June 11th, 2009
Seems I touched off a bit of a “swirl” with a comment I made on my last blog post:
I think, in general, the .NET crowd overthinks and over-engineers just about everything
I said as much in my MIX presentation, where I basically challenged ASP.NET developers to “embrace their inner scripter” and stop building rockets. I have a fairly strong opinion on this – and I’ll save that for another time – but I think it’s high time to remind folks that there’s a lot more to an application then how you get your app gets it’s freak on with your database.
Good Morning!
I remember watching Fight Club for the very first time back in the thick of the very first DotCom bubble. I was feeling pretty ill that day so I stayed home and watched the DVD, and was pulled in pretty dramatically. One line still resonates with me:
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f******* khakis.
I feel the same way about building software: You’re Not Your Data Access.
When I watched that movie I had just bought a nice pair of $180 Kenneth Cole shoes to wear to a client’s VC meeting, to go with my groovy business-casual Cornflower Blue button down shirt. I clearly remember looking over at my closet – the feeling of fashion sobriety coming over me – wondering what I had turned into (if you knew me then you’d know I don’t like wearing that kind of stuff. I’m happy in a white t-shirt and shorts).
I had this same feeling when I popped my head out of the .NET community just 4 years ago (before I worked at Microsoft) to see what this “Rails thing” was all about. I remember the feeling well – and it was very, very sobering and inspiring at the same time. I remember creating an application in fairly short order with all the requisite pieces put where they needed to be put, with every tutorial urging me to “stop thinking – just build”.
Camaro Programming
The .NET platform is pretty dang powerful. It lets you build your own personal Tower of Babel if you so choose, and it can abstract away the very fabric of space-time if you let it. In short it’s a killer set of tools that any mechanically-inclined person would love to use. So naturally it can be very easily abused!
Consider my good friend Eric. I’ve written about Eric a few times before – but in summary he’s my token wrench-head friend that loves his engines and American cars. I lived with this guy for years and he rapidly filled up our garage with parts and *crap* from every car he’d ever owned. And he could dutifully tell you which part went to which car and what that part did – no matter if it was useless.
Eric built and maintained a hunk of junk 1968 Capri which we used to call “The Crappy”. This thing could drive – and I mean really drive – I think Eric pushed it to 180 mph once on a closed race course. It had that sound that all muscle cars make – the sound that makes your ribs shake and your inner 16 yr old say “coooooolll!”.
The problem was that no one ever wanted to drive in it. It smelled, it was ugly, and it absolutely sucked the gas down. Eric would steadfastly defend his Crappy because “it was the easiest car in the world to work on” and “could blow doors on any production car from any country”.
“Yah but when do you really need to go 180 miles an hour man?”
“When I race dammit”
I don’t need to draw the parallels here. I think you get it.
Let it Go Already
I want to be perfectly clear about what it is I’m saying here, and that is that it’s very, very easy for the geek inside us to whisper sweetly in our ears, saying “this Super Massive Paradigm Shifter will be the biggest application EVAR… don’t mess it up!”. I felt this very sensation when starting … well every app that I ever made.
I don’t like being wrong – no one does. So defensively I’ll be sure to include patterning where I can, making sure to separate out my projects whenever it … seems like I’ll crap for not separating out what I’m doing into another project.
I’ll use enums instead of boolean parameters.
Oh wait, no I won’t.
I’ll be sure to avoid Singletons
I’ll absolutely never use Stored Procedures, I mean seriously never, ever, ever (unless Rob Howard tells me to). Or maybe unless my boss tells me to. I’ll let Jeff decide.
I’ll always use Stored Procedures.
I won’t use NHibernate
I won’t use any ORM for that matter. Seriously – Never.
Well I might use both…
I won’t use Code-coverage to tell me anything.
I’ll be sure to use Code-coverage data to tell me everything.
I’ll make sure my method and variables are named properly on Fridays.
Reflection? Not a chance. Unless Rick says it’s OK.
I won’t use Extreme Programming (I’ll be sure to use Lean… whatever that is)
I’ll be sure not to have scrums.
I’ll also be sure not to multi-task.
I won’t use configuration either – hard-coding FTW!
I won’t use static methods
I won’t use extension methods
I’ll keep Native American stereotypes out of my code.
I’ll make sure that all my methods are public and never sealed or internal
I’ll check twice before I use any of these evil keywords.
I’ll also make double damn sure not to use regions in my code – ever.
I won’t use VB (who would?) and I’ll be sure to use C# with great care.
I won’t use Composite Keys in my database
And I’ll be very, very sure to keep away from Norway.
You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person
Let.
It.
Go.
Summary
Simplicity is beautiful. Simple doesn’t mean hard-coding, it doesn’t mean cutting corners or being sloppy – it means building what you’ve been asked to build, not a rocket to Saturn and most of the time it’s a skateboard to the corner store.
