Killer iPhone app

I am a big iPhone user (Sorry MS, I love ya but Apple are the dog's bollox when it comes to gadgets)

My absolute favourite application on the iPhone is Stitcher. It's a neat little app that finds and stitches together podcasts into one long custom radio show.

Being a Brit, I like to listen to UK podcasts from the BBC and the Guardian. Also, having lived in the US for a while I like radio shows such as Car Talk and Science Friday from NPR. The Stitcher application lets me listen to all of these while I am charging around the streets of Paris on my Triumph Bonneville.

Check out Stitcher at http://www.stitcher.com or in the App store on your iPhone.

New content

For a little while I've been busy with projects for a big client and I've sadly neglected my main site bobpowell.net I have recently began putting new content on there with my In Depth section and I intend to do a lot more Silverlight and WPF stuff on there now.

To be honest, I have been so aware of the fact that there is an incredible plethora of information on these subjects available that I wondered about any contribution that I might make being just so much noise. However, after searching for information that was relevant to problems I was working on and finding nothing but out of date and indeed, misleading blather, on the last-but-one beta, alpha or RTM, I am encouraged to imagine that I may actually have something to say if I concentrate on "la derniere cri" as it were.

Watch these spaces, or, if you're lazy, subscribe to my RSS feeds.

Embed a silverlight control into an ASP.Net page

I have been working on a Silverlight banner control for one of my web-sites and had run up against a wall regarding just how to best embed a simple silverlight application or control into a web page on a site created in ASP.Net. To me this seems like one of the most fundamental questions one could ask about Silverlight but, after much searching and many confusing answers that all seem to relate to the beta versions of Silverlight, I eventually discovered how to do this on my own, more or less by trial and error.

I have produced a video using Camtasia that shows how to achieve the task in what seems to be the simplest manner. I hope you like it.

Incidentally, One of my clients is a company that has me creating educational video content for their development teams. I don't have quite the same equipment as they have, a studio and dedicated engineers, but I think that I will do more of these.

To see the video, just follow this link...

Grumpy old man?

Everyone is familiar with the grumpy old man. You know who he is, a bloke of "a certain age" forty going on fifty with a bit - or a lot - of grey and maybe a bald head who just moans and groans about everything.

I am a grumpy old man. I am also proud of being one, in the same way that my darling wife is proud of being a crone.

What do I moan about? I moan about my idiot children who have decided that smoking is a cool thing to do. I moan about the way big business has no room for the little person and how there is no real concept of personal service any more unless it's the service of sycophants that expect to be paid for the honour. I moan about shitheads like Robert Mugabe or those blasted Chinese who commit genocide upon Tibetans and who are ignored because the west loves to wear Nike shoes. I moan about the duplicity of governments who have elected officials who refuse to obey the will of the people that elected them. I moan about religion that pollutes the minds of people so much that they would kill innocent children in the name of their useless gods.

Secretly however, deep inside, I am happy. I am happy that I am fortunate enough to be able to feed my idiot children, even if they don't appreciate it yet. I am happy that I have my health and that I have a very low probability that someone will stick a gun in my face in the near future. I am happy that I can vote for my officials even if I know that they still won't really do what I want them to.

I sincerely hope that wherever you are, even if you're a grumpy old sod like me, that you can enjoy this mid-winter festival free from oppression, hunger and looming death. If you can't, rest assured that I am thinking of you and wish that things could be different for you.

Merry Yuletide.

Life, the universe and everything.

There are several schools of thought that are concerned with the idea of life in the universe and whether we may someday find that we are indeed alone or find that we are competittors for space in a crowded universe.

Frank Drake's now famous equation has been seen, for many years, as a possibility but recent developments in the study of the statistical possibilities of the incidence of life suggest that a much more conservative figure should be expected. Several ideas recently postulated, say that the possibility of life on a potentially suitable planet is only about 0.01 percent. If we take the best case, saying that liveable planets exist in every solar system then we could expect about a hundred million planets should exist in our galaxy with some sort of rudimentary life, some of which would grow to harbour intelligent life.
If we take a very dim view that only one in a hundred solar systems has anything like a Goldilocks zone, perhaps we could imagine a million life bearing planets in the galaxy.

Whatever the outcome, there is still only one possibility. That is that mankind must go out to space, not just as occasional visitors, but en-masse to struggle and probably to die out there but certainly to colonise the universe as much as we can.

