the PSProvider parameter. Unfortunately the FileSystem provider completely ignores the this parameter, resulting in this commandlet completely useless for our environment again.

Where does that leave us?

It leaves me using Powershell, mixed with WMI and Windows Scripting for something that should have been very easy to implement.

I’m sure that this usage scenario isn’t particularly obscure, and hope that future iterations of powershell clean up some of the loose ends around being able to provide credentials to commands instead of assuming that the current user has access to all network resources.

Clearly ahead of my time

2010-11-09T12:55:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I put up a post about Validating user input. Today, news that the British Navy has been hit with a SQL Injection Attack.

I have a very simple question about this.. Why is this sort of thing still happening? Not only are we talking about an attack that is very simple to defend about, but we are also talking about a Military Organisation. I’m sure that most countries have invested large amount of money into Cyber Security etc, but yet they are still failing at implementing simple security measures.

Here are a list of possible ways to have picked up this BEFORE it became an issue:

Code Reviews. Easy, internal and should be done by a person who knows about these sort of things
External Code Reviews. If you don’t have in-house expertise, there are plenty of companies out there who can help
Application Security Testing. Get an external company to try and break into the system.

There are many other ways, but these in conjunction with better education would go a long way to ensuring these types of attacks are a thing of the past.

There is just no excuse for….

2010-11-08T16:54:00.001+11:00

not sanitising and validating your user inputs. These two items are the most important aspects of writing a stable and secure system.

Not only do I think that Sanitising and Validating is important, I also believe that it must be done in that exact order.

Here is a quick example of what can go wrong:

Imagine you have a web application used to sign up users. The only mandatory field is Username, and it must be a minimum of 10 characters in length. This is a very easy check, but developers will quite often perform a trim on data going into a database. What happens when you validate for length but then have your code remove 1, 2 or maybe even 10 characters? The worst case here is that the string full of spaces pass validation then your code removes all 10 characters from the username, resulting in an attempt to insert a null into the database. From here, hilarity will ensue, with either a database constraint exception or random null reference exceptions down the track when you try to use the data for something useful.

This is a very basic example of what can go wrong when you either don’t sanitise, don’t validate or you get the two around in the wrong order.

We apps in particular are still a very popular target for malicious users, using SQL injection attacks, delayed injection attacks or any other method you can possibly think of.

So please, do the right thing, Sanities then Validate ALL your data.

My HTC Mozart

2010-11-08T14:18:00.001+11:00

Well, I’ve now had my HTC Mozart for a little over 2 weeks, and I felt it was time I put up a few of my thoughts.

I’ll start off with a simple statement. I LOVE this phone and I LOVE Metro.

What I like

Metro. Texting. Emails. Live Integration. It’s all so seamless, intuitive and easy to use. Admittedly, I’ve come over from WinMo6.1, so a lot of people are going to scoff at this, but I really like the speech balloon approach to text message conversations.

Keeping up to date with emails on this phone are a joy. I’ve pinned 2 of my email accounts to the main screen, and I can easily see when I have emails and how many. Reading emails is clean, easy and efficient. This is the first phone I’ve had where I actually question the need to use a desktop machine for emails. This is a good thing.

My previous phone was with 3, and the handset had serious issues when roaming (reboots, dropouts, crashes).. This was a killer for me. My Mozart on Telstra? It’s awesome. I get coverage everywhere I’d expect it. I travel between Canberra and Cooma regularly, and with this phone I get coverage most of the way. This is just awesome. Yes, I know this is more about the network, but at least when I roam it doesn’t reboot.

I have even grabbed the official twitter client, this app looks and feels like it belongs, while steel having the typical styling of twitter. It’s clean and easy to use. I’ve started using this for the majority of my twittering.

What I don’t like

As with previous version of WinMo and desktop Windows, a lot of manufacturers installed a lot of CrapWare. With WinMo 7, Microsoft limited the number of third party apps that could come pre-installed on these devices. This is a great idea. And the third party apps that came with my phone (Thanks HTC and Telstra) are perfect examples of why these sort of applications shouldn’t be pre-installed.

I’ll start with the Telstra hub, because I have mixed feelings about this. I really like the weather view on this. The overall feel of the hub is alright, except for 2 grips. The first of these is it’s slow.. There is a lot going on in this tab, and sometimes it’s just not responsive for 2-3 seconds. This isn’t good. My other gripe with the Telstra hub is “My Places”.. Is this the best you could do Telstra? Have a few buttons that just pre-launch a web URL? It kinda takes away from the whole experience. Fix these two things, and the Telstra hub could be my new best friend.

And then there is the HTC Hub.. Seriously HTC… Did you guys think about trying to fit into the Metro style? I think now. This looks/feels just like typical HTC I know better type of UI. It looks like it belongs on the front screen of an Android or WinMo6.5 phone. This isn’t Metro. All this screen does is provides Time/Weather information and links to other (reasonably useless) applications. If you can’t take this sort of thing seriously, then stay off my phone. You guys make great hardware, but I think you need to stay out of the phone software business.

What I’m “Meh” About

I’m still not impressed about the lack of a Music Marketplace for the phone. I understand that this isn’t just a Microsoft issue, but I do think that if Microsoft had been a little more organised, and maybe even been a little more aggressive then we would probably have a download service by now. The reason this is only “Meh” and not a “Don’t Like” is because I already have a large music collection and I already used the Zune desktop client at home. This resulted in a very easy migration over to the new phone, it just seemed to work.

Contact Management is another of my “Meh” items. I love the fact that a lot of contacts have been pulled from my various social networks. I even prepared and migrated all of my outlook contacts over to live before I got my phone. The “Meh” moment with this was the merge functionality. Both the phone and Live offer merge suggestions which seems like a good idea, but when 2 contacts with IDENTICAL names are not recommended, then I know it’s got problems. Fix this small issue and the merge will be up there in the like section.

Besides all of this, there are a few other “oddities”, but I am not going to complain because Microsoft are already working on addressing these. And no, I’m not talking about copy/paste and multi threading.. I’m talking about the following:

Open office documents directly from my live account
Filtering out some contacts. Some people are in my “larger” social graph because it’s the right thing to do, it doesn’t mean I want to know when when and where they poop directly from my phone.

More on Open Music Platform

2010-09-23T09:19:00.001+10:00

Ok, so I’m sure some people have read my post yesterday about the market speak coming from Microsoft about the state of Zune Marketplace in Australia.

I thought I should probably take some time out to explain my thoughts/feelings a little better.

Open Music Platform

I think the idea of having DRM free music, being able to share your music between devices regardless of where it came from is very important. I have a very large collection of completely LEGAL music that I want on my mobile devices.

From an adoption point of view, being able to sync a Windows Mobile 7 device with music you purchased from iTunes is great, and I wouldn’t expect anything less.

The State of Music In Australia

In Australia, we have very limited ways to get downloadable music. We have iTunes, Bigpond Music if your a Bigpond user and that’s about it. There are a number of online music stores online, but due to licensing restrictions they can’t sell us music in Australia. Sure, we can trick them by using US Proxies, Paying with US credit cards etc, but the point is that it’s actually against the Terms and Agreements and probably illegal.

Marketing Speak

The post I pointed to from Dave Glover didn’t do anything to clarify the original point that Zune Marketplace doesn’t allow Music Downloads within Australia. He went on to point out how we could use existing music we owned, get music from other sources, and all the Video content we could get. But I go back to the point that he didn’t address the original issue of not being able to buy music through Zune Marketplace which can be enjoyed in the US and Europe.

Usage Scenarios

Lets look at the major competition from an Entertainment point of view. You know who I’m talking about, Apple and their iPhone and iPad.

iOwners can use one tool to download new music and sync with their devices. It’s easy to use and just works. This is a simple scenario that won’t be available to Windows Phone 7 owners in Australia.
iPhones and iPads can natively access iTunes through wireless internet access. If you want new music and you have signal then it’s available. Again, this won’t be available to Windows Phone 7 owners in Australia.

Why is this happening

There are only 2 possible reasons I can imagine that would prevent Australian Windows Phone 7 owners from accessing online music.

MPAA or some other Music Industry representatives cannot come to an agreement with Microsoft. I actually find this unlikely due to the fact that Apple managed to get some sort of agreement in place.
Microsoft View the potential market in Australia to be too small, and therefore won’t invest the time and money into getting an agreement and systems in place.

My Criticism

My issue with this whole thing is the Marketing crap that comes out of Microsoft about this issue. It is an issue that will affect the uptake of the phone.

In addition to this, I did take the time out to reply to Dave Glover yesterday through the comments on his post. I think the worst thing I said in the post was “contempt”, in the context of the way they (Microsoft) can’t be honest about what’s going on. But it seems my comment didn’t make it through moderation process.

What I’d Like to See

This is really simple. I’d like to see Microsoft publicly acknowledge this as an issue and at least explain why we can get Video on our phones (I don’t care for this) but won’t be able to get music (I care about this). Possibly even detail what they are doing to correct it.

Ed.

An “Open Music Platform”

2010-09-22T15:15:00.001+10:00

Sorry, that just sounds like marketing speak for “We are not going to provide music downloads for you”.

What am I talking about? Read this.

One of the things that has made iAnythings so popular is iTunes. It’s a one stop shop for Apps, Videos AND MUSIC. The iWantItNow generation don’t go to the music shop to buy CDs, take it home, rip it (is that even legal?) and then sync to their iDevice. Nope, they login to iTunes, download it and sync. 5 Minutes max to get the music they want.

With Windows Phone 7, we will have a useful tool called Zune. This works with the Zune marketplace and in the US, most of Europe and a whole heap of other countries, it will be the perfect replacement for iTunes. In Australia, we can only download Videos, not Music. In fact, in Australia we can’t use most online music stores due to the fact that we are not in the United States..

