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.

Internet rules!

I so love the internet. I messed up my satellite dish today and needed to know where to point it so I found this... http://www.dishpointer.com/

What a brilliant idea! I found that all I need o do is point the dish at a landmark nearby and wiggle the elevation till it locks on. Too cool!!

WPF FAQ

I am working on my new WPF FAQ which will be available on my site shortly.

Although I know there are many out there, in my new role as a WPF developer I will use it as a target for noting down all those things I find useful during my learning curve.

Hopefully it will benefit others too.

WPF same-old sameold.

I am currently trying to immerse myself in WPF from a practical and useful standpoint. My usage of this new system has been fairly light and fluffy up until now, I have been puzzled by some of the new concepts, realised that the framework has taken a totally different direction recently and been have wowed by the promise of "A New Hope" or, if you'll forgive me, a paradigm shift.

However, when I began seriously looking into what can be done on a practical level with XAML and how data and XML can be used to build pretty cool applications I find myself coming to the conclusion that its all really business as usual in the world of the programmer.

When you look at XAML and the various cool looking demo applications that are out there you will see in fact that XAML is only as good as the components you can use on your pages and windows. The supply of these components requires programming skills that are firmly based in traditional methods and despite the fact that XAML provides a declarative way of creating an interesting look and feel, when one begins writing a custom control, one is still forced to roll up the sleeves and get to work with good old C# or Visual Basic in the codebehind file.

Certainly XAML is a great way of defining a user interface and incorporating the design elements we need now but the need for strong architectural skills and a supply of high quality controls for all these markup-jockeys to consume is still of paramount importance.

Problems with source-control and ItemGroup entries in .CSPROJ files

Here's an interesting one that just happened to me.

I work in a ClearCase source control environment and recently had to have access to a VOB from another team so that I could do a bit of trouble shooting.

The problem arose as soon as I tried to compile their code; the source-control complained that the xxx.csproj couldn't be written because it was write protected. This was normal because I hadn't touched anything or made any checkouts.

The problem was that the system seemed to want to overwrite the files that were not checked out.

After much detective work I found that the XML:





was being inserted into the IN_MEMORY copies of the CSPROJ files.

After some detective work in the registry I found that this was associated with something called STextTemplating which has to do with the template system in Visual Studio and seems also to be associated with Domain Specific Languages (DSL)

After more searching I found that it was necessary to remove the following keys:

{B4F97281-0DBD-4835-9ED8-7DFB966E87FF}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{a9696de6-e209-414d-bbec-a0506fb0e924}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0Exp\Packages\{a9696de6-e209-414d-bbec-a0506fb0e924}

After this, the problem went away.

Here is the link I found after about two hours of digging and pain...

http://www.devnewsgroups.net/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework/topic61709.aspx

2.NET|!2.NET

Arthur C. Clarke once said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

A few times recently, I've been in a situation where I just wanted to hold my head in my hands and groan "Noooo not again!! make it stop!!". Why? Well, because even after seven years of .NET people still don't get the idea of what advantages there are in fully embracing the framework's philosophies to create really great applications or components.

Imagine dumping a medieval man into the middle of London. Aside from the obvious initial shock, he'd become used to the idea that cars travelled about without horses attached to them, he could even learn to drive a car. He would become used to the idea of lighting without flames and he'd eventually become a consumer of fish and chips or MacDonald's burgers without necessarily understanding how it all happened or what made it all tick. After his short period of adjustment that went from screaming fits and soiling himself with fear, we would eventually get someone who can function just fine in the environment. Whether he could design a car or grasp the concepts of electricity would be however, a different subject entirely.

This is the sort of thing that happens when someone who is "expert" in 1990's technology gets hold of the concepts of third millennium .NET framework. They become a perfectly adequate programmer, able to apply their concepts of programming to C# or VB.NET and as long as their efforts are contained within a single sealed up application all is well and you can't tell the difference from the outside.

What happens however when that person, however innately intelligent they may be, applies 1990's ideas to .NET architectures and has the responsibility for creating, say, a huge data management framework of industrial proportions? You guessed it. A complete and total disaster that does nothing but make people groan with disbelief.

For me, the best aspects of .NET architecture are the ones that don't fall readily to mind, even if you're a world-renowned C++ guru and have 20 years of experience in your field. For example, the idea that your objects may take part in a design time environment. This was not even a possibility in the old world of C++ but now you should seriously consider whether your objects should at least carry the attributes such as Browsable, Description, Category etc. Furthermore, you should ensure that your object has a type-conversion strategy, should implement ToString correctly, provides a design-time editor, possibly a graphic editor, certainly a smart-tag, some designer verbs and so-on.

When designing an architecture today, we also need to look to current trends in data-binding. It used to be that tying an object to a GUI was a laborious process that required either brute-force, the preferred C++ method, or implementation of some pattern such as Model View Controller (MVC). Any remotely skilled Windows Forms engineer will immediately use data binding which neatly sidesteps these issues. However, the objects in question need to either provide changed events for properties or implement INotifyPropertyChanged. So, I hear everyone reading this beginning to say "Well, if the object is some deep part of a framework and not exposed to the GUI, why bother?" The answer here of course is that data-binding is no longer a GUI only issue. .NET 3.0 and 3.5 already has data binding that can take place between any two properties so that otherwise invisible objects can be bound. This is not only interesting for WPF maniacs but for anyone who has an object that receives input from another.

Finally, meta data and reflection coupled with new type description systems are so powerful that it adds vast new aspects to object orientation that are so outside the realms of the classic Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism triad that classes have ceased to become immutable definitions and have entered the realms of chimeric virtual objects that appear to be one thing when they are, in reality, something totally different.

If you're an architect and expecting to create a framework for your flagship product by all means pick .NET. Just don't go blundering about like a medieval peasant when you could be using magic instead.