6 February 2008 in .Net | Comments (7)

WPF has been around for a couple of years now and it’s great to see that it is starting to get some solid traction in the market. Obviously we believe this however it’s always useful to use a tool like Google Trends to identify where things are heading.

Here’s a graph of WPF vs. Windows Forms vs. Winforms

Some thoughts and notes:

• WPF is likely bolstered somewhat by Silverlight as it used to be called WPF/e
• It is interesting to see the general slow decline of winforms over the years. I believe this is because web development has grown more popular for replacing client applications
• I can’t think of a nice term to measure the rise web development in a pure developer sense.
• WPF will continue to take market share from winforms as end user machines become more powerful and capable of running some of the awesome effects of WPF more smoothly
• Microsoft seems to generate most queries for almost any technology they have created (or at least lots of people in Redmond, Washington are interested )
• India was generating, by far, most of the real queries, a real sign of just how large the outsourcing machine is over there.
• Web frameworks are considerably larger, even SilverLight at this stage is about two times as popular as a search query than WPF

– JD

5 February 2008 in Blogging | Comments (4)

Lately I’ve been asked by several people why I don’t write anything that is all that personal on my blog. Truth is, I used to, however that didn’t result in much traffic and it became boring to me very quickly – I don’t know what that says about my own life

While I’m planning on sticking with technology related posts for the time being I thought I’d share some statistics for my blog which is at least somewhat personal to me since I don’t publish any figures normally.

While not strictly technology related I decided to check my blog stats this morning, I’ve been surprised to see that my traffic has been growing despite the low number of posts I’ve been making lately. For the month of January this blog served more than 60, 000 page views which is quite pleasing. I can’t help but wonder where it would have been if my posting rate hadn’t dropped off for the second half of 2007.

A considerable amount of traffic comes from Google; I get a heap of traffic from people searching for details about Windows Vista memory usage and many about my previous employer, Intergen.

Now I’m thinking more about what I should focus on posting about in the coming months. Is technology posting interesting to you? Would you prefer some other topics? More business or Mindscape related posts? You tell me, it only takes a moment to comment and your feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,

– JD

30 January 2008 in .Net, Code, Microsoft, Tools | Comments (0)

A big thanks to everyone who came along to the dot net user group meeting this evening for my presentation on the new ASP.Net MVC Framework. I’ve attached the files below to have your own play with the sample and to check out the presentation file as well.

You will need to install the ASP.Net MVC Framework but everything else (like the MVC Toolkit) is included in the download. If you would like more help with LightSpeed then I’d suggest you download the Express edition which includes a huge number of samples and one of the best developer guides you’ll find.

I would also take this moment to mention that this is a first CTP, you shouldn’t be using it to create production quality solutions yet and the chance for the API to change is very very high. Just have an explore, taste test the framework and get your head around some of the concepts at this stage

Download the slides and sample application here.

I hope those of you that attended enjoyed the presentation and, as always, I appreciate any feedback.

Cheers,

– JD

23 January 2008 in .Net, Mindscape, Windows | Comments (0)

Nothing better than starting off a new year by releasing a new product to help developers create better software. We announced on the Mindscape blog that the WPF Property Grid is now available to download, trial and purchase. The trial includes many samples that go into detail on creating new styles for the grid which is important as one of the benefits of being based on WPF is the ability to create any style that you can think of.

Ivan has posted a a blog article about using custom editors with the Mindscape WPF Property Grid – I’d urge anyone interested in it to download the trial and then check out his article. Pass your eye over the help documentation as well as it’s much more than just a boring API reference!

Check it out at: http://www.WPFPropertyGrid.com

I would love to hear any feedback about WPF Property Grid from any developers leveraging WPF (even if you’re not, what would you love to see in WPF?).

– JD

20 December 2007 in Code, Microsoft, Tools | Comments (0)

Andrew Peters (co-founder of Mindscape) has released the NHaml View Engine for ASP.NET MVC. He had been working with Haml on a project and fell in love with how easy it was to use and the quality of the output and decided it was high time something like this was available to .NET Developers.

Andrew has created a rather lengthy blog post about the engine as well as how to write in Haml, Check out the NHaml View Engine here.

If you are using ASP.NET MVC and are a lover of fine XHTML output then you should check this out.

– JD

20 December 2007 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

I’ve been looking to find more information about IE8 lately however it looks like JB got the scoop (damn Regional Directors and their underground connections! and has posted specifically about standards compliance in IE8 – certainly the most important area of enhancement in my opinion.

Click here to read Jeremy’s post about IE8.

I also question the inclusion of a new header tag to force compliance mode. Even if this is just a meta tag addition I can already hear the outcry’s about splintering standards. Admittedly Microsoft often find themselves in “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” type situation and overall it’s fantastic to hear that there will be ACID2 support – lets just hope that they manage the whole tag required challenge well.