The answer is actually pretty simple.. Buy your music through iTunes then use the Zune software to sync with your phone.. But this isn’t as easy as it should be. Another option is to trick Zune into thinking your in the US, but that’s just not right is it..

Anyway, please don’t treat people in Australia with such contempt by telling us about Open Music Platforms. That’s just a nice way of saying “You don’t get it, suck it up”.

ASP.Net Crypto Attack

2010-09-20T10:34:00.001+10:00

Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week you are probably now aware of the Crypto attack that is in the wild and targets ASP.Net applications. This attack is raising many of the same issues that we see regularly in the industry with SQL Injection Attacks.

Wait, what?? Yes, this is another of those situations where Developers and Administrators have been lazy. Yes, it is a Vulnerability and it needs to be fixed, but it’s also become a massive issue because a large number of ASP.Net applications don’t handle errors correctly.

The recommended workaround (from the MS Security Advisory) is to simply enable customErrors and redirect to a generic error page. Simple fact is that EVERY ASP.Net app out there should be doing this already. This is one of the many steps to mitigating against attacks on websites including SQL Injection attacks. Returning any information to potentially malicious users is bad.

So, let me quickly run through the bare essentials.

If your using .Net 3.0 or earlier, add this to your config file:

<configuration>
 <location allowOverride="false">
   <system.web>
     <customErrors mode="On" 
        defaultRedirect="~/error.html" />
   </system.web>
 </location>
</configuration>


For .Net 3.5 and above

<configuration>
 <location allowOverride="false">
   <system.web>
     <customErrors mode="On" 
        redirectMode="ResponseRewrite" 
        defaultRedirect="~/ErrorPage.aspx" />
   </system.web>
 </location>
</configuration>

There is an additional step that you should take to this. In your error page, add in a random sleep to the Page_Load event. Why?? The short and easy answer is that some attacks use timing information to derive information. Adding in a random sleep (generate the random number through the crypto engine) helps to remove another potential vector for gathering information.

Please, don’t be lazy, make sure your Web Apps are secure.

Another Sad Day

2010-09-16T10:31:00.001+10:00

Well, today’s the day. The official launch of the IE9 Beta, and it’s made me sad. I’m not sad because of what IE9 is. IE9 looks to be an absolutely awesome browser, much faster than previous version, possibly more secure and a hell of a lot sexier.

I’m sad because like may other people out there, I spend a large amount of time sitting in a Corporate environment that is still sitting years behind. Yep, I’m still on Windows XP. This limits me to IE8, or one of the many other browsers out there.

At home, I’ve already installed IE9 beta, and I have to say that my initial impressions are pretty good.. What can I say, I’m not particularly fussy about my browser, I just want it too work. IE9 Beta seems to fit that so far and has a few features that I’m pretty excited about. Pinning Web Pages and having them almost feel like an extension of the desktop is amazing. It’s just not the sort of amazing that I can experience at work.

I think for now, my Netbook

with wireless internet access is going to be how my web browsing is done from work. It’s just going to be separate from the corporate network.

Warnings and Code Analysis

2010-09-09T12:35:00.001+10:00

During development, I do my best to ensure that I eliminate warning and issues identified through code analysis. I like to do this from the start so I don’t have a massive list of “clean up” at the end of a project.

Unfortunately not all of the projects I work on start from a clean state. Like me, many developers inherit a large code base that needs to be extended, patched and enhanced. More often then not, these projects come with hundreds or even thousands of compiler warnings and have probably never been run through any static code analysis.

For code analysis, I have used FxCop and now Visual Studio Code Analysis. Using these tools, I can identify issues and correct them. On a few occasions however, the “issues” are by design and I can easily put a suppression on the error. Suppressions can happen at many levels, but I prefer to generally suppress issues at the lowest possible level. This makes me review every instance of an issue instead of blindly hiding things.

When you suppress a code analysis warning, you can add in an options reason for the suppression. This acts as inline documentation that allows me to share my reasons for doing this.

Now, this is where I currently have an issue. Compiler warnings don’t allow suppressions on a per-instance level. The best we have is the ability to suppress all warning of a type for a particular project.

I’d like the ability to attribute methods, properties or classes to suppress compiler warnings just like I can with my code analysis. Not only that, I’d like to be able to leave documentation as to why I’ve suppressed a compiler warning.

I guess what I’m asking for is to just implement support for compiler warnings that’s identical to code analysis in Visual Studio. This would make my life a lot easier, particularly when working with large inherited code bases.

Datagrids Oh my..

2010-09-09T09:30:00.001+10:00

I’m just going to lay this out there.. Datagrids are the bane of my existence.

Ever since I started in IT, I’ve had the fun job of fixing issues in applications that insist on using Datagrids as edit controls. Datagrids are great tools for displaying information and for selecting data, but they are USLESS for editing.

Use a master/detail layout, or even a popup edit window.. Do something else.. BUT please don’t use datagrids for editing.

When WPF first shipped, did you notice that it DIDN’T have a datagrid? Did anybody stop to think that maybe this was a good thing?? Nope, everybody complained.. “WE NEED A DATAGRID”..

WPF shipped with a ListView and a ListBox. These were fine for displaying data and data selection. WPF also shipped with some really great edit controls.. These edit controls should be used for their intended purpose. You guessed it.. Editing data..

Please, stop the datagrid abuse.

Windows Mobile Development Blues

2010-09-02T14:21:00.001+10:00

Well, with the official RTM for windows mobile 7 today, I thought I might grab the developer tools (beta) and have a bit of a play. So, over to the Windows Phone Developer site to download the tools.

The download was a very smooth process (as it should be, it’s just an ISO). I mounted the ISO as a drive and clicked setup.exe.. FAIL!!!

So, I started checking all the pre-reqs.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (Check) *
Windows Vista/Window 7 (FAIL)

Yep, I’m at work, and my development machine is still running Windows XP. It’s a brand new box, 2.8GH Xeon processor, 4GB ram, SSD hard drive and Windows XP..

It seems the emulator for WinMo7 requires DirectX 10.1, which is why it won’t run on XP. It’s not a huge issue for me, because I have a few Win 7 machines at home that I can have a play with.

What does concern me however, is that there are a number of businesses/government agencies out there who still run Windows XP and will take another year or more to migrate. During that time, they are effectively locked out of doing development for a new exciting platform.

Will this effect the uptake of devices in a corporate setting?? Possibly. What it means for me is that it’s going to be very hard to push for WinMo7 as a platform until the organisation upgrades, which could still be a year or more away.

* The developer tools install VS 2010 express, but the tools can still be used from inside the full version of 2010.

Outlook Social Connector

2010-07-14T13:19:00.001+10:00

I finally got around to installing outlook social connector today onto a machine running outlook 2003. The install went smoothly but I was surprised that the default installation doesn’t come with any pre-installed providers.

The first two providers I’ve installed are for Facebook and Windows Live Messenger.

Some of my contacts came up without any issues, unfortunately many of my contacts use multiple email addresses for home/work etc. This isn’t an issue with OSC, I just had to go through my outlook contacts and ensure that I had all email addresses that they use entered correctly.

With that done, OCS seems to connect most of my contacts pretty well now.

In general, it looks pretty good. I think with a few more features, like the ability to reply to facebook posts etc would make OSC a must have.

I’ll post with some more thoughts once I’ve used it for a few days.

Stay tuned,

Ed.

Dealing with invalid Certificates

2010-06-07T16:39:00.001+10:00

Well, I’ve been working on a project that sends out large amounts of emails. It’s one of those projects that works fine in development, makes it through the test environment fine then BOMBS in production. It turned out that the systems was failing due to an invalid certificate. The certificate being used by the email server had expired months ago and nobody noticed.

While the Server guys were busy getting a new certificate, I implemented a quick fix to get the application working.

The fix involves setting up a call back used for Certificate Validation, very easy. Below is a sample (just Validates any request).

After the call back is setup, it’s just a matter of ensuring it gets called.

And that’s it. Problem solved.

Obviously in the call back you’d actually check the error and only validate the certificate for the specific error you want to, but as an example, this works a treat.

Enjoy.

I didn’t know…

2010-06-07T15:24:00.001+10:00

that you could use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Tab in visual studio to switch between tabs. Better yet, it brings up a little dialog box that allows you to visually see the tabs you have open complete with a preview.

Visual Studio 2010 unfortunately has the preview turned off by default (due to a reported performance issue right before release on slow netbooks). To enable the preview, just run the following command from a command line (or Start –> Run).

“reg ADD HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\General /v ShowThumbnailsOnNavigation /t REG_DWORD /d 1”

Enjoy.

A strange little feature..

2010-01-20T11:18:00.001+11:00

I’ve never been one for formatting data in the database, it’s something I’ve always done when the data is being displayed. Some work I’ve been doing recently has further re-enforced this view.

See, while trying to reverse engineer some old code, I happened to notice some odd data. The data was an XML document generated within a stored procedure in Oracle. This should not be a big issue as the Xml should only be holding data, after all, Xml is really just a data storage/transport format. This generated Xml document is then used as a data source for a mail merge. I’m sure you can see where this is heading, the data in the Xml gets formatted instead of doing the formatting in the merge document.

One of the dates in the XML document needs to be formatted like “01 January 2010”. So, the date value is passed into the oracle to_char(datevalue, format) function with the format specified as “dd Month YYYY”. On the surface this all looks fine, except that the data coming out looks a little strange. There are extra spaces between the month and the year.

After a bit of playing and a few seconds using my favourite search engine, and I found the answer. “Month” returns the full name of the month padded to 9 characters. Yep, it’s fixed width. There is no option for a non-fixed width full month format. You can do the abbreviated version (3 chars) or the full at 9.

I full understand that this isn’t something that can just be changed, but it would be nice (we are in 2010) to be able to format a date in oracle without the padding.