In our four million year or so existence we have conquered just about all there is to conquer, at least in a physical sense, upon the earth. In all that time we have also shown that we do our best work when faced with adversity and a frontier to challenge. Having no frontiers remaining on earth will cause humankind to expand to completely fill the boundaries that we have and then to perish in decay.

So many people these days are concerned with the environment and with the destruction we are wreaking on the planet as we grow our technologies. We moan and whine about global warming or carbon footprints but few people see that this planet is nothing more than a stepping stone for the species and that, as the very top of the top of the food-chain, we own the darn planet and we can do with it as we please. If we need to make so much mess on the planet that we have to escape it at all costs then this will do no more than save the human race from the other, more awful possibility that we will one day be wiped out in our complacence and laziness in our own little Zen garden, unable to prevent the sun from evaporating our oceans or an asteroid from erasing us as the Dinosaurs were snuffed out from history.

I love Tigers and Rhinoceroses and frogs and Pandas but really, I don't give a monkeys, if you'll pardon the pun, for any of them if preserving them means that we must endanger our own future. DNA is nothing but software that runs on amino-acids. We can disassemble it at the moment but in a few years we will have an assembler for the stuff too. We can only hope that the democratisation of the gene assembler is used to make things as benign as a new Panda or to raise the Mammoth or the Tyrannosaurus from the dead. You can be sure that before Jurassic park is a reality, a world blighted by pathogens released by religious fanatics will be more likely.

Mankind must have a frontier, men must die to cross it and, as a race, we will never survive if we do not make the supreme effort. Screw the oceans, the fish, the trees and the dammnable Pandas! Grind them all under the wheels of the rocket launchers! Let's get out of here!

Has HowStuffWorks lost it?

Todays headline: "How labour scabs work"

While the fact that they do work may upset some more militant members of the union, this seems to be a sad comedown for a site that had always delivered good content.

How stuff works seems to have explained all the cool stuff in the world and is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new material to justify its daily feeds.

I guess until the new Large Hadron Collider is eventually up and running and we finally understand the deepest secrets of the quantum universe, we'll have to be content with things like "How snot works" and "How toilet paper works" and "How dog poo works"

Oh how the mighty have fallen!

Not quite getting it

In a recent stand up meeting regarding an important quarterly release of a large application to which I contribute, a developer explained that certain unit-tests were failing and preventing the build from completing so to ensure all was running correctly, he commented out the offending tests.

You can imagine the hilarity that resulted from that!

Agile Methodists

I have recently been researching the driving forces behind agile methods for a series of educational presentations I am making for a client.

I stumbled upon an image of a group of developers participating in the stand-up meeting which, I seem to recall, was on Kent Beck's site and was struck by the similarity between it and images I have seen in Mormon pamphlets, the ones that are obviously an image treated with a Photoshop style aquarelle post-process, that makes the image look as if it was the work of an impressionist painter.

I was startled to make the association between agile methods and religious fervour but re-reading the agile manifesto, which I always thought of as a sort of Marxist text, I see now is more of an evangelical thing.

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place and I felt a chill run up and down my spine when I realised that the morning meeting where everyone speaks a little about what they did the day previously, what they intended to do today and if they were having difficulty on some level or other, was a definite ringer for a witnessing.

Occasionally, meetings get a more conventionally religious overtone when a charismatic developer decides to expound upon hot theories during the sacrosanct fifteen minutes and extends it to forty five while people shift themselves into more comfortable leaning positions on walls and the backs of chairs.

There may even be a burgeoning market for cardboard cut-out pulpits!

Is Apple's software quality slipping?

I recently succumbed to the lure of Apple's call when I bought an IPhone, largely because where I work it's difficult to get my mail during the day.
Aside from being locked to their view of the world, a situation that will be rectified very soon when I jailbreak the thing, I was astounded to find that the Apple reputation for thinking of everything and being easy to use falls far short of expectation.
I am a biker and do my daily commute on my Triumph Bonneville so I got a Bluetooth helmet kit and subsequently discovered that the iphone doesn't have an auto-answer function for when the headset is connected. Furthermore, for a touch device not to support handwriting recognition or voice command dialling yet have the processor power to do serious graphics is inadmissible.
I've hadthe thing for a week now and I am getting used to it's little foibles but to be honest, it shouldn't have any!