Not every application needs to be stitched together from Codebetter posts and Twitter rants. Focus on what’s important – the experience, not what’s under the hood. You’ll change that quite a few times no matter what you think  .
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May 21st, 2009
Before I worked at Microsoft I worked at/with/for various startups. Depending on who you talked to, I was involved in building rockets, the Next Big Thing, and a Super Whamadyne Paradigm-Shifter. Since I’m not a millionaire and you don’t see my face on Wired you can guess that those things didn’t quite pan out.
There are a lot of reasons why projects don’t “pop” – but in some ways I think people can tell if they are “gazing wantonly in the pond’s reflection” by constantly asking a set of simple questions:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- What do we hope to get out of it?
A lot of people would say “sure – that’s what ya call a Mission Statement Rob!” and in some ways, I spose it is. But the next part is the hardest:
Does it motivate you?
The Hard Truth
In every human endeavor the 80/20 rule (aka Pareto principle) cruelly applies – which is effort/payoff are inversely related. This principle is at the core of the just about any time/management book/philosophy – and these things usually boil down to constantly shifting your focus to “what’s important” (aka the 20%).
It seems the 80/20 thing is built in to the fabric of the universe, along with some other groovy numbers. Most large software companies have come to realize this – including Microsoft:
"One really exciting thing we learned is how … a relatively small proportion [of bugs] causes most of the errors," Ballmer wrote in his three-page memo. "About 20 percent of the bugs causes 80 percent of all errors, and–this is stunning to me–1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors."
If we apply logic here then the opposite of this statement must be true as well:
80 percent of the bug-free functionality is produced by 20% of the code.
If that’s true – we’re writing way too much crappy code. Let me reword that – 80% of the code we write does 20% of the work and contains the bulk of the bugs (my math skills got lost there). Which side of the 80/20 code pool are you swimming in?![80-20-rule-coops-manhattan-real-estate[1]](http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/8020rulecoopsmanhattanrealestate1-thumb.jpg "80-20-rule-coops-manhattan-real-estate[1]")
Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine
It’s 2000 and I’ve just ordered a tin of Pringles and The Fragile (Right and Left) from Kozmo. It’s 11pm and I should be at home, but I’m hammering away on my client’s app, trying to get a demo ready for Yet Another VC Who Wants To See Stuff Spin. I’m cranky, tired, and my wife is getting tired of this constant circus of late nights.
The phone rings as the speakers are blaring in our Live/Work Loft/Office on 2nd and Brannan and I’m listening to Trent growl his way through “The Wretched” and I see the area code – it’s New York. My client. Crap.
After 10 minutes of telling him everything’s on pace, he recaps what he wants to see. Amazing – he added 4 new requirements! How very … like him.
I ask him the question:
“What are we doing again? I mean what’s your goal here anyway once all of these demos are done and you’re really rich.”
I hear gasps on the other end of the phone, some choice swear words that involve an ice-pick and my retina, and then *click*.
The phone rings 5 minutes later and it’s The Client. “Do you mind telling me just what the **** you’re asking me these questions for you ****in moron?”. I’m used to “the East Coast” thing by now and I reassure him I know his requirements – I understand the specs and priorities – we’ve been through it a ton. I know about the demo.
I want to know about the day after the demo.
His answer was simple: “We’ll be millionaires. Who gives a **** what else – we’ll be the next tech IPO and you can buy your wife a maserati so **** off and build my ******* app!” (the East Coast thing gets annoying at times – but you get used to it. Don’t get me wrong – I like the other side of the country and all, but they can get pretty spun up over there).
We got the funding – a lot of it. And the company still managed to fail – I think it’s when investors figured out my client was full of crap. I should have figured it out too – but back then everyone was involved in an IPO or buyout. It was a “Craigslist Party” of geeks and power money and you just didn’t ask questions. Or so I thought.
What’s Your Answer?
Twice I’ve worked on a winning application – and it feels great. And by “winning” I mean the client and their clients were stoked, and it literally made people cry. One of my very first applications – an info portal for Ameritech (now PacBell) was one such application. It was so very, very simple that it had to work – it was a classic ASP app (I wrote this in 1998) that used IndexServer to crawl over 12,200 documents scraped from their mainframe.
Their existing app was a terminal-based app and it was all paging and CTRL- shortcuts the user had to memorize. I made a web interface (we called it the “Yahoo UI”) that worked on fuzzy search and BAM – scraped 30 seconds off the average “satisfaction timer”. This meant the call center reps could answer people 30 seconds faster than before without the carpal-tunnel and by using the “new web thing”. I’m not kidding you – one of our User Acceptance participants (an actual rep) started to cry.
If you asked me or any member of that team what we were doing we would have said the following (with minor variations):
- We’re building a web app to reduce the time to answer for call centers
- We’re doing it because our existing app sucks and it’s too hard to learn. Turnover is killing us.
