Laila Lotfi

Finding bugs is difficult, right?

Laila — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:02:28 GMT

Something I hear developers tell us all the time is that they take pride in being a developer.and that bugs are a dent in that pride. Someone once told me "I know I have found bugs years later, and it's the worst feeling in the world." So how can you avoid that sinking feeling when you find out a bug has been in production months before someone lets you know about it?

Besides, let's face it: hearing about a bug often means a world of pain, because it can take hours to track down where the problem is and more hours (if not days) to fix it. And during that time, you're not working on something new, and that, my friends, is really frustrating!

So to cheer you up, we've created a Bug Hunt game, where you battle against the clock to spot bugs. We've really enjoyed putting this together and hope you enjoy playing it too.

Once you're done with the bug hunt, we explain how easy it can be to find and fix bugs in real life, using a neat mechanism that we call Automated Error Reporting.

Play the game now.

How to make software development decisions based on facts

Laila — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:41:48 GMT

We love to hear stories about the many and varied ways our customers use the tools that we develop, but in our earnest search for stories and feedback, we'd rather forgotten that some of our keenest users are fellow RedGaters, in the same building.

It was almost by chance that we discovered how the SQL Source Control team were using SmartAssembly. As it happens, there is a separate account (here on Simple-Talk) of how SmartAssembly was used to support the Early Access program; by providing answers to specific questions about how the SQL Source Control product was used. But what really got us all grinning was how valuable the SQL Source Control team found the reports that SmartAssembly was quickly and painlessly providing.

So gather round, my friends, and I'll tell you the Tale Of The Framework Upgrade .

<strange mirage effect to denote a flashback. A subtle background string of music starts playing in minor key>

Kevin and his team were undecided. They weren't sure whether they could move their software product from .NET 2 to .NET 3.5 , let alone to .NET 4. You see, they were faced with having to guess what version of .NET was already installed on the average user's machine, which I'm sure you'll agree is no easy task. Upgrading their code to .NET 3.5 might put a barrier to people trying the tool, which was the last thing Kevin wanted: "what if our users have to download X, Y, and Z before being able to open the application?" he asked. That fear of users having to do half an hour of downloads (.followed by at least ten minutes of installation. followed by a five minute restart) meant that Kevin's team couldn't take advantage of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). This made them sad, because WCF would have allowed them to write their code in a much simpler way, and in hours instead of days (as was the case with .NET 2).

Oh sure, they had a gut feeling that this probably wasn't the case, 3.5 had been out for so many years, but they weren't sure.

<background music switches to major key>

SmartAssembly Feature Usage Reporting gave Kevin and his team exactly what they needed: hard data on their users' systems, both hardware and software. I was there, I saw it happen, and that's not the sort of thing a woman quickly forgets. I'll always remember his last words (before he went to lunch): "You get lots of free information by just checking a box in SmartAssembly" is what he said. For example, they could see how many CPU cores their customers were using, and found out that they should be making use of parallelism to take advantage of available cores.

But crucially, (and this is the moral of my tale, dear reader), Kevin saw that 99% of SQL Source Control's users were on .NET 3.5 or above.

So he knew that they could make the switch and that is was safe to do so. With this reassurance, they could use WCF to not only make development easier, but to also give them a really nice way to do inter-process communication between the Source Control and the SQL Compare products. To have done that on .NET 2.0 was certainly possible <knowing chuckle>, but Microsoft have made it a lot easier with WCF.

<strange mirage effect to denote end of flashback>

So you see, with Feature Usage Reporting, they finally got the hard evidence they needed to safely make the switch to .NET 3.5, knowing it would not inconvenience their users. And that, my friends, is just the sort of thing we like to hear.

The Metro Surfaces

Laila — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:34:00 GMT

Our perceptions of Windows 8 are currently based on the live tiles of Windows Phone 7.5 'Mango' and the touch-based 'Metro' User-Interface supported by WinRT. The buzz is of a clean, well-designed, but decidedly retro user-interface based on JavaScript+HTML/CSS, and based in tiles that can be rotated, docked or run full screen but not resized. The focus is on getting the typography right, thereby making the content clear and legible. Amidst all the excitement, .NET, Silverlight and WPF looks a bit passé.

The truth is, of course, different. Windows 8 is still Windows. The 'desktop' hasn't changed, in the sense that nothing has been taken away. Everything will still run in the desktop as it did in Windows 7, but not in 'Metro'.