Well, that’s the end of my little story and mini rant.

An interesting task

2009-08-03T15:55:00.001+10:00

Over on the OzDotNet mailing list, one of the posts was asking if it’s possible to detect if there is an active exception. I believe the purpose is to change the behaviour of a method that is being called from a catch block.

While I suspect the what I consider to be the “best” solution is to pass a parameter into the function, the idea really hit a “geek spot” somewhere deep inside me. So, without further ado:

   1:          public static bool InCatchBlock()

   2:          {

   3:              StackTrace stackTrace = new StackTrace();

4:

   5:              bool inCatchBlock = false;

6:

   7:              foreach (StackFrame stackFrame in stackTrace.GetFrames())

   8:              {

   9:                  MethodBody body = stackFrame.GetMethod().GetMethodBody();

10:

  11:                  if (body != null)

  12:                  {

  13:                      foreach (ExceptionHandlingClause clause in body.ExceptionHandlingClauses)

  14:                      {

  15:                          bool isFinally = clause.Flags == ExceptionHandlingClauseOptions.Finally;

16:

  17:                          if (!isFinally && stackFrame.GetILOffset() >= clause.HandlerOffset &&

  18:                              stackFrame.GetILOffset() < clause.HandlerOffset + clause.HandlerLength)

  19:                          {

  20:                              inCatchBlock = true;

21:

  22:                              break;

  23:                          }

  24:                      }

25:

  26:                      if (inCatchBlock)

  27:                      {

  28:                          break;

  29:                      }

  30:                  }

  31:              }

32:

  33:              return inCatchBlock;

  34:          }

This function above, simply walks the current call stack and checks at each frame to see if we are inside a declared catch block. It seems to work fine for the limited testing I’ve done.

On a related note, I personally believe that code should not care about where it’s called from, as it creates intimate coupling with upstream code, which is more likely than not to create issues with your code.

National Broadband Network

2009-04-07T09:29:00.001+10:00

Wow, it’s been months.. no, years since this process started. Finally today we got the announcement we were all waiting for. Who is going to build the NBN?? Who won, who can provide the best service??

Well, it turns out that nobody was a winner. The government has cancelled the request for tender process and has decided to go it alone.

So, the plan?? A new Government owned business, who will implement a new network, implemented over the next 8 years. $4.7 billion of initial capital, but the plan is for a total of $43 billion for the full 8 years..

Personally, I think this is a very interesting result. The NBN along with Voice over IP, the Social Internet and Mobile communications will effectively make Telstra’s existing infrastructure obsolete… I guess we will see soon what Telstra plans to do. Will they build a competing network?? Lower prices so they can actually compete?? I do hope this move brings competition to the market, and that the Governments moves will produce a workable/usable network.

A growing shrinking problem

2009-04-06T10:14:00.001+10:00

A growing trend around the net lately, has been shrinking URLs. This isn’t a new thing, it’s been around for several years thanks to tinyurl and a few other sites.

The purpose of shrinking URLs is to make re-typing addresses easier, to make the links neater and to cut down on space.

Twitter has benefitted massively from shrinking urls. With such a small limit on message length, it’s means users can have a URL AND a little bit of info in their message. It’s a win-win.

Unfortunately, it seems that more places are also adopting the process of URL shrinking, in some cases, with very little benefit and some big downsides for me.

So, what’s the problem?? I regularly use a little feature that exists in nearly every browser, I like to look at where a link points to before deciding if I’ll click on it. See, it’s very easy to have a URL A Nice Site with Puppy Dogs that really points to www.somebadurl.com. Personally, I’d not click on the link despite the promise of puppy dogs.

Shrinking urls, unfortunately hides the true destination of a hyperlink, and as such, means that I am running blind. This means, I have to use my best judgement based on trust. Do I trust the person/site that posted the link. In general, this isn’t to bad.

But this is where it’s getting more difficult. Several social media sites are now actively shrinking all URLs posted on their site. These links can be posted by anybody, people I don’t know, people I don’t trust. The result, the sites no longer have my patronage. Sure, I’m only one person, but I’d rather be safe than run the risk of something far nastier.

News Flash: Wally has been found

2009-03-24T11:43:00.001+11:00

It’s been years, many books, and finally the day has come. Here is Wally

A Quick history of the internet

2009-03-20T10:47:00.001+11:00

Anybody who thinks Microsoft haven’t gotten their mojo back only have to stop and grab IE8 and take a look at this video (IE8 not required)..

IE8 News

2009-03-19T15:54:00.001+11:00

Straight from the horses mouth via twitter. “@NickHodge IE8 Final: you'll be able to download it from 3:00am AEST tomorrow. http://www.microsoft.com/ie8”

So, I guess tomorrow morning I’ll be updating my IE8 RC installs.. w00t!!

The Joy of Development

2009-03-18T16:32:00.001+11:00

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is delivering new software that makes a difference for my clients. It’s part of the reason I’m still working in the industry, it makes me feel good.

The other thing I really enjoy, and something that has happened today, is the ability to make a program (or small part) run faster. It was just a simple query, with a few tables, a view and sub query or two. In one of our environments the query run blazingly fast, taking only 2-3 seconds. In all of our other environments (one of which is an exact replica from 2 days ago) took a long time too complete. By a long time, I mean it took more than 15 minutes before I lost patience and stopped the process.

So, what changes did I make? Simple, it was just a restructure of the query. As I mentioned before, there was a sub query. This sub query was used within the where clause. An example is:

WHERE Table1.Field1 In (SELECT Field2 FROM Table2.Field2 WHERE Enabled = ‘Y’)

became:

FROM Table1 INNER JOIN (SELECT Field2 FROM Table2 WHERE Enabled = ‘Y’) as Table3 On Table1.Field1 = Table3.Field2

By moving this into the From section and making it an Inner Join, I was able to help the optimiser make the decision to apply the filter earlier in the execution.

The result, ever environment now runs the query sub second.

You may ask yourself, how did I know where to look? The answer is all in the tools you use. Today, I was using Toad, and a simple “Explain” on the query quickly shows you where the execution cost is. SQL Management Studio and many other tools can all provide an execution plan that you can use. There are a few things that you should focus on when looking over an execution plan. The two I focus on the most are Cost and Full Table Scans.

Cost provides you with a figure relative to the whole query about how expensive that operation is. If an operation is excessively expensive then you should try and simplify it.

Full Table Scans generally occur when there are no suitable indexes in place. This means that a filter cannot occur on an index and instead “scans the whole table”. As you can imagine, on a large table this can be a very time consuming process.

There is plenty more information available over the web on this topic. This is just one of my favourite (and easy) fixes for a very common database performance issue.

* This is a very simplified example of the actual query

Pick a Search Engine

2009-03-12T16:37:00.001+11:00

A few weeks ago, I woke up early in the morning and made a decision too do something different. For the life of me, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had a need too change something. That day happened to be the same day that Google decided to join the EU bandwagon and complain about Microsoft bundling I.E. with Windows. This news rubbed me the wrong way, it’s not like Google has been massively effected by this, as they’ve only recently bought out Chrome.

Anyway, after reading that, I made my decision, I was going to try and live a life without Google.

So far, it’s proven a little more difficult than I’d like, not because I rely on them, but more because of habit.

The only habit I’ve successfully changed is my web searching (because I just changed the default search engine in IE8). I’ve tried to break other habits, such as using Live Maps, but alas, the coverage in Australia is just not as good as Google Maps. Just today as an example, I did a search for Moore Street in the ACT. For anybody who knows Canberra, you may know that this street is right in the Centre of the City. Unfortunately Live Maps still can’t find it.. Luckily, Where Is came too the recue.

I’m still trying to find my feet in this Google-Free world, and while I’m sure I may never be completely free, I am pleasantly surprised that the world hasn’t come tumbling down yet.

*Yes, I’m well aware my blog is hosted by Google, I’m still not sure if I’m going to relocate it or not.

Google and the Linux desktop… Oh please…

2009-03-12T16:10:00.001+11:00

People have been jumping up and down in the vein hope that Google will move into the desktop space. I’ve heard this discussion before, yet here it is again.

It’s an interesting idea. Start by slowly working around vendor lock in, to position yourself with an end too end replacement for existing infrastructure then BAM, put out an OS too free the people.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people seem too be forgetting a few simple facts. The most important of these is the business that Google is. Google runs a search engine. But, Google the company is in the business of Advertising. Yep, that’s right, providing the ability too search is just a way to bring people in too view advertisements.

Google docs, Gmail and Google Calendar are all the same. Provide a service too bring people in, then serve up some ads. That’s the business Google is in.

All of the articles/discussions I’ve read about Google on the Desktop have all talked about some sort of Linux Distribution. Great, it could be cool. But Google will still want their advertising cake. Are they going to modify their own Linux distribution too include built in advertising? Are they going too remove the popular email clients, calendaring applications and office applications in order too force users too continue using their online, advertising supported applications?

The answer too this is clearly no. Google will not give up their revenue stream.

I think a more likely scenario is a Web Based desktop. Something that keeps users away from the PC based desktop, and all PC based desktop apps, and keep the users working in the Advertising based world that Google is clearly the king.

There is no Right Join

2009-02-11T11:44:00.001+11:00

From very early on in my career, I’ve coded SQL by hand. This is nothing particularly special, but it always astounds me how many people still get confused over the various types of joins.

Over at Code Project, I just stumbled across an article that does a pretty decent job of explaining the various join options, but it did remind me of something very interesting.. See, in my 11 years in the industry, I have never had a need for a right join. Why?? Simply put, Right Joins are just backwards left joins.. If you get your table ordering correct, then right joins don’t exist.

So, I hereby call for an end too useless right joins…

I used too just melt them..