- We hope to have happier call center folks and happier customers
These answers are all kinds of win because they’re grounded in something real: making a job easier/better/faster. They don’t involve greed and aren’t out to change the way the Earth spins – simple and direct and dare I say truthful.
Smelly Answers
I’ve asked these questions various times over the years and aside from my client from hell above, I’ve received some real winners:
- “We’re going to be the Premier [WHATEVER] and direct all buyers of [X] to use our service and we’ll make wads of cash”
- “We’re going to Change the Game with this app, and in doing so make wads of cash”
- “We’re going to dominate the [BLAH BLAH] space – we’ll actually become the internet. We’ll make wads of cash”
- “Right now there’s a massive void out there and we’re going to fill it. We don’t know how we’re going to make money – but we’ll get there soon enough”
- “I don’t know really – I’ve been told to build this thing so I called you. I need a beer.”
People and technology are funny and scary at the same time. Sort of like clowns. When I tell people what I do they get a really weird look in their eye (you know the look I mean) and sometimes I don’t know if I’ll be “fixing their internet” or hearing their great new idea to make tons of money. I, evidently, am a bit like Willy Wonka:
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”
Mr. Wonka also offered a followup – which I hold to very tightly:
“You should never doubt what no one is sure about”
If we agree, by now, that this 80/20 thing has some merit, then it stands to reason that there’s an 80% chance you’re working on a project with a smelly set of directives. You ended up here by the various laws of the universe that sprinkle geeks across projects like salt and pepper – but you don’t have to be the 80% tripe!
You can change this: you can jump the 20% fence. You just have to help your team face the problem plaguing them – which is usually a weird direction that has to do with wads of cash, changing the game, or shifting some paradigm.
Get their heads back in the game and make sure you’re kicking ass for humanity – and you can figure this out pretty quickly by asking some simple questions and listening for:
- Delusions of grandeur
- “Wads of cash”
- “I don’t know yet” spoken 2 or more times
- The solution isn’t a win/win (you, client, end-user)
- Frustration at the question
If you hear these answers or feel like you’re drifting – change things for the better by asking if you can open up conversations about the endgame – about the value for the end user.
If you don’t get concrete answers point to YouTube: a really dead-simple app that makes people really happy. Just like a puppy or a kitten – without the poop. Or Twitter – one of the silliest, most relevant applications ever made (that has yet to make a dime… but anyway).
You can change things – you really can. As long as your team is willing to listen and engage and if they’re not, well maybe it’s time to look for the golden 20% out there.
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May 4th, 2009
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May 3rd, 2009
I’ve been reading a lot of old blog posts tonite regarding Microsoft and Open Source – it really reminds me of the interesting stances the company has taken over the last 5 to 10 years (I’ve only been working with Microsoft for just about 2 years now). For instance – I read a post from Scoble that goes over why “Web 2.0 entrepreneurs” don’t trust the M$ Stack – and I must say, it’s a pretty interesting read and the points that Scoble raises are still felt pretty strongly:
As I’ve been going around the world I’ve been meeting with many people who’ve built their companies on non-Microsoft stuff. Some of whom have companies worth billions of dollars now. Some of whom you’ve never heard about unless you read TechCrunch. Here’s 12 reasons Web 2.0 entrepreneurs like Ross tell me that they aren’t using Microsoft’s stuff:
1) Startup costs. Linux is free. Ruby on Rails is free. MySQL is free.
2) Performance per dollar. They perceive that a Linux server running Apache has more performance than IIS running .NET.
3) Finding tech staff is easier. There are a whole new raft of young, highly skilled people willing to work long hours at startups who can build sites using Ruby on Rails.
4) Perception of scalability. The geeks who run these new businesses perceive that they can scale up their data centers with Linux and not with Windows (the old “Google runs on Linux” argument).
5) That Microsoft doesn’t care about small businesses. After all, Microsoft is an evil borg, but Ruby on Rails comes from a single guy: David Heinemeier Hansson. He has a blog and answers questions fast.
6) That open source makes it easier to fix problems and/or build custom solutions. A variant of the old “Google or Amazon couldn’t be built on Windows” argument.
7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too.
 They don’t want to take shit from their friends (or, even, their Venture Capitalist). Most of this is just pure cost-control. I can hear the conversation now: “OK, you wanna go with Windows as your platform, but is the extra feature worth the licensing fees for Windows?”
9) No lockin. These new businesses don’t want to be locked into a specific vendor’s problems, er products. Why? Because that way they can’t shop for the best price among tools (or move to something else if the architecture changes).
10) More security. The new businesses perceive Linux, Apache, Firefox, and other open source stuff to have higher security than stuff built on Windows.
11) More agility. I’ve had entrepreneurs tell me they need to be able to buy a server and have it totally up and running in less than 30 minutes and that they say that Linux is better at that.