Posted from my IPhone...

Reflector

I suppose that about fifty million people will have received the mail from Lutz Roeder explaining that he has sold or given the code for Reflector to RedGate software.

Personally, I am "gobsmacked" as they say in the UK that Microsoft hasn't done the right thing and paid Lutz handsomely for this system so that it could be included in Visual Studio as a tool. This isn't the first time I've been similarly gobsmacked at the stupidity of Microsoft when dealing with community projects of this type. The previous grave error on their part was to not buy nDoc for a decent price instead of proposing that P.O.S. Sandcastle as a viable alternative.

It seems to me that when it comes to community, Microsoft seems to have lost touch with what community is about. As a long time advocate of community and peer-to-peer education and assistance I believe strongly that some things used by the community are just too good to let fall into the hands of third-party entities that would exploit them in the wrong way.

I imagine that when Reflector was first seen, there were those in Microsoft that were aghast at the idea that all the source code of the framework became open to anyone who wanted to view it. I also remember it as a wakeup call to companies that had no protection for their own code. Despite this initial reaction, Microsoft never made an effort to obfuscate the system DLL's and now, I don't believe that a single developer on the planet who programs for Windows can get through the day without using Reflector somewhere.

As community projects or run by small entrepreneurs, a self-starter tool of such enormous impact as Reflector, nDoc or even nDepend, present no competition to to Visual Studio and do nothing but enhance it. When taken over by a third party, these tools immediately become looming compettitors that may adversely affect the market and reduce resources when Microsoft suddenly realises that they have to build competing functionality into Visual Studio.

A couple of million bucks is a drop in the ocean for Microsoft. Imagine what they themselves would spend in order to try to create something as universally useful as nDoc, Reflector or nDepend. On the other hand, for them to purchase these tools and add them to the Visual Studio system would be an incredibly useful and sane thing to do. Instead, they allow such important work to fall into the hands of third parties that really are potential competition to them.

Microsoft, Wake up! Look at the communities that you say that you value, use the resources in them to enhance the product, don't allow something like this to happen again! It's just plain idiotic.

Well, despite my joy in finding a bug it seems that the issue of the overload polymorphism question is moot. Its a choice.

The compiler can choose to ignore the fact that a better parameter match exists and use a lazy evaluation of a method in a derived class. Apparently, this doesn't break the rules of OOP or of polymorphism. It just prevents "brittle base class" syndrome.

Personally, although I can see a certain validity in the arguments of MS gurus like Eric Lippert I still feel as though the wool has been pulled over my eyes somewhat. How I missed such a simple thing as this for the last eight years is a mystery to me. I must be getting old.

Ahh well. I suppose I had better brush up on my VB syntax because despite the fact that the language is verbose and redundant they have a kick-ass compiler that is proven to be better at
loop optimisation and now I discover that it handles an important compiler principle in a logical and intuitive way.

Still bugs in the C# compiler.

I have been putting together some simple training for VB6 developers who have had little or no experience with C# or object orientation and I found this lovely bug in the compiler.

Speaking with a friend who works for Microsoft he quickly said it wasn't a bug and gave me a line about explicit casting and method selection in the compiler but I think that the example is really simple and is a clear breach of overloading principles.

I have a base class with a virtual method which contains an integer parameter. In a derived class I include both an override for the original method plus an overload for the same method but this time having a float parameter.

The main function calls the derived class and even when the parameter is cast explicitly to int, the int overload is never called.

This is true in the 2005 and 2008 versions.

To prove a point I wrote the exact equivalent functionality in VB.net and it works as expected.

Here's the code.

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

DerivedClass dc = new DerivedClass();

dc.AMethod((int)1);

dc.AMethod(1f);

Console.ReadKey();

}

}

class BaseClass

{

public virtual void AMethod(int i)

{

Console.WriteLine("Base class integer parameter!");

}

}

class DerivedClass : BaseClass

{

public override void AMethod(int i)

{

Console.WriteLine("Derived class integer parameter");

}

public void AMethod(float f)

{

Console.WriteLine("Derived class float parameter");

}

}

Grandad

When I was a boy I had the great fortune to have lived at my grandparents home for a while whilst the family was in-between houses.

