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A few weeks ago I was talking to several developers and a Microsoft evangelist. The topic of conversation turned to the relative proportions of web forms versus windows forms development. One of the developers (who is primarily an ASP.NET developer) put forward his strongly held view that the ratio is at least 80% : 20% in favour of web development. My own view was that it would be much closer to 60% : 40% with web development in the lead. The man from MS, who gets to see a wider cross section of the industry than most, said “It’s actually closer to 50:50”.

The point I’m making is not that my estimate was closer but that it is easy to believe that someone else problems / solutions / environment look exactly like your own: experience gives you a wider perspective. It’s a problem faced by software designers and developers everyday: each project participant has their own view of the world.

Now I wonder if he knows the relative proportion of C# versus VB.NET developers…did someone say “language jihad”? Are you predominately a web or windows forms developer?

Several people have commented upon the fact that Scott Hanselman is so prolific and knowledgeable that he must not sleep at all. I take the more fantastic view that he has been cloned: in fact if each clone would place their ID number in the title of each post, it would soon become apparent that there is actually an entire army of Scott Hanselman’s out there!

Humor aside, I grok Scott Hanselman. I had heard of Watir (pronounced water) and several other tools for automated Web page acceptance testing, but as usual a Hanselman blog post turned the light on for me. Whilst Fitnesse, a wiki based user acceptance (UA) tool will still be applicable for getting non-programmers writing UA tests, Scott has posted this great idea Time Saver – Using Watir as a Startup Program in your ASP.NET Projects. Not his first great idea and highly unlikely to be his last!

Will the real Scott Hanselman please stand up?

Found a great combined RSS feed at diggdot. Not only does it have some great Tech posts but also some funnies, like the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs ! With lines like “The seventies called, and they want their hairstyle back” it is sufficiently silly and irreverent to hit the spot.

Do you read thedailywtf? If you enjoy programming you should check it out. Sometimes the stories leaving you wondering whether to laugh or cry! Take this one for instance — “…utilizing some Excel Interoperability” — actually described the architecture of the system: a horrid amalgamation of Excel spreadsheets interacting with C# interacting with other spreadsheets…”

It reminded me in a tangential kind of way of an incident in my third full-time job after University. I’d been working at this company for around 3 months and one morning, one of the analysts dropped by and said “…come and look at this”. He opened a large storage cupboard and pointed to a huge pile of that green lined computer paper (you know, the type with the sprocket holes down the sides!) . A quick look showed that it was line after line of a large array initialisation setting each value to zero! The programmer responsible had obviously not quite got up to the point in the training course where loops were introduced!

SourceGear have released Vault 3.5 with some nice improvements and a few fixes.

I am really looking forward to the release of this new book: Windows Developer Power Tools, published by O’Reilly (due Nov 2006) and written by James Avery and Jim Holmes.
The book is designed to be a reference encyclopedia on many of the productivity and quality improvement tools available to Windows developers. There is coverage of 150 tools spanning 1000 pages so it’s definitely going to be a huge book! Rather than try to be a complete reference for each tool, this book describes each tool, what it is used for, what situations it is best suited to, and then a quick introduction on how to get started with the tool. The book covers automated builds, testing, code generation, metrics, source control, deployment, lifecycle, debugging to name just a few areas.

You can download it from Rough Cuts right now. “If you want to check the book out you can read through the table of contents and download a couple of sample chapters over on a small site Jim has set up.” Jim is accepting feedback on the sample chapters published.

A blog article by James Avery led me to Robert Scoble’s blog and his post on Microsoft Research. Here he talks about the long term value of of research and makes comparisons between the research programs at Microsoft and Google. He gives the link to Microsoft Research, where there are literally stacks of very interesting research papers available for viewing. The sheer number of papers is mind boggling.

Just had lunch with a colleague and he mentioned this:
Microsoft Acquires Winternals and Sysinternals and Mark and Bryce are on their way to Microsoft!

Better download those tools quick!!! 😉

Since I’m on the subject of books…

I’m also a huge Iain M. Banks fan: his work is outstanding. I used to read volumes of Sci-Fi when I was in my teens but later went off it, finding it a bit childish and sometimes too out of touch with today’s science let alone that of tomorrow. So discovering Iain M. Banks was something of a revelation. His last book ‘The Algebraist” shows just what an exquisite imagination coupled with an understanding of the possibilities science can create. Simply wonderful. Another of his that really stands out is ‘Feersum Enjun’.

I’ve just finished reading “The Best Software Writing Vol. I”, a collection of essays and commentary, selected and edited by Joel Spolsky. Joel makes the point that “…communicating is one of the most overlooked skills in software development.” Another pithy one-liner is “Show, Don’t tell.” This pretty much sums up what any software development book or training course should do to be successful. That means fewer slides in those PowerPoint presentations and more coding demos! This book won’t tell you how to implement the MVP (model-view-presenter) pattern using TDD (although this MSDN article Model View Presenter by Jean-Paul Boodhoo will!), but it is brimming with anecdotes that encourage you to think outside your locked in terms of reference. This book is worth reading by developers and non-developers alike.

Anyone that knows me well, would know that I read alot of books! Not just technical or non-fiction ones, but a heap of fiction as well. One of the genres I love is high quality crime fiction, typified by Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, Peter Robinson and to a lesser extent James Lee Burke. Michael Connelly’s portrayal of detective Harry Bosch is nothing short of brilliant.

I’ve read every Michael Connelly book so far; the last was ‘The Lincoln Lawyer” (not a Bosch novel, but the next is!) I haven’t read anything in the genre that can compare from the point of view of the story content and the quality of the writing.

It would be fair to say I’m very much a Michael Connelly fan. So it was a Huge disappointment to read ‘Crime Beat: True Stories of Cops and Killers’. Michael Connelly started out his career as a Police Reporter for the Los Angeles Times and this book is a collection of stories that inspired many of the plots (or sub-plots) in his work. The introduction is great; it has that special quality that all of Michael Connely’s books have. But the rest! It just seems to be re-prints of newspaper stories written long before Connelly honed and perfected his art. I was barely able to finish most of the ‘stories’. This seems to be a shameless attempt by the publisher to profit on Michael Connelly’s writing reputation by way of rehashing old, poorly-edited material.