12) The working set is smaller. Because Linux can be stripped down, the entrepreneurs are telling me that they can make their server-side stuff run faster and with less memory usage.
I’d love to know if these opinions have softened at all – or if they’ve been further reinforced – especially given the release of ASP.NET MVC (and it’s subsequent listing on Codeplex under Ms-PL). I’m going to guess that they’re roughly the same: people will believe what they’re going to believe and for some reason, when it comes to Microsoft, changing people’s minds is really hard.
One thing that’s particularly interesting to me is that Microsoft, at least some divisions, are actively changing their “thinking” if you will to a more open posture. The Ms-PL of ASP.NET MVC (mentioned above), some of the work that Developer Division is doing with the Mono team, and the source availability of the entire .NET stack (yes, I know it’s still not open) are evidence of a shift in thinking.
Great! But now what?
Clearly openness and transparency is super groovy – but then what? I’m a huge champion of the open and transparent thing and I’ve been able to do some great stuff in the open with the MVC Storefront and I’ve taken you along with me. I like to think that I was brought to Microsoft to help keep “rolling the bubble” towards more openness – but I have no way of knowing where the rowers are a-rowing; so I just keep plugging along and thankfully they’re letting me .
The Storefront has been a great learning tool, and a lot of people have thanked me for it (and you’re all very welcome! I learned a ton too). But now what?
It was always my intent to pop what I did up on Codeplex and share it with people with the idea that if it had legs – well hooray! So far I have every reason to think it will become quite the open, flexible, “new thinking” type of application that people can learn from, use, extend, and so on. It fires me up and makes me pretty happy because I really like Open Source and what it can do.
But then again – I’m a Microsoft employee and this is a Microsoft project, after all. They’ve given me tremendous latitude to do with it what I will so people can learn core concepts surrounding ASP.NET MVC. That part is sort of done, and now we have Kona – an app that I’m hoping will be somewhat influential with respect to Open Source apps built on ASP.NET. Nice idea – but then there’s the fact that I work on the ASP.NET team.
What does it mean to you that I’m an MS Employee, on the ASP.NET team, building an OSI-licensed ecommerce app? Do you think Microsoft should do more things like this in a more formal way? Or should it stay out of the picture and let others run with this kind of thing?
There are so many questions that I have in my head – and I’m very, very interested to know what you think here: What do you think Microsoft should do with respect to Open Source and .NET?
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Tags: musings
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April 24th, 2009
“I can’t believe you’re using your blog to pimp you’re book! You’re such a … [not a nice word]”.
I couldn’t agree more, and overall the book is a mess and you shouldn’t buy it. If you do buy it, it will give you bad dreams (I know how to write dream trojans) and your brain could boil, increasing the size of your forehead until it eclipses the sun. Or maybe you’ll like it – who the hell knows – I gave up trying to figure this whole thing out a while ago.
Why This Book Sucks
I’ll be straight with you – we tried to avoid sounding like every other book out there – so it might not work for you. Every chapter I wrote I actually stressed over – trying to make sure that I told a story and made it entertaining. I know I know – swimming upstream… but a guy can dream.
I hate boring books written by guys with huge foreheads and silly looks on their faces – and I have a lot of them (and now I am one of them!). One of the things I said to the editor when we first talked was “dude this book has to be fun and entertaining otherwise it’s a waste. Palermo’s already writing the boring one – we have to write the good one”.
OK I didn’t really say that last part – I’d probably get in trouble if Jeffrey thought I said that – so let’s keep that between us KTHX!
I wrote Chapter 9, the security chapter. Well to be precise – I rewrote it about 5 times. Each time I kept thinking “this is boring, who cares!” and that’s not a good thing – especially with regards to security. So I decided to tell stories along the way – stories about Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, and The Ghettohackers pwning the competition at the annual DEF CON in Vegas. Stories about the Srizbi and Storm Worms (which I also wrote about on my blog) and basically tried to take a walk on the wrong side of the digital universe – taking you with me – showing you what kinds of bad guys are out there.
Why This Book Really Sucks
Scott H, Phil and I collaborated on a few of the chapters as well – and we each pushed each other to “speak a bit more plainly”. It’s easy to lapse into author-speak, losing your voice. This was a pretty fun process, and I have to say Scott’s an exceptional writer as well as a speaker. He wrote many of the early chapters in the book, and sums up the WebForms vs. MVC thing pretty well.
He tells it straight, as do Phil and I – so if you like your books milky and Wonder-bread bland, well it’s probably not for you.
What You Get With This Book (Which isn’t Much)
People have been asking “what’s in this book anyway – why should I care?”. So here you go – I’ll tell you specifically:
- 0 to 60 with ScottGu and Nerddinner. Scott writes clean, amazing prose and cuts right to it, showing you how we started Nerddinner.com
- Perspective – Scott H. covers what MVC is in terms of a pattern and discusses the platforms that use it on the web today. He then dives in to “what ASP.NET MVC means” and exhaustively shows, in just about every way, the conceptual difference between WebForms and MVC
- Nuts and Bolts – Phil. The PM of the project himself covers Routes, Controllers, Views, and ActionFilters going into deep detail about each.