Metro is for mobile devices. Developers will be able to use the same ALM environment provided by Visual Studio for C# and .NET in order to write mobile apps. The next version of Visual Studio will include project support for Metro apps, and allow Expression to prototype and produce HTML5 Web apps for Windows. The JavaScript editor is now greatly improved, they've added support for HTML5 tags, enhanced the CSS editor and provided better code formatting.

WinRT, (windows Runtime library) is needed for Metro primarily to allow HTML/CSS/Javascript developers simple access to those parts of the operating system that they might require in order to write non-portable Windows applications, and allow these applications to run on ARM processors used in mobile phones as well. However, it is a much more useful part of Windows 8 than just that. It is a managed successor to the Win32 API, written on Object-oriented principles, and able to work with XAML directly. It isn't a replacement for .NET at all. If anything, it replaces COM and Windows Forms. Metro and .NET will both interact with WinRT. For any .NET application, WinRT is just another stack: If it uses WinRT the UI will just run faster, since WinRT uses DirectX to draw the entire user interface.

Having said all that, the presence of WinRT and Metro is uncomfortable for those of us who are committed to developing Silverlight applications, since it reinforces the message that Silverlight isn't for phones or tablets. It looks as if the message from Microsoft is that touch-based Windows mobile applications will be Metro-based, and Microsoft seems very keen on demonstrating how easy it is to convert from Silverlight to Metro. Developers who want to write for Windows mobile devices are going to find it difficult to hedge their bets by adopting a platform that provides portability to iOS or Android. Metro and WinRT isn't going to port easily, even if it adopts open standards. You can't, for example, run either Flash or Silverlight in Metro. It is 'plugin-free'. At the moment, it seems that for a desktop application that has to run on both PC and Mac, Silverlight is still the obvious route. For the Windows Phone and tablet, then it is Metro. For portability? Who knows at this stage?

Gadgeteer

Laila — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 01:16:00 GMT

Microsoft Research, from Cambridge, is about to release what has the potential to become one of the most fun ways of programming in .NET you could think of. It is called 'Gadgeteer' (well, officially Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer) and is based on the Open Source .NET Micro Framework.

The intent is to allow embedded and handheld electronic devices to be iteratively designed, built and programmed, in a matter of hours. Of course, you have to buy the hardware from third-parties. First out of the blocks is GHI Electronics who, from the end of September, will offer their Fez Spider Starter Kit. It comprises the .NET Micro Framework mainboard, plus a range of twenty to thirty gadgets, including such things as cameras, SD card readers, Wifi, Ethernet modules, touch-screen LCDs, switches, potentiometers, joysticks, and power supplies.

The mainboard, a 72MHz ARM system-on-a-chip with 14 expansion sockets, is the centerpiece (and costs $120). All the modules plug in to the mainboard via ribbon-cables, and you can create complex gadgets without doing any soldering. Then, you use all your .NET skills, programming the logic in C#, using the .NET Micro Framework in Visual Studio. The framework supplies pretty advanced IntelliSense that prompts you with all possible options at any point in the programming process, and so allows you to get started without having to stick your nose into manuals.

Evidently, the Gadgeteer project evolved as a result of the frustration felt by the Sensors and Devices Group, led by Steve Hodges at Microsoft Research Cambridge Microsoft Research, at the slow pace of prototyping electronic devices such as their SenseCam. The idea came to them to produce object-oriented hardware to match Microsoft's existing .NET Micro Framework. The results of this combination of technologies have been startling.

Although the aims of the .NET Gadgeteer include some serious design-work for electronic devices such as bar-code readers or monitoring systems, I can see this combination of lightweight framework and standard hardware providing a great deal of educational amusement for .NET programmers. Already, a miniature working games arcade console has been made, with the source code available, but there is a huge potential for recreational computing. At the moment, the range of modules isn't really enough to consider even the simplest robotics, but hopefully soon a hardware manufacturer will come out with a suitable kit. In the meantime, there are some interesting designs out there, such as a rig for doing single-frame animation work, that are sure to keep me amused!

Do you work with ASP.NET and IIS?

Laila — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:19:44 GMT

Do you work with ASP.NET and IIS? Maybe you're a dab hand at installing ISAPI extensions, or maybe you like to keep your production servers pristine and free of anything you didn't hand-craft yourself. Maybe you're using IIS 7's modules to configure server functionality, or perhaps an earlier IIS version gives you all the control you need.