2009-02-09T13:12:00.001+11:00

Customised My Little Ponies..

A new phone, and an interesting system

2009-02-09T10:34:00.001+11:00

Well, over the weekend I finally took the plunge. I said goodbye to my trusty old JasJam and got myself a HTC Touch Pro.

Along with this new phone, I also changed my telco. I had been with my previous telco for over 11 years, and in general hadn’t had any major issues. That was until I started looking at the Touch Pro. See, the Touch Pro was released exclusively to a single provider here in Oz for 3 months. That 3 month period started back in October last year. Fast forward 4 months, and the phone is still only available at one telco.

I contacted my previous telco, through several different methods, via phone, email and in person at their stores. Unfortunately, this is where things started too turn for me. I couldn’t get an answer about this phone. I got everything from “Would you like to just get another phone” to “What’s a Touch Pro”. This really struck me as strange. Nobody seemed to know anything, not their sales people, not their customer support, nobody. Any company that can’t answer a simple question about product availability has some serious problems.

Anyway, back too the new telco. So far I’m reasonable happy, but one thing did strike me as odd. See, as usual, the telco had to do a “credit check”. But the format of the credit check was by far the most interesting I’ve seen. It involved a few quick questions:

Are you employed
How long have you been employed
What type of employment

From this, they managed to approve me for 3 services. So, I could pick up 3 phones on plans. Wow, that’s great.. The problem is, the system in no way took into account my income, the plans I was going to get, the monthly repayments or even my other commitments. I even confirmed this with the customer representative, I could get 3 brand new phones, all on $200 plans..

CodeCampOz 2009

2009-02-03T08:43:00.001+11:00

That’s right folk, Code camp is back for another year, and anybody who’s been before knows it’s worth making the trip.

Mitch has announced the details and registration is now open.

Unfortunately, this year I won’t be there. See, it happens to be on my birthday..

Interesting Problem

2009-02-02T13:28:00.001+11:00

I came into work this morning, to find my inbox full of errors from one of our production applications. This application has been running full time for a long time. The exception that our app was throwing was:

The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx:xx PM') is in the future. Current time is 'xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx:xx PM' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'

After a little searching (ok, it took 30 seconds), I stumbled across a great post about this.

A little further digging and my assumption was correct, this is actually tied to Kerberos.

Anyway, in this case, I didn’t follow the easy solution of changing the binding behaviour, instead I got out systems guys to ensure that all the machines in question have their clocks correctly syncronised.. It seemed like a better long term solution.

Test Data

2009-01-28T10:44:00.001+11:00

I’ve always been a big proponent of using the best test data possible. As a developer, I find that it’s very easy to get lost in the details of implementation, and tend to leave the generation of test data till a later stage of a project.

The problem I find is that by leaving the generation of test data till the end, more often than not, I end up only testing edge cases (which is extremely important), but I tend to not spend enough time generating large quantities of normal data. A result of this is that it’s easy to miss performance problems.

So, as of today, I’m making sure I have sufficient amounts of test data up front. Best of all, I’m focusing on automated data population from various sources. One of my favourite sources for this is Wikipedia. For any large body of text, I find just grabbing a random article is perfect.

Annual Noise Cleanout

2009-01-21T07:58:00.001+11:00

Well, it’s that time again, yep, I’m cleaning out my list of blogs, twitter friends and every other bit of noise that I find is just not providing any use.

Unfortunately, while examining what I’m currently subscribed too, I noticed something that was a little disturbing. Once, a long time ago, I had most of the MS Oz PDE team in my feed, as of today, I’m down too one.

I used too find the information coming out of this group extremely useful. In particular, Information about Dev tools, events and new technologies. I’ve found over time, these blogs have reduced to general noise about peoples lives, or have just plain gone quiet. They no longer serve the purpose I had subscribed to them for.

This isn’t the only group I’ve cleared out, but it’s certainly one of the most disappointing ones. On the bright side, over the last year, I have picked up a number of feeds from overseas that have replaced the ones I’m now removing.

Ed.

Is it really that simple

2008-11-24T11:45:00.002+11:00

Working in the Apps dev space, you quiet often get issued with bugs and feature requests that users expect to be very easy to fix. As a general rule of thumb, I attempt to fix anything the user wants as long as it fits within the scope/budget for the project. As with everything though, quiet often a bug/request will be issued that is actually a lot bigger and more complicated than it initially appears.. And this brings me to something I've been sitting on, thinking about for a few weeks..

Over on CodingHorror is a post about a "bug/feature request" that seems to have been made into a big issue. It's a request to have the Windows Forms designer automatically default the forms font to Segoe... On the surface of this, its a pretty simple request...

The problem for me is that i use VS2008 and target Win XP AND Vista.. Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that Segoe is actually present on the target machine, and I'm not too sure if I'm actually allowed to distribute the font (I'm guessing I can't..).. This raises an interesting problem.. Windows Forms doesn't deal very well with automatic resizing. It can be done, but requires a lot of extra work, and because of this, I don't want to use Sagoe and risk the target machine picking the next best font..

Sure, there are options available, like having project settings determine the font.. i.e. a "Vista Only" option, but personally I think that allowing the users to just select the font they want works best..

Anyways, back to the grind...

I'm excited

2008-10-30T08:27:00.002+11:00

At times, working in the IT industry seems to be a little slow, dull and much the same as the previous day. this has been the case lately with the media continuing to blast Microsoft over Vista. Everywhere you turn, there are complaints, "10 reasons why x is better than Vista" and any other thing you can possibly imagine.

As for me, I've had no major issues with Vista, I use it to work, i use it to play, and for the most part, it works.. Sure, there are one or two little things that I may think need improving, but that's the same for any OS..

But, I guess back to the topic, and that its the reason for my excitement.. The last few days have reminded me exactly why I love this industry. Here's why:

Tuesday I started a new Job, and we also started to get information flowing in from PDC2008. The big news items, well, here they are:

Details on Windows 7 have started flooding in, it's Vista but it's better..
The Announcement of Windows Azure.. Yep, the cloud computing OS
And Office on the Web

I'm not going to go into details of each and every feature here, but there are a lot. I guess what I'm more interested in is the fact that a company who, according to the press is "struggling" to provide such wide ranging announcements and to even get a lot of positive feedback from folk who have been very critical of late.

I can't wait to get my hand on some of this.

Silverlight 2.0 Released

2008-10-20T08:42:00.002+11:00

The title says it all.. And here's the link to the announcement. For me, this is what I've been waiting for, Silverlight 1 was nice, but lacked a lot of features that I personally believe were required to make it useful beyond media streaming and basic flash type apps.. Silverlight 2.0 brings in everything I need as a developer to really start pushing it for internal business apps developement.. Yay!!!

Current Reading List

2008-10-13T10:44:00.000+11:00

I thought I'd just put up a quick post of my current reading list. So, here it is:

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
The God Delusion
Fish!

I don't know why, but I quite often find myself reading a few books at the same time.. Maybe I need to learn to focus a little more ;)

w00t

2008-10-02T15:43:00.003+10:00

I just read over on Mitch's blog about some new features that are going to be included into the next release of TFS Power Tools. Each of these new features looks awesome, but one caught my eye in particular that I personally can't wait too see. that feature is the new Team Members folder. Not only will this allow you too visually see who is in your project team, but it will also provide integration with your *IM client for presence, notification and vital communication functionality.

I'm all for collaboration, and any tools that help me communicate better with team members is a win in my books.

*If your IM client supports it..

VS2010 & .Net 4.0

2008-09-30T09:29:00.003+10:00

W00t, just a quick post to link up the announcement of Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 4.0. Here's the link

Oh yeah, just a quick wish on the collaboration side.. I want to be able to have multiple people working on a diagram at the same time.. Think of it like collaborative "white boarding" but.. well.. not on a whiteboard.. I know that there are a million tools available for basic whiteboard sharing, but they all ultimately end up requiring one person to convert it into UML/DML etc.. I'd just like to take the middle man (or format) out of the picture..

Can't wait too see where this all goes..

IE8 Beta 2

2008-08-28T13:43:00.002+10:00

Most people by now are probably aware the IE8 beta 2 has been released. In my last post, I quickly touched on Ubiquity, and it's interesting too see that other people also believe that Accelerators (the feature formally know as Activities) goes a way to providing the same functionality, seems some people do get it.

Besides this, there are many other features that IE has been needing for a while. The biggest as far as I'm concerned is InPrivate, closely followed by the work done on performance (speed increase, memory usage etc).

Unfortunately I won't get a good chance to get my hands dirty until later today, but I'm sure looking forward to getting IE8 beta 2 running on my machine at home.

What a tool!

2008-08-27T14:59:00.002+10:00

I was just over at Scobleizer and stumbled across his latest post about ubiquity. Somewhere in the post, he starts to talk about people who "get it" and people who don't. Or as he puts it, passionates and non-passionates.

His rant goes on about people who won't be bothered reading the instruction manual and watch the training video, and because of this, only passionate people will use it.

Now, I think ubiquity is a nice concept rolled up into a geeky, non-usable form. Blaming users for not wanting to learn what is in effect a command line for the browser seems to be a bit off the mark. If you actually spend the time to even read the first page about ubiquity, it talks about providing the "Verbs" (actions) on context menus. This is where the future is. It provides the features you need where people don't have to remember all the possible things they can do.

So, I can understand someone which passion getting excited about ubiquity, but taking an elitest stand and saying that it's no good for anybody else is just a complete load of crap as far as I'm concerned. I think maybe a bit of critisism about the form it's been delivered in is probably a better approach to take than bagging people who prefer to use the mouse than type commands into a black window.

An example of what I think would work, is based on what is provided on the ubiquity page.