The times I liked most was the mornings. I would hear grandma in the kitchen as she made the breakfast, she would often hum or sing a tune as she worked. Grandad would call us down and we’d have scrambled eggs on toast or boiled eggs. Grandma and granddad were a great team.

Being the first grandchild I suppose I got the benefit of his own feeling of grandfatherhood. We spent a lot of time together and he would often ask me “Robert, do you know how to….” Whereupon, because I most often had no idea, he would launch into a demonstration of something or other. It was granddad who held the saddle of the little bicycle, on which he taught me to ride a “two-wheeler”. It was granddad who introduced me to books without pictures, who gave me a passion for literature and reading and who introduced me to authors like Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells. It was granddad who showed me how to use an index so that I could look for information on my own. He gave me many of the starting points in my young life.

The job I do today is with computers, using math and complex graphics or calculations. All of my skills are rooted in his teaching me how to use a slide-rule or what good the sine and cosines are for and the value of precision in engineering.

In short, I have a deep sense that my granddad contributed a great deal to who I am today.

Later in life I continued my relationship with this man but as an adult. Whenever we saw each other, we would talk at great length on many subjects. Once, he came flying with me when I qualified as a pilot and we flew over his house on the Isle of Wight in a little Piper plane.

Recently, I myself became a grandfather and someone asked me if it made me feel old. I replied that I had actually been looking forward to it a great deal and only hoped that I could be as good a grandfather as the one I was lucky enough to have.

William Anderson

14th December 1906 - 13th July 2008

Fuel prices getting you down?

In Europe we're paying 1.5 euros per litre or more at the moment so the question of fuel consumption is a big issue.

Last year we bought a new Honda Jazz, it's a small petrol engined car which the dealer told me was more economical than a diesel. I laughed at this but recently we've been playing a game where my wife and I try to get the best mileage as possible. We've been learning to drive economically but the car is used for all those niggly little taxi journeys that one is obliged to do when one has children.
Driving the car "normally" as in "we don't care about fuel consumption" we were getting 7 litres per 100 kilometres or about 40 miles per gallon.

Recently, since we began the fuel consumption game we reduced it to the 5.5 / 100 region but since last weekend we've done an amazing 4.8 litres per 100 kilometers which works out to 58 miles per imperial gallon!

Cool eh?

On the move.

It's sometimes hard to keep the modern stream of consciousness flowing when stuff as truly unimportant as work gets in the way. This however has been my limiter for a while now.

In 2005 I was asked by an old acquaintance to go look at the problems plaguing a C++ application that he was responsible for. This thing does electronic trading of credit derivatives for one of Europe's biggest banks. My contract was for a week.. I am still at the company with more and more work to do each week.

I recently moved from credit derivatives to commodity trading where I am now on a small team of architects dedicated to dragging the company kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I've always considered myself more as an educator than anything else and this job is no different to many of my others because I am mentoring a whole team of VB6 developers in how to survive in the real world. I recently gave a presentation on patterns in which I started by asking "Has anyone heard of patterns?" All the hands went up. I then asked "Who knows any patterns or has used one in their work?" I was rewarded with a room full of blank-staring faces and no hands.

So, the mandate of the moment is to assist inexperienced developers to "migrate" a truly vast and monolithic VB6 application set to .Net and make it work. Can you say "Refactoring"?

In one sense I think this is a really shocking revelation that even in today's blog-following, webcast-viewing world of geeks that people who program for a living still don't know about the gang of four and have never even understood the simplicity of Singleton or the joy of Dependency Injection. In another sense however, I allow myself a little chuckle of schardenfreuder-ish glee when I realised that there is still a place in the world for old blokes who know the difference between their arse and their elbow.

A job that was originally a weeks work, that became six-months, that mutated in to two-and-a-half-years of living in a hotel three nights a week has now become a full-time job educating "cub" developers in the joys of how to program in the real world and so 60% of my family (that's six of us) are moving to the metrolopis in the hope of being able to spend more time together. (I don't get to sleep with my wife enough at the moment....)

We've just signed for a lease on a house in a tres chic part of the country, outside of town but 30 minutes from the bank where I work and we intend to move in early August.

Quote of the day...

I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of not having lived enough.

Bob Powell, 2008.