Either way, Red Gate is keen to hear from you: we're carrying out a short developer/sysadmin survey, and we'd love a quick insight into your experiences deploying and managing ASP.NET applications on IIS. In exchange for your time, we'll enter you into a draw to win a $50 Amazon voucher, and - if you're interested - enrol you in our Early Access Program, for a sneak preview of some exciting new features for ASP.NET development and management coming up in our tools.

The survey's intended to gather data on your experience of hosting applications, add-ins, and extensions with IIS. We've tested it, and found it takes less than five minutes to complete. Red Gate will use the results to improve its tools for everyone working with ASP.NET: your answers will help shape the products Red Gate build over the coming year. Your details won't be shared with any other organization, or used to sell or market to you, and the prize draw will be made on September 5th. We'll read all responses carefully, and offer you the chance to take part in future research and usability sessions - your input will help us make simple tools, to make life with IIS easier.

Click to take the survey here.

Turnkey with LightSwitch

Laila — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:31:06 GMT

Microsoft has long wanted to find a replacement for Microsoft Access. The best attempt yet, which is due out in, or before, September is Visual Studio LightSwitch, with which it is said to be as 'easy as flipping a switch' to use Silverlight to create simple form-driven business applications.

It is easy to get confused by the various initiatives from Microsoft. No, this isn't WebMatrix. There is no 'Razor', for this isn't meant for cute little ecommerce sites, but is designed to build simple database-applications of the card-box type. It is more clearly a .NET-based solution to the problem that every business seems to suffer from; the plethora of Access-based, and Excel-based 'private' and departmental database-applications. These are a nightmare for any IT department since they are often 'stealth' applications built by the business in the teeth of opposition from the IT Department zealots. As they are undocumented, it is scarily easy to bring a whole department into disarray by decommissioning a PC tucked under a desk somewhere. With LightSwitch, it is easy to re-write such applications in a standard, maintainable, way, using a SQL Server database, deployed somewhere reasonably safe such as Azure. Even Sharepoint or Windows Communication Foundation can be used as data sources.

Oracle's ApEx has taken off remarkably well, and has shaken the perception that, for the business user, Oracle must remain a mystic force accessible only to the priests and acolytes. Microsoft, by comparison had only Access, which was first released in 1992, the year of the Madonna conical bustier. It looks just as dated. Microsoft badly needed an entirely new solution to the same business requirement that led to Access's and Foxpro's long-time popularity, but which had the same allure as ApEx.

LightSwitch is sound in its ideas, and comfortingly conventional in its architecture. By giving an easy access to SQL Server databases, and providing a 'thumb and blanket' migration path to Access-heads, LightSwitch seems likely to offer a simple way of pulling more Microsoft users into the .NET community. If Microsoft puts its weight behind it, then it will give some glimmer of hope to the many Silverlight developers that Microsoft is capable of seeing through its .NET revolution.

Sunshine after the iCloud release?

Laila — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:30:58 GMT

"Why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought us MobileMe? It was not our finest hour, but we learned a lot." Steve Jobs June 6^th 2011

Apple's new cloud service has been met with uncritical excitement by industry commentators. It is wonderful what a rename can do. Apple has had a 'cloud' offering for three years called MobileMe, successor to .MAC and iTools, so iCloud is now the fourth internet service Apple have attempted. If this had been Microsoft, there would have been catcalls all around the blogosphere. I'll admit that there is a lot more functionality announced for iCloud than MobileMe has ever managed to achieve, but then almost anything has more functionality than MobileMe. It's an expensive service (£120 a year in the UK, $90 in the states), launched as far back as June 9, 2008, that has delivered very little and suffered a string of technical problems; the documentation was mainly a community effort, built up gradually by the frustrated and angry users. It was supposed to synchronise PC Outlook calendars but couldn't manage Microsoft Exchange (Google could, of course). It used WebDAV to allow Windows users to attach to the filestore, but didn't document how to do it. The method for downloading and uploading files to the cloud-based filestore was ridiculously clunky. It allowed you to post photos on a public site, but forgot to include a way of deleting photos. I could go on with the list, but you can explore the many sites that have flourished to inhabit the support-vacuum left by Apple.

MobileMe should have had all the bright new clever things announced for iCloud. Apple dropped the ball, and allowed services such as Flickr to fill the void. However, their PR skills are such that, a name-change later (the .ME.com email address remains), it has turned a rout into a victory, and hundreds of earnest bloggers have been extolling Apple's expertise in cloud matters. This must be frustrating for the other cloud providers who have quietly got the technology working right.