The scenario: A typo on a blog (ironic that this post probably has typos too..).. They highlight some spelling mistake on a web page and use ubiquity to highlight by typing in the highlight command. The next step is to select a larger amount of text with the highlighted part to give more context of where the mistake is. They then type into ubiquity "email too xxx".. This opens gmail and starts a new email filled with the selected text and the Send To address filled in.

How I think it should work:
Select the typo and right click. Select actions->Highlight.
Select more text and right click. Select actions->Email

This is what IE8 does through activities. The difference, it's not done in a non-user friendly way using a command line tool.

Anyway, time to stop ranting... Ubiquity is a nice tool, I just think it's not quite ready for normal users.

WPF Datagrid CTP

2008-08-14T11:29:00.002+10:00

Well, for anybody who managed to miss the news, Microsoft have just released the CTP for the WPF Datagrid.. It requires the .Net Framework 3.5 sp1, but that's just a small little update...

Anyways, so far the best link I've found for it is here. So take a look and have fun..

*Just a little side note.. I'm sure this is one of the last big things that people are holding out for with the adoption of WPF, though to date I've managed pretty well without it..

MS Bob Lives!!

2008-07-24T11:34:00.001+10:00

lol, Frank just linked this up on twitter.. Long Live Bob!!

Windows 7 Wish List

2008-07-15T10:46:00.003+10:00

I read an article this morning (can't remember exactly where) that had a wish list for windows 7.. This list included things like Minwin, UI changes, diagnostic tools etc.. While I liked some of them, I tend to think that some of the items didn't really appeal to the geek in me.. And too be honest, I think windows appealing to geeks is important.. They help to drive adoption in the industry.. So, I thought I'd throw out a list of things I'd like to see:

Express Development tools as part of the install
A decent graphics package
A serious Voip package
Serious Support for Multiple desktops
Diagnostic tools, memory checker etc..

Now, I understand that Microsoft are actually in a bit of a pickle as far as some of these are concerned. I'm sure they'd love to include lots of things, but may be restricted due to Anti-Trust type things.. So, my proposal is this, a package manager like what's available in most linux distros.. Make it easy to download tools from Microsoft, they don't have to be included in the OS, just easy to get.

Now, once again, this could still cause problems. I suspect the Package Manager will still have to include links to 3rd party apps. This though shouldn't be a big problem. Allow companies to easily register their products, and provide easy categorisation. Allow users to choose apps to install by category and popularity. By default only provide the 5 most popular items for a given category..

Now this system is likely to also require some sort of payment system, but I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard. It's about making people life easier, and as a geek, this really appeals to me.

Anyway, that's my little list of what I think would help windows re-capture some of the "geek" kudos.

I was away for a bit...

2008-07-11T13:20:00.003+10:00

Well, it seems that in my time away (and the quick cleanup of my email account) that I missed out on something. It seems that the old AusDotNet mailing list has been replaced. The new one is here.. I've just re-subscribed, I guess I'll see soon if this new one works :)

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

2008-07-10T15:46:00.004+10:00

Back when I was little, we used to play a game called "Chinese whispers". I'm sure you know the game, everybody sits in a circle and someone starts whispering a message into another persons ear. This message then gets relayed to the next person and so on until the message finally gets back to the last person. Quite often, by the time the last person received the message, it was garbled, changed, lost information or had new information added. This happened consistently even when the message was very simple (hey, we were only kids..)..

For me, I learned that the more people who are involved in a chain of communications, the higher the risk of information being incorrect when it reaches it's target.

Unfortunately, I still see this type of thing happening in my day to day work. It's not uncommon for developers to be 3-4 times removed from the users of a system. Now what makes this worse is that the information being passed around tends to be a lot more complicated than when we were we little kids. Complicated business requirements, processes, legal requirements. None of this is particularly easy on the best of days, but after it's been through the process, it's almost guaranteed to be incorrect when it gets to the developer. The only question is how incorrect.

Now, don't try and read behind the lines here for any hidden messages about Business Analysts, expert users etc.. There is none of that. They are all an important part of the process. So is keeping the developers in the loop on communications. There are a hundred different ways to do this, from the simple CC on an email through to using forums for all requirements gathering etc.

Think about the Chinese whispers situation at your work and see if you can't do something to help the message get to the developers in a clearer way.

*Yes, the title is a classic line from the Simpson's where a message was passed through a crowd at a protest rally. The message made it to the Edna, complete with Purple Monkey Dishwasher at the end. "We'll show them, especially for the Purple Monkey Dishwasher comment!"

My GMail Account...

2008-07-10T15:25:00.002+10:00

A long time ago, I signed up for Gmail beta.. I honestly thought it was the best thing since sliced cheese.. Around that time, I was signed up for the AusDotNet mailing list at work, and decided to move my subscription across to Gmail. Not long after, work banned all web mail. Gmail included.

For some time after that, I managed to keep track of everything at home, then later on my mobile phone. By this stage, I had also subscribed to SQLDownUnder. The amount of email pouring in was huge. I got a little behind with my reading and before I new it, the amount of emails were just too much to keep up with using the poor mobile interface for Gmail. I stopped checking this account.

Just today, I got a bright idea.. I'll check this account, clear it out and start using it again.. I thought that maybe the interface had improved... And, for the most part it has. It's way better than it used to be. The problem, it still doesn't have any easy ways to deal with large amounts of data. There are all the normal features like a delete button and the ability to mark items as read. Cool... Except I have 1972 emails that need to either be deleted or marked as read.

What I want (and this applies to live mail as well) is the ability to say "Mark all emails read" without having to select them in the Mobile interfaces. I can do this for my junk mail, so why not my normal mail??

Anyway, back to it, only 99 pages of email to clear from my mobile :)

A little Tip

2008-07-09T16:48:00.002+10:00

Just remember boys and girls, to setup impersonation before you call ChannelFactory.CreateChannel otherwise your impersonation won't work... Also, another little tip.. Regardless of when you revert the impersonation back to the original identity, the open channel will still be impersonating!!

Mobile Live Blues..

2008-07-09T09:51:00.003+10:00

It seems as though there has been a recent breaking change with Live Mail. See, from work, I usually keep track of my live (hotmail) emails from my mobile device (i-Mate JasJam) running WM6. Unfortunately, sometime over the last week, Live Mail no longer detects my phone as a mobile device and attempts to load the full version for IE.. As you can imagine, this does cause a problem.

So, for now, I just have to make sure I specifically head over to mobile.Live.com and then click on the Mail link from there.

Oh yeah.. I also have another small little gripe.. Accessing sites on a mobile device, I generally have to pay for all my data downloads, and for anybody else in Oz, they would know that it's fairly expensive. Another feature of Mobile Live that I'm less than impressed with is the Ad Banners.. Screen real estate is limited AND data data is expensive.... Not happy Jan!!

The New Hermit Crabs on the Block

2008-07-07T13:53:00.002+10:00

As a father, I often get to learn a lot about things that I normally wouldn't kow anything about. Over the weekend however, after a trip to the local pet shop, I discovered something that has left me somewhat changed.

Before I tell you what I know know, let me set the scene.. See, my sister and her kids once had several pet hermit crabs. These hermit crabs were kept in their little tank, and just kind of lay around, occasionally moving around the tank and not really doing much else. Occasionally they would be given a few new shells that better matched their size. The problem was, they were all plain old boring crab shells. Sure, they did vary in size and shape a little, but apart from that, there was really nothing that made one crab stand out from the next. Those poor little boring crabs...

Enter the new range of designer hermit crab shells!!! All the newest crabs on the cat walks are wearing them...

All I can say is I'm shocked.. and changed forever!!

My Phone Battery

2008-06-10T10:53:00.002+10:00

Over the last month or so, my little i-mate JasJam has been performing a lot worse than expected. The battery life has degraded to the point that I could not leave it on overnight.. 7 hours standby is about all I was able to achieve. So, I got of my backside and ordered a new battery. It arrived last week, and I have to say, I'm extremely happy. It's running like the little champ it should be. I'm a happy man!!

Save XP???

2008-06-05T16:12:00.002+10:00

Ok, so, I thought I'd put up a post for something that has been bugging me a whole lot lately. And that is the immaturity of some people out there. Just today I read (where else but slashdot, the whole thing seems to have started with neowin) about Microsoft asking people to stop calling their customer support requesting an extension to Windows XP availability and support. This really got to me on a few different levels.

First up, it's just making life difficult for people who really need to use the support lines, yet these people who have XP running fine on their machines are happy to push their own agendas at the cost of others.

Next up is this. If I wanted to go out and by a brand new 2001 Mitsubishi Magna.. Guess what? I can't.. Why, it's discontinued.. It's a business decision they made to not make it any more. Do Mitsubishi still make enhancements to the Magna.. Nah ah... Are they under warranty anymore.. Nope.. This is not just unique software and cars either. Try it with nearly any industry. Power tools, sports equipment (yep, new golf club models every year!!), clothes, phones, TVs, Stereos, iPods.

Every business tries to moves forward. Sometimes products are successful, sometimes new products are failures. Now, as I've said before, I'm very happy with vista and office 2007 (though there are a few things i'd prefer were a little different..) but at the end of the day, Vista is the successor of XP which had a remarkably long shelf life compared to many other things in I.T. and in this case, much longer than the type of support you get in nearly any industry...

Anyway, back to my original point. Grow Up!! If you don't like it, use Mac, Linux whatever.. Just grow up...

That's my 2c for the day :)

Help Microsoft Donate

2008-05-30T14:14:00.002+10:00

I just noticed a post by Nick Hodge about Microsoft Donating to The Smith Family (a charity). The problem is, they need your help. Pop over to this site and watch the video. For every person that views the video, Microsoft will donate $1.

(Just a note, I'm sure this is a promotion to help spread the Silverlight love, but I think it's a very worthwhile cause non the less.)