- “Higher Concept” stuff – Phil and myself. Phil puts on the rubber gloves and covers every possible aspect of TDD – how to work it with MVC, his secrets, and some interesting strategies you can use. I dive into Testable Design Patterns – the “OK fine so how do I put this altogether” kind of thing where I cover patterns and things I’ve learned from the Storefront. I also do a lengthy chapter on AJAX and show you some interesting tricks.
When You’re Done Reading It…
Burn it. The ideas contained in this book are dangerous and might make you do weird things – things that could make people stare at you and say “why is he doing weird things”. Our hope is that you can dive into any chapter, and we don’t spend too much time on the basics but instead treat you like adults and try to get right to the good stuff – having a good time on the way.
If you’re a sucker and have bought it already – well I hope it helps you somehow. If not, wel
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April 22nd, 2009
I’m never shy about my opinion – why start now? I’ve been reading a lot of posts flying about on whether you should learn MVC, Summing up the differences so you can decide when to use it, I even found a post that offers a scorecard approach! I remember reading the latter post thinking to myself “how can you possibly put a number next to Testability? And why it is only 2 more points than “using a RAD designer”? Isn’t this missing the entire point?
I felt the need to speak up a bit so I left a comment on DotNetKicks:
Please don’t use this "scoring" chart with respect to MVC and WebForms. Honestly – you can’t "score" something like "should I care about Testability" (which rates an against "do I need to use this Server Control" (which scores a 10). There are so many problems with approaches like this – really the only answer is to *try it* and see if it works for you or your org.
Today I read a post on StackOverflow which was pretty contentious wherein the author says:
I’ve been fiddling with ASP.NET MVC since the CTP, and I like a lot of things they did, but there are things I just don’t get…
<snipped ugly viewcode>
Am I doing something wrong? Because I spent many dark days in classic ASP, and this tag soup reminds me strongly of it.
Everyone preaches how you can do cleaner HTML. Guess, what? 1% of all people look at the outputted HTML. To me, I don’t care if Webforms messes up my indentation in the rendered HTML, as long as I have code that is easy to maintain…This is not!
I have definite opinions on this, and today you get to read them. Note that I pushed Scott Hanselman really hard when we wrote our book (which I think is shipping today!) to come out AND SAY SOMETHING (Chapter 3 – a discussion on MVC and WebForms – and he did an amazingly good job). It’s too easy to think “hey – I’m Microsoft – I need to stay balanced here so I don’t offend” and there’s merit to that.
I, on the other hand, think we should also be able to speak our minds. In that light, I present to you my latest effort at getting in trouble: why you need to read this post, get up, and learn what MVC is all about (if you don’t already know).
The Great Lie
WebForms is a lie. It’s abstraction wrapped in deception covered in lie sauce presented on a plate full of diversion and sleight of hand. Nothing you do with Webforms has anything to do with the web – you let it do the work for you.
This, friends, is a big deal (at least to me): You’re working in a lie. The web is *not* stateful and works with this stuff called HTML sent across wires using another thing called HTTP – you need to know this, love this, and feel it at the bone level. I understand this sentence right here is probably making some of you squirm – please continue squirming (I’ll wait). 
If you’re still squirming, then perhaps web development isn’t for you (meant very respectfully and kindly – not being snarky). I say this because you shouldn’t work in a sausage factory if you’re allergic to pork, beef, and ground up animal parts. Nor should you put a wig on your cat and hope that it can sing like Susan Boyle.
These are self-deceptions put in place to make you feel better about something lacking, and it’s usually not healthy. If you’re thinking that you don’t need to know HTTP/HTML to work on the web… you’re doing it again! Please see 2 sentences ago.
If you’re still thinking it – your cat needs a new wig.
MVC Is Elite-test?
I’m sure that WebForms people are probably thinking I’m being a bit of a sh** right now – and I’d like to speak to that. The title of the post here is “You Should Learn MVC” – not that you have to use it (although I wish you would – it’s tons of fun!). That’s all I’m asking – for you to learn it; I’m not telling you that you’re a bad person if you don’t use it (only that you put wigs on your cat).
MVC Is Full of Tag Soup?
Once again, I’ll say this: Spaghetti is as Spaghetti does. I don’t like to see a bunch of if’s and fors on my View the same as any other geek. This, friends, is up to you! Not the platform! Please read this: markup is up to you, as with everything else in MVC. Yes it’s not drag and drop – but nothing ever is in life! It’s new, it’s different – it’s not 1999 if only because we have the power of C# now – not VBScript.
I’m not afraid of HTML – and you shouldn’t be either. Respect it when putting code to page and use DRY as your guide. We can make it through this, together. You can bring your cat, too.