Lighten-up

I just took delivery this weekend of three Asus EEE-PC machines.
These little Celeron based machines have a four gigabyte flash memory instead of a hard drive drive and a wireless adapter for mobile connectivity.
They come with a Linux system pre-installed and are ideal for simple internet and mail / news tasks but they really shine with a copy of a Windows operating system. Unfortunately Vista requires a minimym of seven gigabytes to install but XP Pro will go onto a 4 gig flash drive with some jiggery pokery.

I have used nLite to create a cutdown version of XP and got the machine up and running with XP on board. Another 4 gig SD card plugged into the machine serves as a second drive, to which I have moved the documents, local application settings, in short-anything that needs lots of writing. Flash drives have a long lifetime but a finite number of writes so I am trying to increase the life of the mainboard soldered components as much as possible. I may try a big fat SD card as the maindrive later and see how that goes.

I have installed the first machine but it's at the limit of space for the flash drive so I'm going to try even more optimisation. I know a guy who has XP and Visual Studio Express installed and does WPF development on the machine.

I will post back here if I have anything interesting to impart.

Brian McCoombe Band

How can I have too much praise for this band? I have been listening to their album recently and I can't get away from the fact that these people aren't rock-star millionaires even thought they should be.

Last year I celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary to my beautiful wife Chrissy and we decided to hire a band to play music at the event.

Chrissy found Brian's band through an internet search and we decided to hire them, even though the price at the time seemed high. We had gone to the trouble of finding the venue of a French castle for the party so we figured that a band should at least try to fit in.

Unbeknown to us we had hired a band of such incredible quality and skill that we were totally and utterly blown away by their music.

Brian's voice has a soaring quality that one would expect from Freddy Mercury or Stevie Wonder. The band's music is tight and professional and the lyrics rip your soul from you and leave you with the feeling of having been drowned and brought back to life in the same moment.

The Brian McCoombe Band is a celtic rock band with roots in Scotland, Ireland and the Finistere region of France. Their music is original and astounding. Seek them out and be amazed!

World class Software

For almost three years now I have worked in the commercial finance industry and have been advising banks and insurance companies on how to write software that stands the test of time.

Institutions such as banks have a client lifetime measured in decades so the idea that software should be robust and reliable is taken for granted. The reality is however, that the software produced in companies that really ought to be irreproachable is often somewhat less than mediochre and that the attention to code quality is less that one would assume.

My rules for world-class software are simple:

#1 All code must be documented with inline comments and white-papers that describe the motivation behind the implementation. When this is in place the superhero programmer cannot die in a skiing accident or be headhunted by the company up the road and leave the development team wondering how the code works.

#2 All code must be tested. Unit testing, black-box testing and white-box testing ensure that the software performs as intended. All three types of testing are needed because none of the individual techniques cover all of the usage scenarios. Testing is a serious business so, rather than leave testing to novice programmers, companies should hire the most expert and devious code-killers possible to test the software. These people are few and far between and should be paid a lot!

#3 Software factories that do continuous build and test are essential. Without these, mistakes in the build can go unseen for days, weeks or months, depending on the release cycle of the application.

#4 Source-control rules must be draconian. Developers must not be allowed access to the same file at the same time. If they need to then you probably have the situation of more than one class in a file. This is totally unacceptable. Checking in of a file that breaks the build should be accompanied by public ridicule in stand-up, daily or weekly meetings. A great thing to do is to have people wear a stupid hat if they break the continuous build.

#5 Code should be monitored on a daily basis. Companies I advise often have code metric analysis tied into the daily builds so that it is easy to see whether a class has become bloated with too many methods, methods are more than a certain number of lines, cyclomatic complexity is too deep or there aren't enough comment lines in the code.

If you're company is in Australia and you need a seriously dedicated architect drop me a line...

It might be architecture, but is it art?

At work today I remarked to a friend that the name "Architecture" can apply to some software in the same way that "Building" can apply to a beaver dam.

Both seem to have been thrown together by animals, subject to the forces of nature, inherited by a long line of animals with differrent ideas on how building should be done, do the job they are intended to do with results that depend on the weather or the phase of the moon and are often adversely affected by rot.

The only good thing is that you can get rid of bad software without dynamite and without upsetting a bunch of bleeding-heart ecologists.

Wonderful internet again.

Here's how the Internet is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to the human race.