An interesting use for using

2008-05-16T10:00:00.004+10:00

A college of mine came to see me the other day with a question about some code he had stumbled across. He wasn't exactly sure what it did, or more importantly, if it's something that he should be doing in his code. The code in question was a using block. Now, I'm right up there, telling people that they should have using blocks in their code for any object that implements IDisposable.. The problem was, the object in the using block didn't..

Now, I found this to be very interesting.. myObject was an instance of an object that clearly didn't implement IDisposable. Performing a cast like this would actually result in a null reference. The compiler was happy, the cast was invalid, and it ran without any problems at all.

I took a peek at the IL generated, and was pleasantly surprised to see that there is a check for nulls before the call to dispose.

I'm not sure if there is any benefit from doing this, and I'm sure I wont be recommending this to anybody, I just thought I'd mention it as an interesting tidbit.

Cheers

Vista and Office 2007

2008-05-16T09:46:00.002+10:00

I just wanted to go on the record.. I really really really like Vista and Office 2007...

See, when both Vista and Office 2007 came out, I upgraded.. I've done this for every version of Office/Windows (except for Win ME...) since Windows 95. So far, I can't say I've ever had any major problems with an upgrade.

Back to Vista and Office.. The dev machine I had at home was a little under powered. I also play games, and the machine was struggling under the load. So, I did the right thing and built a new computer. It wasn't all singing, all dancing.. It was just a nice system. I met all the recommended requirements etc, 2 gig of ram, a decent video card etc. The end result was a system that ran fine, and for a smidge over $1000.. (This was just the computer, not the monitor etc..)

To date, I still haven't disabled UAC.. I've deliberately left it on.

Anyway, the point of my post is that I have not encountered any problems with this system to date, no stability problems, no performance problems, nothing.. Well, not completely try, I have had 1 driver problem, but that was with a Netgear NAS (very cheap.. And sucked under XP anyway..) that didn't have drivers for over a year after the release of vista.. This is clearly a problem with the vendor (or the people that made the re-badged toaster looking NAS box they sold)..

As for Office, wow.. Sure it was a shock at the start. The ribbon is a big change, but once I spent time to actually use it, I fell in love.. Back at work, I'm still running on XP and Office 2003, and I have to admit, I find now that I miss the ribbon....

I'm glad the upgrade process for both Vista and Officer is underway at work ;)

WCF and Inheritance

2008-05-08T09:45:00.003+10:00

Anybody who has had the pleasure of working with WFC, or in fact any messaging based programing will understand the issues related to messaging and inheritance. For those that don't, here is a quick rundown.

Take this situation:
I have a person class with:

First Name
Last Name
Age

When serialised, I get something like this:

FirstName: Eddie
LastName: de Bear
Age: 30

Now this so far does not cause any problems. It's designed to work like this. When a service receives this message, it knows exactly what it is dealing with.. A Person.. That's what the contract defines, that's what it gets and deals with.

Now, Imagine I now have a new class Employee which inherits from Person and adds a single attribute, EmployeeId.

Now, when this gets serialised, what do we see:

FirstName: Eddie
LastName: de Bear
Age: 30
EmployeeId: XXX-123-XXX

(This assumes that the new Employee class still has the same contract name etc..)
Now, if this was passed to a Service that expects a person, the service has a little heart attack. It has no idea what to do with the new attribute EmployeeId.. It's not part of the person class..

There are a number of solutions to this, such as Method Overloading. But one of the solutions I find the most interesting is the mechanism WCF uses for Contract Versioning. IExtensibleObject.

In the example above, you could easily implement IExtensibleObject on the original person class. IExtensibleObject basically provides a property bag for dumping extra information that is encountered at deserialisation time. This allows the service to continue to treat the Employee object as a person, without loosing the additional information added by the employee class.

A great article on the use of the IExtensibleObject interface can be found Here

Improving output

2008-05-08T09:30:00.002+10:00

So, a while ago I found myself getting a little behind with my work. I found myself constantly caught up in meetings, spending a large amount of time communicating with team members and stakeholders. In fact, I found that more of my time was taken up with this that I could really afford, something had to be done.

So far, I have actually had little success in reducing the number of meetings that I need to attend. This is something that I'm sure keen to work on, but find that getting these meeting taken offline (email, IM etc) still has a great deal of resistence in the workplace, people like face to face contact.

What has changed though, is my productivity.. No, I still refuse to use code generators.. But I have found myself adding Code Snippets to Visual Studio at an absolutely astonishing rate. I find that code snippets provide me with the best of both worlds, I don't need to continually waste time writing the same templated code repeatedly, and the overhead of creating them in negligent.

So, what sort of things do I use the Snippets for.. The answer is easy.. Any repetitive work.

Properties with Change Notification
Data Access
Service Contracts
Data Contracts
Exception Handling
Anything else I type repeatedly

Basically, I find that by removing the tedium of these repeated tasks, I can spend more time focusing on the actual business specific problems.

Productivity ++

It helps to read the manual..

2008-05-02T15:29:00.002+10:00

I've had my i-Mate Jasjam for a little over a year now, and for the most part it's been very reliable. As of late, I've been having a little bit of battery problems. In particular, it's because most applications continue to run even after clicking on the little X in the top right hand corner.

Over the last year, I've slowly added more and more applications, and tend to spend more time surfing the web (or just have programs like tinytwitter running).

Anyway, today I stumbled across a little feature that I'm sure was not on the original WM5 rom that was loaded when I got my phone, but was added by I-Mate in the WM6 rom. Basically, it actually closes the application when you hold the X button for a few seconds. This avoids constant trips to the task manager and clicking the "Stop All" button..

Keeping Busy

2008-04-21T09:40:00.003+10:00

It's been a few weeks since I last posted here, but being so quiet has nothing to do with the reality of my life. The last few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. I've had 30th birthdays, an old friend from Ireland visit, work on getting my divorce finalised and a lot of golf in my spare time.

Oh yeah, I've also started back at the gym..

Throw in Work, spending time with the kids as well as my wonderful new girlfriend and you can see that life has just been extremely busy.. I just haven't had the time I'd like for playing with new Toys and Technologies..

Anyway, the fast life is starting to slow down again, and I should now have plenty of time to start to get back into playing and learning again.. I'm looking forward to it :)

WM6 Daylight Savings Update

2008-03-27T13:33:00.002+11:00

Just read this over on Rog42 about the update for WM6 daylight savings settings.. Anyway, there are a few links for both the MSI and CAB updates. The MSI is to updated from a PC and the CAB directly from your Mobile Device.

Anyway, short story is I'm at work and can't connect m phone to my PC, so I'm stuck with the CAB update.. So it was off to TinyURL.com to shorten that ghastly download link. This made it heaps easier on my phone. For anybody else who needs it, http://tinyurl.com/2b67p4 should do the job nicely :)

Happy Updating...

Apple Pushing Safari

2008-03-27T08:21:00.002+11:00

So, last night I got home and turned on my computer. Just wanting to kick back and do a bit of reading that I didn't manage to finish at work. Within a minute of turning on my computer, the apple updater popped up. The apple updater?? Yep, It got installed along with iTunes for my daughter's IPod.

Anyway, when I thought it I first thought to myself, cool, a new iTunes update. This must be good.. I was just glad I took the time out to read what the update was... It was Safari 3.1... WTF?? I don't want Safari 3.1... I have a browser that I use and am very happy with. Why would I want another vendors browser pushed on my just because my daughter has an iPod...

Anyway, it only took me around a minute to work out how to block the download, but it really left me thinking.. How many people will accidental end up downloading safari (there are lots of iTunes users out there..).. And more importantly, once it's downloaded, does it install and set itself as the default??

If the answer to this is yes, is this possibly an example of a company using it's dominance in a market (music) to work it's way into another market?? Possibly.. It's not the first time it's been done...

Either way, I'm going to be interested to see how many windows users will be running safari 3.1 in the near future..

Misinformation in the Media

2008-03-05T12:01:00.003+11:00

As a kid, I used to sit in front of the TV and watch the news, or even pick up a news paper and read an article or two. I was taught at school that this information should be used to keep up to date with current affairs and the likes.

Unfortunately, like most people, there is a point in your life when you start to realise that the information provided in these mediums is far from accurate. It's not that they go out of their way to lie, it's more that the people reporting may accidentally forget to include something in their articles.

Yet another example of this appeared today in The Age. Basically, the article is about a "Security Specialist" who found a "security hole" in windows, and Microsoft did nothing to fix it. The truth of the matter is that it's a flaw in the Firewire specification which can be used to exploit any OS that has support for Firewire. In fact, the flaw is actually a "Feature" that allows connected firewire devices to access (read/write) directly to system memory. This can be used to do anything on a running computer you can possibly think of. The only limit is the attackers imagination.

I'm not sure that this omission was completely deliberate, it's probably more just a case of the author not actually knowing any better, which really begs the question about why they are in that job in the first place. In this case, they are probably there because they follow the current trends in the technology media. Bag out Microsoft, and Rave about Apple.

My real question is, how long is it going to take before someone finally gets fed up with this sort of Misinformation and actually does something about it. At the end of the day, companies need to rely on their image in the community, and when the media continually effects the image of a single company, there is only so much those companies will take..

Mac vs. PC vs. Linux - South Park Style

2008-02-28T18:50:00.001+11:00

Tired of all the commercials.. Check out this take on them..

Windows Live Writer

2008-02-27T17:45:00.001+11:00

As part of the whole getting back into blogging thing, I've decided to start using Live writer from now on. This is the first post, and I have to say it's been an absolute sinch so far.

Anyway, here is a little picture of it Live Writer running. As you can see, I've actually taken a screen shot of me writing this post ;)

A feature I'd like

2008-02-15T14:53:00.003+11:00

It's really simple, but I think it's something that is really needed. You guessed it, HTML support in outlook for items other than emails.