Bring on the beta’s!

– JD

19 December 2007 in Apple | Comments (0)

A long time ago Phil Cockfield blogged about how the iPod would pause your music when you removed the headphones from the socket. The general theory was that many people did this to pause the iPod when you suddenly had to pay attention to something and didn’t have the time to fumble around looking for the pause button. It was one of those cool little features that Apple packs into their devices.

Zooming up to modern day, I recently acquired an iPhone and was complaining to Lena about how I have to take it out of my pocket to pause music. You can’t even fumble around and click a button through your pocket like you could with an iPod, you had to remove the cable to pause the phone quickly if you wanted to.

A few days later and I was looking at the mic on the iPhone headphones and noticed it seemed like it would break easily. It had a distinctive “click” feel when I pressed it together and that got me wondering as to why Apple would make something so crappy that it would feel broken right out of the box. However something interesting happened – when I clicked it, the music paused. When I clicked again it played. When I double clicked it the track skipped to the next one. Colour me impressed – listening to music on the iPhone became a much more enjoyable experience once I realised this small feature existed!

So why am I telling you this? As a male, I don’t much care for instruction manuals and possibly never would have found this out. Given the demographic of my audience here I suspect you’re likely a male and therefore likely also not read manuals Hopefully this will be helpful to somebody like myself out there.

– JD

5 December 2007 in General, Mindscape | Comments (7)

Perhaps a funny thing for a geek to say but hear me out. We, geeks, surround ourselves with many other geeks and we all get our jollies discussing the latest and greatest technology. We have to build this website in Ruby on Rails! This application must be written in .NET 3.5! We must use SQL Server 2008 RC9! We need to change back end to use framework XYZ!

If geeks were to be believed, often you would think they completely couldn’t function without the latest alpha bits of technology xyz.

The thing that geeks often ignore is what is best for the end user. If you’re building a website, for example, and you elect to build it in fancy technology xyz but it delays your delivery by 3 months is that a benefit to the end user? If you elect to build it in technology xyz but, because you had no idea how it really worked beforehand, needed to stop and start all over again in the middle, is that a benefit to the end customer?

Customers just want the work done so that it works, is delivered on time and helps solve the problems it was designed to solve. That is about where their interest ends usually. Your mission to to ensure you meet those goals effectively and in a manner that won’t turn into a maintenance nightmare when it needs to be supported later.

But I am a geek!

I want to stop short of saying that technology platform NEVER matters because, to geeks, it does. And keeping geeks happy, in fact any employee, is important to moving forward efficiently. No geek wants to still be coding in VB 3 (and those that still want to code in Access… well… that’s a seperate blog post!). We do get job satisfaction from playing with cool stuff. If you were a pilot you’d probably love to fly some kick ass new fighter jet rather than than what you currently fly.

There are also additional benefits to developers from new technology – some things do become easier, some things do require less code and perform faster. However the decision to use the latest and greatest needs to be considered carefully – I know many software houses that use the latest stuff only because it is the latest stuff and this about the worst reason to move up.

WTF JD?

Some of you might be asking this question – how can I be saying this when we at Mindscape were pumping out solutions based on LINQ to SQL 9 months before it even RTMs? We all speak about upcoming changes in the new releases of SQL 2008, Windows Server 2008. Heck, Jeremy has even been training folks on how to use Windows Server 2008 a year before it comes out. So what’s the story?

I believe strongly that it is beneficial to play with these technologies before you put them into production. We are geeks, we do grab alpha bits, we do explore but that is so that we can make judgment calls about when it’s appropriate to use in products. What is LightSpeed written in and targeting? .NET 2.0. That’s it. We know a lot of our customers can’t move up to .NET 3.5 right away and, while we could have targeted 3.5, we knew it was better for our customers and therefore better for us to use .NET 2.0.

If code is performing its function correctly and is performing well then you do not have a major reason to upgrade. For example – TradeMe used to be all ASP code and it took them a while to jump on the .NET bandwagon. I’m not sure the specific reasons that dictated it was time to move up but my guess is that it’s a combination of reasons:

• It was getting harder to find developers wanting to code in ASP
• ASP code can be a wee bit harder to maintain due to it only providing an inline code experience
• .NET code could be run faster than the older ASP code (that’s a guess on my behalf)

As I say, these are just a guess from my part. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from a lot of people posting in the forums saying “ASP sucks – you should use .NET. I’m not going to use TradeMe anymore unless you move up”. Customers don’t care unless the technology starts surfacing in terms of performance slow downs etc which is often more of a design issue that being explicitly because of the technology choice.

What are your thoughts? Have you fallen victim to upgrading for the sake of it? Am I completely off the mark or have I missed something out?

John-Daniel