I've been married for over 25 years to a fantastic lady who I met one afternoon in a farmyard on the Isle of wight. Just before I met her she had been involved with a not incredibly famous progressive rock band called The Enid. This band played all manner of pieces ranging from classical composers to covers of The Troggs Wild Thing and The Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant as well as their own compositions which are pretty good too.

They did a gig in 1978 in Farnborough England where a Swedish fellow by the name of Hans recorded the only recording of some of their music. My wife who was 16 years old at the time was in the audience making noise.

Thirty years later, Chrissy has a MySpace page, contact with the ex band members and through the power of the Internet, Hans. This means that the one and only recording of that gig, made on a handheld tape recorder and never heard elsewhere can live on and enrich the human experience.

You may not imagine that this is important in any great scheme but that data is digital. Ok, the original recording sucked but it was real and it existed for couple of hours. It made memories for a bunch of people that have lasted for thirty years so far and now will be available amongst the petabytes of other data that the human experience has created. Maybe someone a thousand years from now will hear a bit of music that has my wife singing in the background when she was a kid. Maybe someone a million years from now will still be able to hear it.

When all human experience becomes digital and storeable and transferrable and copyable and shareable maybe we will all become immortal.

http://www.myspace.com/theenidsociety

Web idiocy

Please enter your e-mail address...

Please confirm your e-mail address...

How idiotic can you get? If someone enters the wrong address it's their fault and why should you care?

This has become an annoying habit with many webmasters and i bet they do it just because everyone else does.

Vista 64 and performance.

After upgrading to a new graphics card and more memory I get a performance report of 5.0 on my Vista ultimate 32 bit install.


At the same time, I bought a new hard-disk upon which I decided to install Vista 64 bit but this gives me a lower performance rating of 4.3 and crashes every few seconds with a display driver freeze.

I am interested in using Vista46 because I want to take advanage of the 4 gigabytes of memory that is now in my system. My experience so-far however shows that it's buggy, unstable and has serious compatibility and driver issues. It took me five attempts to install a version that even boots without a bluescreen. I accomplished this with the latest vista install with integral service pack one direct from MSDN.

As an MVP I get access to software for free but I can say unequivocally that had I bought Vista64 ultimate I would be a very unhappy customer.

Growing up with technology

The first computer I ever had, I built myself. It had a Zilog Z80 processor and 2K of static RAM. I understood it at a fundamental level and when I learned to program I did it in pure machine code. It was some time before I used even an assembler let alone a high-level language like C.

This gave me a very machine oriented view of the computer. I understood that integers were stored as binary ones and zeros in a specific order in a register. I understood that a mathemtical operation was different from a bitwise logical operation and even today, when I think of an integer or a byte I see a little shoebox with a certain number of pebbles ranged in sub-divided partitions for the bits. Consequently, I find myself surprised when programmers go through their working lives without ever understanding this.

Now, a university student or technical college student immediately sees the high-level language view of the system and may not undertand the implications of the circuitry that carries the signals back and forth along the busses.

I find this to be both interesting from an anthropological viewpoint and disquieting from a professional one. From the first viewpoint its interesting that we don't fundamentally need the deep-down knowledge of the systems we work with anymore. We can work at such a high level that there is no need to understand the mechanism of an interrupt or consider an integer like an array of bits. It's disquieting because there is still a lot of code that relies on these principles so when a new-age programmer sees these techniques in use, they may not immediately understand what the implications are and so make an adjustment that is completely at odds with the architecture.

I wonder how long it will be before even the discipline of logical problem solving and algorithm creation is obsolete? I bet it's less than twenty years.

Living in the past

The Chinese have a curse; May you live in interesting times. The 1990s certainly were interesting for programmers. A vast proportion of applications coded during those years were written in Visual Basic and, believe it or not, these applications are still hanging around today.

I imagined that finding a team that programs almost exclusively in a language as crippled as VB6 is in these days of frameworks and massive API's would be rare in itself but it seems that they are not so rare as I imagined. Trying to train such a team to change working practices to encompass .NET 3.x and C# is a challenge.

Over the years I've seen many .NET projects written by VB programmers and it seems that the pattern is always the same. No layers in the architecture, code factored by functions - not by classes, no concept of encapsulation or inheritance, every dirty trick possible to create global objects and globally accessible functionality.

I never realised that object orientation was something that was still on the frontier of programming practices. Maybe the millions of VB devlopers out there really do need help.