I'd like to be able to paste HTML into appointments for example, or even better, have outlook render the HTML Description stored in exchange for an appointment instead of having it converted to RTF (very badly might I add...)..

It's just a small little feature I'd like to see one day in outlook...

Sorry to hear guys

2008-02-07T13:03:00.000+11:00

Sure the writing was on the wall, but it's still sad to see happen. I learned this morning that a large department has just terminated a large number of contractors due to budget over runs and a whole heap of other excuses.

Unfortunately, this is just what happens in IT, and it's part of the reasons contractors get payed that extra bit of money. Having said this, it's still not the sort of thing you want to see happen to our friends, especially when many people knew there were problems, yet nobody wanted to listen.

This raises a very interesting question. Why won't people listen.. Sure, sometimes it may just seem like people are having a whine, I know, because I enjoy having a whine with the best of them. Other times, it's just a game of self promotion at the cost of everything and everybody else. I still to this day do not know the answer to stopping this, short of just letting those people hang themselves..

Unfortunately this time, some very nice people, many good friends of mine have been hurt and left in a bad situation. So, I'm putting up this post to let them all know that I feel for them, and to wish them all the best of luck in moving forward.

Take care guys and gals..

C'mon guys

2008-02-05T15:53:00.000+11:00

I'm a bit of a geek, I like to have all the new sparkly bits and pieces whenever they are released. One of the things I'm currently trying to do is replace all the boring old desktop apps I have with nice new .Net bits and pieces that I can. I've got myself a replacement for notepad, use Paint.NET and a few other bits and pieces. In general it's been a pretty good experience.

That is except for two things that I'm really keen to take a good peek at. MSDN Reader and Architecture Journal Reader. Both of these are based on the News Reader SDK and have been created by the kind guys at MS.. Unfortunately it looks like they didn't even bother putting in support for Proxy Authentication.. Now while I haven't looked at the News Reader SDK, I'm fairly confident that Authentication shouldn't be any harder than it is with the existing framework.. See the two lines below.. Either one will work depending on the enviroment..

Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("UserName", "Password", "Domain")

Please guys, fix this up...

Scrabble

2008-01-31T15:03:00.000+11:00

So, along with a whole heap of other changes lately, I've been plaing quiet a lot of scrabble lately. Actually, saing that I'm plaing is a bit of an understatement. It's been getting so serious that I've just ordered a copy of the official scabble dictionary. Hopefully this will put an end to the arguments.. And just for the record, Qi and Fa are real words...

Catching up with life

2008-01-11T10:18:00.000+11:00

As I'm sure many of you already know, the last year has been particularly hard for me. I've had a few personal issues that needed to be taken care of, and with that, I also took a bit of a back seat in the world in general, content to just let everything take it's course.

Somewhere along the way, I realised I was missing something. My Mojo.. I lost my mojo.. When I realised this, I decided to do something that I probably should have done a little earlier. I changed jobs, getting me out of my comfort zone and also did my best to get rid of some other baggage.

So here I am now, start of a new year, looking to get back on top of everything. So keep an eye out on the blog, and I'll keep you all up to date with the what's, how's and why's..

If I hear it one more time

2008-01-03T16:22:00.000+11:00

"Why don't we use code generation"...

I'm going to put it very very simply.. I HATE CODE GENERATION.

Why? It's simple. Code generation CAN help developers get applications to market quicker. I won't argue that point at all. My argument against code generation is all about abstraction and workflow.

Abstraction
I've worked in many environments, but one thing seems to remain the same. At some point, you will have to integrate with an older system. More often than not, that integration will be done at the database. Yes, I know the whole point of SOA is to re-use the services, but how many places are in a position to do that yet?

Anyway, back to the point. Over the life time of an application, entities in a system tend to change. They acquire new attributes, they change their behaviour and many other subtle changes. The end result, a person for example is could originally be stored with just an Id, a few fields for their name and maybe a data of birth. Over time, more information gets added. The person may now be an Employer, an Employee, a Client.

As these entities gain more attributes and new meaning, business rules will be applied to each different incarnation. A person is no longer a person.

Now you may think I've gone off track a little. What does this have to do with code generation. It actually has 2 things.

The first is that Code Generator Fanatics will just point their favorite tool at the database and let it do all the work. The problem, is that you now have services and a UI that are just a representation of a person with lots of other information. This is how you end up with applications with 20 tabs and a few hundred fields that all need to be populated before the user can press save. It's hideous and not very user friendly.

The second part is to do with the "We can just rebuild the whole thing" mentality. In this world of source control, managed change etc, at what point did it become acceptable to just blow away half a project and re-generate it just to add an extra field to an entity. Ooops.. Did someone change that file..

Workflow
Next up on my list of gripes is to do with workflow. I touched upon it just above. I'm a big fan of services guiding workflow. I don't know how often I end up on a project where the services are just a set of GetXX(), AddXX(), UpdateXX() DeleteXX() methods. I hear developers talking about CRUD (you know, create, read, update, delete).. This stuff works fine in small projects, but when you start having to add workflow into the picture, it very quickly becomes messy.

Lets look at a simple problem with this. Imagine that within the database we have Users and Contacts. Both a user and Contact have Addresses. Some smart cookie along the way realised that this could be normalised and they both have a relationship with the same "Address" table. Now you need a SaveAddress() method. That's cool and all, but should you be saving an address without some sort of context as to why it exists.

In this situation, I tend to go for AddAddressToContact(Contact, Address), AddAddressToUser(User, Address). This is clear what is happening and you no longer have confusion about why your wonderful OO design doesn't work in a messaging environment.

One Final word
I'll also throw in another little issue I have, and that is when devs take it just that little extra step. They also code gen their unit tests. C'mon... What point are unit tests if they are always going to succeed. You are making our unit tests so they only call your code the way YOU WANT OUR CODE TO BE CALLED. It's not testing for the unusual cases.. Unit tests are supposed to test the unusual cases as well..

Anyway, that's my little rant for now. Feel free to drop a comment about how wrong I am on the subject and I'll buy you a beer while I argue with you until I'm blue in the face :)

It's done and dusted for another year

2008-01-03T10:36:00.000+11:00

Yep, that's right, the party season is over, it's time to sit down behind the computer and get back to the hard work. Projects don't finish themselves. Actually, this is what my post is about. Projects not finishing themselves.

I often find it ammusing how often I find myself on the critical path of a project, not that I find this a problem, quiet the opposite. I find I work best under pressure. For me, this is the one thing that keeps me motivated. However, working as a team lead, I often find that more and more of my time is taken up with meetings. You know the type, talking to project managers, talking to busniess reps, talking to BAs. It's the communications.. All projects need communications.

The problem though is this. I spend more time communicating and less time coding. Sure, others in my team are still busy working away, yet my work seems to be getting left behind. This leads me to believe that there is a problem. I don't think that there should be less communications, I just think that I need to find a more effective way to communicate with all the other people in the project. Meetings are a nice break, but I'm sure they are not the most effective way to communicate...

Anyway, I'm going to post more about this over the next few days, but lets jsut say that it's not going to be easy considering the tools I have at my disposal. Stay tuned for all my fun adventures...

IE8 passed ACID2

2007-12-20T15:51:00.000+11:00

Ok, if you haven't heard it yet, the dev guys working on IE8 have just announced they have checked the code into source control allowing IE8 to pass the ACID2 Test.

As you can imagine, this seems to have created a massive buzz around the web. It's an important step to having IE8 "standard" compliant, though all it really means at the moment is that IE now renders a large set of CSS2 and 2.1 correctly AND handles errors gracefully. I'm sure there is still more work to go before IE8 fully supports the full set of standards (Pick a standard, any standard.. there are plenty of them..).

Interestingly, IE8 will need a special DOCTYPE tag to indicate it's should be processed in "Standards" mode. Why does it do this, it's pretty simple. It means IE8 won't break the web. It will continue to render everything the way it does in IE7.

What it means though. especially for all of us developers, we will now need to start paying a little more attention to web standards (By Us I mean everybody else, if you've ever worked with me or talked to me, I don't do web dev...), but hopefully, we won't need to write web sites differently for all the different browsers.

Anyway, after reading this, it took me a little bit to work out what it really means to me as a non web developer. The answer was actually really simple. I'll hear less complaining from web developers. This is a good thing. Second of all, the only web site that I've ever had trouble with in IE6/7 (Slashdot) may now actually render correctly. This is great as I can now enjoy reading their tripe and constant complaining the way it is intended..

A quick catch up

2007-07-05T10:12:00.000+10:00

New Job
So, here I am, sitting at my desk, enjoying the challenges of a new contract, learning all the faces, the project and investigating why things are done the way they are. This last part for me is probably the part I both enjoy and hate the most. I always enjoy looking at processes and technology to see how they have been used in creative ways, yet at the same time find it sad that some opportunities go begging for seemingly small petty reasons. I have to say though that so far the I have not found any of these things yet, which is really exciting.

Blogging Friends
I'd also like to just throw out a quick shout to Dave and Glenn, two of the great guys I worked with on my last contract who are both now blogging (for a few weeks, I just haven't had time to say anything yet).

Leaving Friends
And then there is Kyle, yet another of the talented developers I've been lucky to work with. He's all set for the UK to see what mysteries await. Good luck dude, make sure you stay in touch.

The Pub Without Beer

2007-05-25T13:31:00.000+10:00

Well, not quite. But the situation was very very close.

A pub without a working toilet. That's right, there I was, happy after having a few beers with my friday Surf 'n Turf, thinking how I really shouldn't have had so many, and desperately needing to relieve before getting into a car for the ride back to work. Unfortunately when I got to the gents, there was a very nice sign informing patrons of the "outside water disruptions" and how the facilities were closed to the patronage.....