I wish iCloud well, even though I resent the expensive mess they made of MobileMe. Apple promise that iCloud will sync files, apps, app data, and media across all the different iOS5 devices, Macs, and PCs. It also hopes to sync music across devices, but not video content. They've offered existing MobileMe users free use of the MobileMe service for a year as the product is morphed, and they will be able to transfer to iCloud when it is launched in the autumn. On June 30, 2012, MobileMe will die, and Apple's iWeb is also soon to join iTools and .MAC in the hereafter.

So why get excited about iCloud? That all depends on the level of PC integration. Whereas iOS5 machines will be full participants in the new world of data-sharing (Sorry iPod Touch users) what about .NET libraries? There is talk of synchronising 'My Pictures' libraries with iOS5 and iMac machines, but little more detail as yet. Apple has a lot to prove with iCloud and anyone with actual experience of their past attempts to get into cloud services will be wary.

Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

Laila — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:42:23 GMT

After Steve Ballmer's indiscrete 'MisSpeak' about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We've now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of 'Mosh' at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This has caused acute anxiety to the programmers who have followed the recommended route of WPF, Silverlight and .NET, but it need not have caused quite so much panic since it was, in fact, just a thin layer to make Windows into an apparently mobile-friendly OS. More worryingly, the press-release from Microsoft was at pains to say that 'Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML', as if all thought of Silverlight, dominant in WP7, had been jettisoned. Ironically, this brave new 'happening' platform can all be done now in Windows 7 and an iPad, using Adobe Air, so it is hardly cutting-edge; in fact the tile interface had a sort of Retro-Zune Metro UI feel first seen in Media Centre, followed by Windows Phone 7, with any originality leached out of it by the corporate decision-making process. It was kinda weird seeing old Excel running alongside stodgily away amongst all the extreme paragliding videos. The ability to snap and resize concurrent apps might be a novelty on a tablet, but it is hardly so on a PC.

It was at that moment that it struck me that here was a spreadsheet application that hadn't even made the leap to the .NET platform. Windows was once again trying to be all things to all men, whereas Apple had carefully separated Mac OS X development from iOS. The acrobatic feat of straddling all mobile and desktop devices with one OS is looking increasingly implausible. There is a world of difference between an operating system that facilitates business procedures and a one that drives a device for playing pop videos and your holiday photos.

So where does this leave Silverlight? Pretty much where it was. Windows 8 will support it, and it will continue to be developed, but if these press-releases reflect the thinking within Microsoft, it is no longer seen as the strategic direction. However, Silverlight is still there and there will be a whole new set of developer APIs for building touch-centric apps. Jupiter, for example, is rumoured to involve an App store that provides new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages. When the smoke clears, one suspects that the Javascript/HTML5 is merely an alternative development environment for Windows 8 to attract the legions of independent developers outside the .NET culture who are unlikely to ever take a shine to a more serious development environment such as WPF or Silverlight.

Cheers,

Laila

Monopolytics: Porting the .NET framework

Laila — Fri, 20 May 2011 11:29:00 GMT

.NET was originally conceived as a portable framework that would run on any number of platforms. Microsoft has gradually diminished their ambitions for .NET and Silverlight, but as long as Mono and Moonlight lived, there was proof that the framework can be ported. It came as a surprise to many, therefore, that Attachmate should close down the Mono project so soon after purchasing Novell, and fire all the Mono team. Surely a Linux port of the .NET framework is something that the industry wants, and what Microsoft needs?

It might seem odd to worry about .NET's credibility whilst it continues to dominate the industry. However, Microsoft's poor showing with windows-based mobile devices and tablets means that a .NET framework that can only run on Windows isn't an option. .NET developers need Mono, and the commercial products that use it such as MonoTouch, Unity3D, and MonoDevelop to give them the confidence to develop applications for the whole range of successful mobile devices and servers.

Fortunately for the .NET community, the founder of the Mono project, Miguel de Icaza, announced a fortnight after the Attachmate putch that the project lived, with the mono team working for a new company Xamarin. It looks as if they had been planning to create a spin-off in time but not expecting the layoffs. This means that there will now be three companies producing commercial products based on Mono, Grasshopper for ASP.NET on Linux servers, Unity with an iOS framework and Xamarin with iOS, and Android offerings.