On patterns...

I responded to a post in one of the Microsoft newsgroups the other day where someone asked "Is MVC a good pattern to use and should I port my old implementation of it to my new C# application" (I am paraphrasing here).

The answer is; Yes, MVC is a great pattern and NO! don't port it. it's built in to .NET. They just call it databinding.

When pattens became popular in the 90's I was working as a team lead in Stingray's C++ development department and I remember long and fraught discussions about the MVC pattern because my boss saw MVC as somthing that worked on a macro level, the whole view, the whole model and the whole controller. I on the other hand imagined MVC as a light and super granular pattern that only really applied well to individual controls or bits of data. Because he was the boss, Stingray went on to provide an MVC implementation that worked well enough but that encouraged hefty logic built into views and complex interactions with data that sort of spoiled the simplicity and grace of my MVC vision.

Looking at the world now I feel vindicated because databinding is indeed granular and simple and, as I mention in my previous post, is the only thing that Microsoft have really retained between Windows Forms and WPF.

I strongly advise that you don't fall into the trap of trying to reimplement MVC on a .NET platform. I saw an example of this just a short while ago when a very competent and sane C++ programmer was given the thankless task of porting an old C++ program that implemented Stingray's MVC pattern to C#. He spent weeks messing with it and then was disturbed to discover that all that effort could have been avoided with a few simple lines of databinding code.

Powering the presentation layer...

Ok, I know this is a tagline for Infragistics but I think they'll forgive me because they are pals of mine. The thing I'd like to expound today is just what is a "presentation layer"?

In many people's opinion, The guys at Infragistics included it seems, this smacks of UI and graphics. For me however, this couldn't be further from the truth. For me, a presentation layer is totally non-graphic and is really a buffer between the data and the graphical layer.

One thing that I have learned over the last, oh, thirty years in the business is that the graphics always change, it's the data that remains the same. Consider the current situation; We have a world full of applications based on the hype of Windows Forms and the reality of WPF looming, well, more than "just this side of" the horizon. What does this mean for the application developer? Yup, you guessed it, a massive re-write of everything. Or does it?

Over the last little while, I have been working in the financial sector where data is old and entrenched in massive databases. These financial institutions however need up to date applications to run their decades old loan deals. Recently, the emphasis has been on windows forms but now WPF is taking the world by storm and people have been wringing their hands about re-writing all those applications again. On many of the projects I have worked on, the presentation layer has been the key to success in migrating applications to WPF. Here's how it works:

The MVP pattern suggests a model a view and a presenter. This is a great pattern if only people could get the presenter bit right. In implementations such as CAB, MVP is really crippled and has a poor definition but with a little bit of work we can have a perfect system in which the model is isolated from the view by a "presenter" that is really a two-way buffer between the UI and the data. I say two way because the presenter must play the role of a data conditioning filter that runs both ways. Here's a scenario for you.

The database of a bank contains reprsentations of money values. the database actually holds the value of, say, 124,000,000 but, because this is a bank and banks don't deal in piffling small change, when a bank agent see's a loan or mortgage he actually sees the numbers 124.0. Traditionally the conversion between 124,000,000 an 124..0 would be done in the view where some clever code resides. However, if this operation is done in the presenation layer and the presentation layer is databound to, say a textbox in the view, then the presentation layer "presents" 124.0 to the view and when the user types in 125.0 the prsentation layer "presents" 125,000,000 to the data model.

An even better example of this is when the presentation layer synthesizes data. Take for example the need for a number to be of a certain colour. In the database we may see a representation of 100,000,000 that is seen in the UI as 100.0 with a colour of white for the textbox background. When the value is -100,000,000 then that value really should show up in bright red. Where is the colour gnerated though? That's right, in the presentation layer. The UI doesn't have to have business logic in it to translate colours, it just databinds the value to the presenter and the colour of the textbox background to the presenter's synthesized colour data.

So now, what does this all mean for the future? Well, when Microsoft introduced WPF they threw out everything that we knew about UI and replaced it with something else. Well, actually, everything except databinding, which, incidentally, they made more powerful. This means than that if your applications had a model and bi-lateral presentation layer then you could rip out the 10% of code that was your old UI and databind in a shiny new WPF UI in a few days and come up smelling of roses.