7 Reasons To Stop Calling Me A Jerk
Hopefully you’re still here, and hopefully you’re thinking “enough of the blather already – gimme something to sink my teeth into”. So here goes:
1 – Testability. No – not talking about the TDD variety, just testing in general. If you’re “not a testing person” that’s OK – the rest of the computer science world has embraced the idea that “testing what we build is a pretty good idea”. You don’t really want your clients to catch that silly “InvalidCastException” do ya? There’s LOTS of reasons to want to test – again not TDD – just good old Unit Testing! It’s easy peasy with MVC and this alone should pull you in to at least check it out – along with why testing can save you time and money.
2 – Control over HTML. I’m sure you’ve heard this before – mangled ID’s, non-validating HTML, etc. Why is this important? Because you might want to use client-side programming for something! I won’t bang this gong for too long – but it’s a lot more than “making ViewSource look pretty” – you’re communicating with super-finicky creatures (browsers) that love to argue – being able to smith the markup experience makes you a more valuable developer!
3 – Extensibility. Literally every part of MVC Is pluggable – and in the last 3 apps I wrote (Storefront, Nerddinner, and SubSonic’s MVC Starter) I used my own ViewEngine to save some time and work. I’ve spun up my own ControllerFactory so I can use IoC (which is awesome fun!) Understanding this is the keys to the kingdom for any developer! Have you ever been freaked out because you needed to use Page_PreRender to get something to load into the ControlTree properly so it will show when you need it to? MVC does not lock you into anything – you’re free to do what you want to.
4 – It Makes You Think… This is the one thing I never liked about WebForms – I never felt like I was thinking – just solving. May seem like splitting hairs, but not to me. I’d get a bit of inspiration and then try to figure out “hmmm – how can I make the form show it this way”. MVC is the opposite – the control is in your hands and you get to be free with it. You get to use your noggin! Wow!
5 – …Differently: Javascript Doesn’t Suck. jQuery, Dojo, extJS – whatever. These frameworks make client development so easy it’s actually fun. Phil and I have recently geeked out extensively using jQuery (he more than me) and I distinctly had the feeling that I’ve been missing something. Something that other platforms have had for years – the ability to make a web experience fun and magical (for a user) through client programming. It makes you think completely differently once you “get it” – and soon your server code is being drastically reduced in favor of light, clean client code (thanks to these frameworks) that work up an awesome experience. Cats love jQuery too.
It may seem weird to say it, but developers like to learn a language every few years – make javascript the one you learn this year. You might think you know it, but you probably don’t know it as well as something like C#/VB. Try to – it will change your development entirely from scheming out an interaction to how much code you write.
6 – Learning New Concepts. You’ve seen them everywhere, and seen us fighting about them. We probably shouldn’t argue so much but in a way, this is part of the learning process! Either way – take it upon yourself to learn some things. WebForms is a comfy blanket that can lull you to sleep over time. This has happened to a lot of us (myself included). We’re only now catching up with frameworks that have been creating rocking, compelling sites over the last few years – jog your brain! Wake yourself up and get to know the details that make compelling sites groovy! Learn the things that can help you write more nimble code – if only so you can argue from a point of knowledge!
7 – It’s Fun. This, to me, is the biggest reason. I find MVC fun because I can do what I want, when I want, how I want. I’m free to build an experience that I feel will sell my design, and I’m not hindered by a A Big Lie and a freaky cat with a wig on.
Summary
Bottom line: I’m having fun web programming again and I think that’s pretty motivating, at least for me and my cats. Yet Another Comparison, sure, but hopefully a bit more direct. You have absolutely no reason at all to not learn MVC – but I will concede there may be a reason or two for you to stick with WebForms.
I know many people might think I’m speaking for the rest of Microsoft – hardly. I’m biased and, more importantly, I actually still have my very own brain which forms its own thoughts! I love MVC and I think you will too – just please, please try it before you form an opinion.
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Tags: aspnetmvc
Posted in ASP.NET MVC, Blog | Comments
April 13th, 2009
I’ve been working with the SubSonic forums lately (CommunityServer) as I prep them for retirement (archiving, searchable). One thing I really need to is to be able to run accurate searches based on free text – so over the weekend I’ve been goofing around with Full Text indexing and it hit me that not a lot of people know a little trick you can pull with a Table-valued function.
SQL Functions
Also known as “UDFs”, functions are something that people don’t use too much. It’s understandable in our current climate of ODD – ORM Dependency Disorder (hey I *just* thought of that – kind of like it where all DB procedures (SPs or whatever) are generally avoided. I won’t get into that debate – but if you’re free to put a little programming in your DB, I’ll show you how you can get away from dropping business logic in there and raising it into your ORM while still flexxing the power of SQL Server.