A managed framework is a great help for developing iOS applications even if it is just to allow you to forget about memory management. Added to that is the huge resources of the .NET framework. A programmer can develop for iOS, Android and Windows and share almost all the non-GUI code. It could even be used for a Windows Phone 7 version! If current plans succeed, we might even eventually be able to port GUI code using a strong Mono Silverlight implementation on iOS and Android if they can get over the poor fit of the Silverlight/Moonlight Binary Interface with android or iOS.

Now that there seems to be a reasonable long term strategy for Microsoft in the mobile market in combination with Nokia and Skype, It would be great to get this final missing part of the story in place.

Cheers,

Laila

A Fresh Start

Laila — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:12:15 GMT

As you may already be aware, I'm no longer responsible for the .NET Reflector newsletter. That publication is now in the very capable hands of the Reflector team.

But fear not; starting in early April, I'll be launching a brand new .NET Newsletter, and I invite you to enjoy the very first edition by subscribing to our new mailing list, or by updating your Simple-Talk subscriptions, and joining the .NET Newsletter mailing list.

With a fresh and snappy design (it might even be described as idiosyncratic. but I can say no more at this stage), we'll be making a brand new start. Each month, a member of my team (that's the Red Gate .NET team) will host the .NET Newsletter, bringing you the choicest cuts of breaking news, the very best .NET content from Simple-Talk, alongside details of hot upcoming events. To top it off, not only will you be among the first to get access to free resources (including free wall-charts, training videos and eBooks), but you'll also get exclusive access to betas, early access programs, and special offers. We can't wait to share the new design and exciting new content with you!

If you have any questions about the changes to the newsletter, please feel free to send an email to editor@simple-talk.com or post a comment on my blog. If I don't hear from you before next month, then I'll simply say that I hope you enjoy the new look.

Cheers,

Laila

Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

Laila — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:41:00 GMT

I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process
</marketing hyperbole>

On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love.

I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is tricky.

Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow.

To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery:

As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports.

Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're using SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs.

Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback.

Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting.

Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25^th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

Silverlight: less cross-platform, more cross developers

Laila — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:52:00 GMT

Much has changed since Silverlight first saw the daylight. Microsoft has realized for some time that they can't possibly maintain their ambition to support the use of Silverlight as a runtime that runs consistently in all popular OSs, in different form factors across the increasing variety of devices that have appeared since then. They had hoped, nevertheless, to make Silverlight the logical choice for the development of rich media applications for PCs and Macs, in much the same way that Flash is used; however, the speed at which HTML has been adopted and implemented by the leading browsers has taken everyone by surprise, and it had become increasingly apparent that HTML5 will soon be the way to develop customer-facing, cross-platform, 'rich-website' apps. Silverlight is still seen as being the best platform for browser-based line-of-business applications. It will be the main platform for Windows Phone.

Microsoft's PDC statements by Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia should therefore have come as no surprise. However they weren't careful enough to clarify the difference between a line-of-business application and a fancy website. Whereas it is obvious to the seasoned developer, it seems a bit vague to the overexcited journalists who reported the announcement. In fact, all that has changed with the announcement is that Microsoft will never need to admit that Silverlight's bid to compete with Flash as a general way of delivering video and animation has failed. This may bother the very few people who have actually used Silverlight to replace Flash in public websites, but none of the current rich-app users of Silverlight are affected by the 'repositioning exercise'.

Windows Presentation Foundation now seems to be getting little attention. Whatever Microsoft's motives are in downplaying WPF, Silverlight 4 and WPF, together make a lot of sense for the .NET developer, particularly since it allows the use of just one codebase to build applications for desktop, and mobile devices. Together, they are a very broad church, and the development tools that support the platforms are the best in the industry. This offers a coherent strategy for any .NET developer that uses WPF as the framework for Windows desktop applications, and puts Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, in the role of providing browser-hosted or out-of-browser applications that run on the Mac or the Windows Phone.

The emergence of the new HTML5,CSS3 & JavaScript technology is very impressive, and will soon change the look of websites. Even Wikipedia is now using it. Microsoft would have been foolish not to catch up with Safari and Firefox with the functionality of Internet Explorer. However, you still cannot create full business applications with it since browsers by definition cannot have full access to all the necessary resources of your device. Adobe's AIR was designed to bridge that awesome gap but still has a lot to prove. You don't have to be a gambler to bet on HTML5, JavaScript & CSS3: It's inevitable; but it's for customer websites, not apps.

Is Microsoft unified behind WPF and Silverlight as their strategic .NET development platform? I'd love to hear your views.

Cheers,

Laila

Take part in a short survey on Software Error Reporting

Laila — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:25:31 GMT

Are you programming in .NET?