Anyway, it got me thinking more about systems, and how, despite their continual uptime and reliability, a single outside factor can easily take down a system. Yet with a little better planning, system up time can still be maintained (yes, a water tank may have solved this problem)...

Time for a Change

2007-05-17T15:35:00.000+10:00

Wow, it's been 4 months since I last blogged. Quite a bit has happened in that time which I hope to get up here in the next week or two.

Probably the biggest new is that in just two weeks time I'm heading for greener pastures. See, I've been in my current job for a little over 5 years (on contract), doing a range of work including development, builds, maintenance etc etc. I recently accepted a new job offer with yet another government department here in Canberra as a Technical Team Lead/Senior Developer. It's back doing the sort of work I enjoy, using new technology.

I'll try and keep you all up to date with how things go, but needless to say I'm fairly excited about the near future.

A pet hate of mine

2007-01-12T14:29:00.000+11:00

I know a few people who will strongly disagree with me on this, but it's something that I absolutely hate seeing in computer systems.. Its Nullable Booleans...... Booleans represent two states, true, false.. They do not represent "Unknown" or anything else you might possibly find. If you need a third state, use something else.. an enumeration or something that carries the meaning of the "extra" state with it.

It's about time that ....

2007-01-12T11:49:00.000+11:00

we can now report idiot drivers... Lucky I'm clean...

I'm going to make a habit of entering all motorist into this site that annoy me.. Starting with the 4x4 that made it impossible for me to overtake other cars all the way back from Batemens Bay on the weekend...

My new Toy

2007-01-10T16:59:00.000+11:00

I finally did it. I went and got myself a new toy. I've turned of my old i-Mate PDA2k, and with it cleared up alot of room on my belt.. The JasJam is just awsome. It's small, faster and better looking.. I'm loving it.

It took me a whole 10 minutes to try out my first 3G video call.. what can I say, I'm a geek..

I've been tagged

2007-01-08T10:35:00.000+11:00

Wow, I actually thought I might manage to duck this one, but Rory managed to hit me up. I guess it's time to air my dirty laundry.

1. I played AFL for the Gungahlin Jets, this year is going to be my 15th year playing.
2. I don't have any "Qualifications", as I left CIT to start working and never went back to finish.
3. I've been married now for 3 years to my wife Kama-Jay, though I've been together we've been together now for nearly 10 years. We have two little girls together aged 7 and 2.
4. I'm absolutely terrible at golf, though I love to play. I've decided that I really need to play a lot more and get some lessons.. If anybody wants a game, let me know..
5. And the biggest secret I've been hiding..... I play World of Warcraft...

As for tagging other people.. I think everybody I know has already been tagged.. So I'm going to take the easy way out and not tag anybody back.. ;)

I'm back, a valuable lesson or a timely reminder

2007-01-03T10:14:00.000+11:00

It's been a while since I last updated my blog, mainly because I made a decision to take a bit of time off. Well, that time is over, and I am going to do my best to keep this site a little more up to date.

The first thing I decided to post was a timely reminder to everybody to make sure your work is backed up every day.. Why, simple.. I came into work this morning, and guess what... My computer was turned off. Pressing the power button resulted in a wonderful buzzing sound and a few flashing lights.

Luckily for me, a bit of poking, prodding, removing and re-inserting bits into the computer seemed to have fixed the problem for now. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before something else goes.. So for me, it's time to make sure I shelf my work every night before I go home.. No exceptions..

It's a sad day...

2006-09-04T14:35:00.000+10:00

I just read about about this on www.news.com.au. Steve Irwin the Crocodile man passed away today in a freak accident.. It's a very very sad day...

A Big Welcome

2006-08-16T16:41:00.000+10:00

It's true, readify are not the only place in canberra that is trying to hire all the local bloggers.. Looks like Rory is coming to join Paul, John and Me

Welcome Rory...

A small gripe...

2006-06-16T13:56:00.000+10:00

Not that you'll find many gripes coming from me, but here goes anyway..

Regular expressions. Or, more to the point, the fact that Visual Studio .Net has different syntax in the Find/Replace than the .Net Framework... C'mon... The tool that we use to write .Net code should use the same regular expression parser/engine as found in System.Text.RegularExpressions...

Anyway, that's my small gripe.. Maybe it will be fixed one day...

It's that time

2006-05-24T15:02:00.000+10:00

For anybody who knows me, you'd know that I am an big Saints Fan. Probably not as much as Frank, but I still love them. In fact, I just love AFL in general. It's one of the few sports I actually follow and even play..

Tonight, as anybody in NSW and Queensland would know, It's State of Origin Game 1. It's one of the few games of Rugby League that I actually watch each year.

All I have to say is Go the Maroons!!!!

Another year of poor coverage

2006-03-30T11:38:00.000+11:00

Living in a Canberra sure has some problems. One of the biggest problems is the AFL coverage. Channel 9 have the rights to the AFL with foxtel picking up the remainder of the games. The problem is that Channel 9 also have the rights to the Rugby League, which is always shown in preference to the AFL.
Tonight, the Saints take on Westcoast in the first game of the season. Unfortunately, channel 9 have decided to hold off the coverage until midnight so they can show the footy show..

No problems, I have foxtel.. I can just watch it there.. Nope.. it's not being shown until 11:30pm.
Turns out, Fox Footy is showing the game from 9:30 in NSW, QLD, SA, WA, yet ACT misses out...
Anyway, that's the end of my rant.. I can't wait until next year to see how much better the Channel 7/10 consortium do with their coverage...

ODP.Net Beta Released

2006-03-23T13:34:00.000+11:00

Great news, oracle have just released a beta version of ODP.Net (oracle data provider for .Net) for .Net 2.0.

This release is awesome for the following reasons:

Support for the Provider based Factories
Connection String Builder
Data Source Enumeration
Schema Discovery
VS2005 integration and support for debugging stored procedures

Best of all, ODP.Net should now work out of the box with Enterprise Library 2.0 without the need for writing provider factories and wrappers around the old Version..
Here are the links:
What's New
Download

Community Launch, and What I've been doing

2005-12-01T09:02:00.000+11:00

Last night saw the Community Launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 come to Canberra. As expected it was a pretty big event, even when you take away the Microsoft, Readify and .NET Solutions guys, there were still heaps of people there.

If you want a list of people who attended, just check out Geoff's blog, as usual he has done an awesome roundup.

During the course of the night, I was asked by Darren what I've been playing with, to which I answered "Visual Studio 2005".. After all, isn't everybody.. However, on the way home, It dawned on my that I have actually been doing a lot more than that.

With Visual Studio 2005, several other community tools have been released (or are near release). These are some of the other things I have been playing with.

First, there is the new Composite UI Application Block, an awesome framework for building a Windows Forms based UI.

Secondly I have been playing with the tech previews for Enterprise Library 2.0. In particular, the data access components and Oracle's Oracle provider for .net. The problem with this is that Oracle have not actually released a version of their provider that supports the new changes in ADO.NET 2.0. As a result, I have had to create my own data provider that wraps around oracle own provider. It's been a fairly interesting process, and has given me a much better understanding of the changes from 1.1 to 2.0

Stay tuned for more information on all of these wonderful topics.

Speculation

2005-09-29T11:49:00.000+10:00

Eveybody knows that GotDotNet's workspaces were supposed to be Microsoft's attempt to provide a community based site for collaborative development. This failed for a number of reasons, including performance, reliability and usability.

Many projects that started out using gotdotnet, very quickly moved to source forge.

In a vain attempt to make the site more successful, the GotDotNet team created a Source control plugin for visual studio. While this worked, the underlying engine was still to slow and unreliable.

Now, today several MVPs have mentioned that the GotDotNet team has something new and exciting up their sleeves, yet are unable to spill the beans. This leaves me with only one option, and that is to take a guess at what is going on...

Simply put, my guess (and wish) is that GotDotNet's workspaces are going to be converted into a pretty web based front end for Team Systems...

This makes plenty of sense. Microsoft have spent huge amounts of money already creating a collaborative development environment in Team Systems, and maintaining another environment that has proven itself to be lacking would be stupid...

In addition, modifying the Team Systems plugin for Visual Studio to work with the new GotDotNet team systems would be trivial.

Something like this would blow sourceforge out of the water...

Tip #102 - DesignMode only works after a Component is sited

2005-09-21T15:36:00.000+10:00

I could almost kick myself... the designer has been busted for months, and I never twigged to this.. I guess it was just easier to code my forms by hand...

The reason for this is simple, someone I used to work with decided all our controls needed to have consistent fonts and colours, without having to change the system settings (Gotta love UI standards). To achieve this, the customisation code as put inside control constructors. This broke all the designers.. I figured it would be an easy fix, just wrap all the customisation code in a check for DesignMode. After this fix didn't work, I just decided I didn't really need the designer anyway.

It turns out, the problem is that the DesignMode property on the Component class is simply a wrapper around the site.DesignMode property. Without the site set, it will always return false. Obviously, a control is not sited until AFTER it's been constructed...

Moving all of the code into the a different location, and suddenly we have the designer back.. yay...

Keyboards need to change...

2005-08-04T09:11:00.000+10:00

I've been using keyboards now for over 20 years, yet there is one key on the keyboard that I never use (Not deliberately anyway..). It's the key that other people always use, right before I get onto the computer. It's the key that can cause you to lock your account. It's the key that causes people to SHOUT in chatrooms..

That key is the "Caps Lock" key...

Seriously people..

How often do you use it?
I know occasionally I bump it.. Then I have to press it again to turn it off.

I know my daughter likes it, but she's only 6 and just loves the effects...

I think the world would surely be a happier place if only this horrid key was removed...

*Don't get me started on the Break/Scroll Lock.... (Yes I've used them, but not for a long time...)