There are 2 main function types in SQL Server 2005 that you can write (not counting system functions here):
- Scalar: returns a single, typed value
- Table-valued: returns an in-memory table of records
Scalar functions are very, very useful and you can use them to run calculations that you might want to re-use in your application – such as finding the distance between two points given their lat/long.
Table-valued functions are incredibly useful if you want to reuse functionality that returns one or more results – such as a Full Text search.
Hooking Search Up To a Function
In my last post I showed you how to hook up Full Text indexing, which allows you to do some really cool free text searches. Once you get that done, you can work up a Table-value Function that accepts the search term (this example is using the CommunityServer database):
ALTER FUNCTION [dbo].[SearchPosts]
(
@search nvarchar(500)
)
RETURNS TABLE
AS
RETURN
(
SELECT KEY_TBL.[KEY] as PostID,
KEY_TBL.RANK as Relevance
FROM
FREETEXTTABLE(cs_Posts, Body,
@search) AS KEY_TBL
)
Notice that in this code I’m purposely avoiding joining any tables – I’m only exposing what the function gives me: a Primary Key of the searched record (which in this case is the PostID) and a RANK. I’ll work with the returned data in other ways in a moment.
Note: I could use CONTAINS or other method of search here – this part’s up to you. I like FREETEXTTABLE because it works for me
Using Linq To Sql with Table-value Functions
Linq to Sql supports table-valued functions in the same way it supports tables – you can use them in your queries just like you would any other class. To see how this works I’ll work up a Linq to Sql class and pull in CommunityServer’s posts, as well as my groovy function:
I’ve named my DataContext “DB” inside of the “CS” class just to keep things simple – now I can query my search results (using a Console App here):
static void Main(string[] args) {
CS.DB db = new CS.DB();
var results=from s in db.SearchPosts("distinct query")
select s;
Console.WriteLine(results.Count());
Console.ReadLine();
}
And I get back a bunch of results – lots of people have written posts in our forums, evidently, on the subject of DISTINCT queries using SubSonic:
That’s not all that useful – but I can tweak this a bit and pull in some relevant information – as well as restricting the whole thing to the top 20 records:
static void Main(string[] args) {
CS.DB db = new CS.DB();
var results = from s in db.SearchPosts("distinct query")
join p in db.cs_Posts on s.PostID equals p.PostID
orderby s.Relevance descending
select new
{
Author=p.PostAuthor,
Date=p.PostDate,
Subject=p.Subject,
Rank=s.Relevance
};
foreach (var post in results.Take(20)) {
Console.WriteLine("Author: " + post.Author + "; Title: " + post.Subject);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
This works perfectly:
Using SQL Profiler I can take a look under the hood to make sure Linq to Sql isn’t running away with my database:
exec sp_executesql N'SELECT TOP (20) [t1].[PostAuthor] AS [Author],
[t1].[PostDate] AS [Date], [t1].[Subject], [t0].[Relevance] AS [Rank]
FROM [dbo].[SearchPosts](@p0) AS [t0]
INNER JOIN [dbo].[cs_Posts] AS [t1] ON [t0].[PostID] = [t1].[PostID]
ORDER BY [t0].[Relevance] DESC',N'@p0 nvarchar(14)',@p0=N'distinct query'
Notice how everything is parameterized as it should be? This is good stuff!
Summary
Many people don’t like diddling with StoredProcedures and Functions because, to them, “business logic will bleed in”. To some degree I can see why people think that – and again I won’t debate the point . I think that this is pretty biz-logic free here, and shows a great way to push the search capabilities into application.
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Tags: SQL Server
Posted in Blog | Comments
April 11th, 2009
This is one of those posts that’s for me to remember (cause I always forget it) and perhaps could come in handy for you too. From time to time I need to setup Full Text Indexing (yes I know there’s lots of alternative) and I hate using the IDE if I don’t have to.
Setting Up Full Text Indexing
sp_fulltext_database 'enable' –-need to have SP3 installed
IF EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM sys.fulltext_catalogs
WHERE name = N'my_catalog_name'
)
DROP FULLTEXT CATALOG my_catalog_name
GO
CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG my_catalog_name
GO
IF EXISTS(
SELECT *
FROM sys.fulltext_indexes
JOIN sys.tables
ON sys.tables.object_id = sys.fulltext_indexes.object_id
WHERE sys.tables.name = 'table_name'
)
DROP FULLTEXT INDEX ON table_name
GO
CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON table_name (column1,column2,column3)
KEY INDEX PK_table_name –-this is the name of the PK, not the column
ON table_name
WITH CHANGE_TRACKING AUTO
GO
ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON table_name
START FULL POPULATION
This will start population of the index. There’s a whole bunch of ways to query it, but the easiest is using FREETEXT and FREETEXTTABLE.