I would like to get your opinions on error reporting. I would really appreciate it if you could take 5 min to answer a short survey on the topic.

Click here to take the survey: https://www.surveymk.com/s/error-reporting

You'll be entered into a prize draw with a chance to win one of five $100 Amazon vouchers.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Orchard? No harvest quite yet.

Laila — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:36:59 GMT

Microsoft announced last week that it was scrapping its Windows Live Spaces blogging technology, and would make Automattic's WordPress the default blogging platform for Windows Live. Couldn't Microsoft's Orchard, the three-year open-source project to provide a general-purpose website publishing and blogging platform, come up with the goods? Sadly, it is just bad timing: Orchard is only half way through its development, which aims to deliver far more than just a blogging platform. It promises an extensible architecture and a complete set of reusable components from which you could easily assemble a web-based application that is exactly tailored to your needs, the IT equivalent of Lego. At the moment there is nothing quite like it on the market. Whereas Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and all the others give you a tantalising glimpse, the more you try to tailor them the more you realise that the components and plug-ins don't quite work together as you'd expect. Unless you design a framework from the ground up to be extensible, you're going to hit the limits pretty soon, however attractive the plug-ins seem.

The idea of modules is at the heart of Orchard's design. Orchard is built on top of ASP.NET MVC. MVC has a model (M) for the data, a controller (C) that orchestrates the UI and determines how it operates on the model, and a view (V) that just has to display what the controller passes to it. It also has 'Areas' that contain a set of features that are logically separate. Orchard Modules are MVC areas with YAML manifest files, the Module architecture allows you to slot functionality into a site. Want to add comments to a product, a picture or whatever? Decide that you want a blog? Want to publish articles from a CMS? Use a Lucene site-Search engine? You can pick, choose or write your own.

Orchard is therefore already a framework for Web Application development, but it is also an Application. Currently, they're working on the Orchard CMS and Blog that are, in Beta version 0.5, already usable, albeit a bit rough around the edges. It is worth keeping an eye on Orchard, to see how it develops, or even join its' community, since its aims are easy to sympathise with. See: http://orchard.codeplex.com/ and http://www.orchardproject.net/.

Orchard is an important part of a wider strategy for Microsoft that includes Razor and WebMatrix. It is to provide far simpler tools for people who want to create web applications, but at the same time give them the freedom to create design features that are novel and progressive. It is a hard balancing act, but well worth the attempt, since website development shouldn't really be as hard as it currently is.

Is Orchard the best approach to componentised website construction, or have you come across better ones? If so, I'd love to hear about them.

Cheers,

Laila

Devscovery 2010 - Last Day

Laila — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:47:00 GMT

It's the last day of Devscovery and time to wrap up the Red Gate games by announcing the winner of yesterday's quiz, and the Red Gate Games Champion, winner of our Grand Prize.

Our quiz winner is... David Lambert!

David, congratulations! You'll receive a copy of ANTS Memory Profiler, a $50 Amazon voucher, a copy of The Complete Guide to .NET Performance Testing and Optimization, a copy of CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter, and a box of Red Gate goodies! We'll be in touch with you to arrange this mountain of prizes. :)

Keep an eye on this post. It'll be updated later with our Grand Prize Winner. An announcement will be made on the ground at 1:15pm...

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for...

[Drum roll]

The Red Gate Games Champion for Devscovery 10 is.... Mani Subramanian! Huge round of applause for Mani! An engraved 32 GB iPod Touch will be on its way to you as a hallowed token of your victory!

To all of you who participated in both the Man Hunt and the Quiz, but didn’t win anything, we’ll also be in touch with a little surprise, as a way of thanking you for being such good sport.

Congratulations to all our winners – we’ll be in touch to organize the delivery of your prizes.

To finish things off, thanks to everyone who took part in the games. I hope you had as much fun as we did. Thanks also to everyone who went along to Clive’s talk, and to Clive himself for presenting it; thanks to John Robbins and Jeffrey Richter and the rest of the Devscovery10 speakers for their support; and thanks to Bethany Vananda from Wintellect who did most (if not all!) of the event organisation work on the ground and who’s been an absolute pleasure to work with.

Last, but certainly not least, a very BIG thank-you indeed to Paul Hoeffer, for being our man on the ground, and for being so willing to help out. We couldn’t have done it without you, Paul!

So, that’s it for Devscovery10 and the Red Gate games. Safe journey back home to everyone!