Querying
The easiest query is something like this:
SELECT table_name.column1, table_name.column2,
KEY_TBL.RANK
FROM table_name INNER JOIN
FREETEXTTABLE(table_name, search_column, 'query value') AS KEY_TBL
ON table_name.primary_key = KEY_TBL.[KEY]
ORDER BY Rank DESC
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Tags: SQL Server
Posted in Blog | Comments
April 2nd, 2009
I’m sure you’ve seen the news:
I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). The MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.
Phil, Hanselman, and ScottGu each wrote a bit about it – so did Miguel de Icaza (Gnome/Mono guy). It’s really quite an amazing thing if you think about it: Microsoft released a major framework component under and Open Source license (Ms-PL is recognized by OSI as true Open Source).
Craziness. It reminds me of a blog post I wrote when I joined Microsoft, and I nice guy named Christian Convey gave me a quick “head’s up”:
Rob, you should realize that regardless of how nice the work is or how nice your immediate coworkers are, the organization you’re supporting with your work is rotten to the core. You should not feel good about supporting them. I encourage you to dream big in terms of how you put your talents to use. Don’t settle for this. Life is too short, and there are too many people in need.
Feelings clearly (still) run deep, and it’s a mountain Microsoft needs to climb. This happened before my tenure and, to be honest, it doesn’t involve me really. What involves me is what we can do from here, and what’s possible. If I dwell on what came before. well honestly what good does it do anyone?
To be perfectly clear – I had nothing to do with this. This whole thing was all Phil/Hanselman/ScottGu. Well mostly ScottGu. But I like to think that “the mindset” is starting to settle in – that perhaps ScottGu, with some extra (loud) voices behind him, will keep making these kinds of decisions and pushing them forward.
This is what I do every day at work. If you don’t believe me – ask this guy. I’m not sure a single team meeting goes by where I rat-hole a meeting or throw a small fit about some community thing or another (I can be difficult to work with – but I think that’s why I got hired . The good news is he’s completely (well, almost) with me on most of this stuff – but I have to remind him anyway cause that’s just me. and I like to see his French composure unravel.
I feel good about supporting this company – because they listen, and because I still work here. Because I can throw fits, and because I work with people who are committed to shaking things up and bringing about some really, really good things. But it doesn’t happen over night – it takes patience, prodding, some slap-n-tickle, and little sweet talk, and eventually a gentle push (or in my case a small tantrum). As my old boss Shawn Burke put it:
It’s like rolling a bubble – slow and steady my friend.
This, from a man who took 8 years to get the source pushed for the .NET framework (Shawn was the guy who thought of and pushed this whole thing).
Congratulations to ScottGu, Scott H, and Phil on this bit of work – you guys make me very very proud >.
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Tags: crazytalk
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April 1st, 2009
Eilon is a madman. If you ever get the chance to actually meet the guy you’ll see right away that part of his brain is engaged in quasi – dimensional pursuits. The only way that I can possibly get the guy’s attention is to hug him – literally – in a bromosexual way. It’s funny to watch him freak on that.
Anyway – the brain that is Eilon’s announced today a new class to handle typing and type conversion of strings (the bane of us all), which will be available in Futures in some CTP form or another:
Mutation of data types leaves a software developer in an interesting situation if the data was not formatted properly and thus could not be mutated. For example, the string “abc123” cannot be parsed into an integer. Many frameworks deal with this situation by immediately reporting an error condition. That error could be an exception that was thrown or a Boolean value of false to indicate failure. Keeping track of these states can easily introduce uncertainty into an application.
The first class being introduced is the StringOr class. It is a generic class that encapsulates both the original string user input as well as the result of an attempted conversion operation.
This is great stuff and ups the whole Duck Typing thing by a good order of magnitude. You can have your type and eat it too:
If the consumer of this API wants the original value, they can use the StringValue property. Otherwise they can use the OtherValue property, which in this case is the successfully parsed integer.
The API is pretty basic:
StringOr<int> userInput= GetUserInput("Quantity");
string szUserInput=userInput.StringValue;
int intUserInput=userInput.OtherValue;
(Note: Eilon asked that I use the naming you see here. He’s part Hungarian and feels the need to connect with his roots).
Introducing Probably
I’m a big fan of this whole thing. I like Strings, don’t get me wrong – I don’t need no stinkin type-safety. The only thing here is that there’s an element of uncertainty that goes into this whole thing. Eilon, being the Sith that he is, deals in absolutes and decided that there can be only two values possible here: “StringValue” and “OtherValue”. But what about the third option: “Probable Value”? Ahh Yes – SubSonic to the rescue.
Given that I’m working up the final bits on SubSonic 3.0 right now, I’m happy to announce support for this new core feature by way of Extension Method: Probably(). The code looks a bit like this:
The super cool thing here is that you can work with a value that is based completely on the user’s experience at the time of using your application! In a way, you could say that the user experiencing the application would actually define (probably) the type of the method they’re working with!
Duck Typing, you’ve been SERVED.
I love the smell of fresh strings in the morning… it smells like…
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