To summarize, some random observations:

• JAVA vs. .NET: from the .NET prespective, I noticed that the JAVA crowd is way ahead of us in terms of agile development processes, but is starting to lag behind technology wise (still doing massive Spring configurations and generics appeared almost absent);
• NoSQL: time will tell, but this could really change the way we think about structuring our data in the future. By far the session I attended that caused the most excitement in the crowd;
• When asked how many people in the audience use NHibernate, more than 50% raised their hands! (ok, it was a session about the NHibernate ecosystem);
• Entity Framework 4.0 really is going to be a big improvement;
• ASP.NET WebForms 4.0 has some improvements, but nothing that got me really excited. It feels like WebForms is finished (as in proven technology that isn’t going to change much anymore);
• Google returns totally different search results in Sweden

At one time during the discussion, Scott Hanselman brought up the issue that we (as in the people who attended the conference) might be out of touch with people like ‘The Chief Architect of the Nebraska Forestry Department’, formerly know as ‘Mort’. The discussion continued a little with terms like ‘elitist geeks’ and so on and during the discussion I started to get the feeling that Scott might have a point here. Aren’t we out of touch with the majority of developers that do the ‘real’ work?

Then, Ayende countered with a statement that he simply doesn’t trust developers who don’t keep up with technology, blogs and want to learn and made a perfect analogy: when you have to visit a doctor, do you trust one that doesn’t go to conferences and reads his literature to keep up to date?

That statement immediately did it for me. We aren’t out of touch at all. We are working in an industry where things change rapidly and I think it’s our obligation as professionals and towards our customers to continue to learn and improve ourselves. Maybe the people who don’t (want to) do this are the ones out of touch?

So you might think comparing a doctor with a software developer isn’t fair because the doctor is dealing with something much more important like the health of people and we developers just deal with computers and stuff? Think twice: our customers invest lots of money in software and for that amount of money they just expect us to stay current on technology.

Keep learning and improving!

(and call me an elitist geek if you like )

This morning, I was shocked when I found out how much the development of my pedalboard went through exactly the same stages as the way I’m building ASP.NET web applications. First let’s see where I’m coming from:

In the picture above you can see a large yellow device. This is the Line 6 Distortion Modeler. It claims that it can produce all the classic distorted guitar tones that you’ll ever want and to a certain extend this is true. The sound is alright and the possibilities are huge. But also: the output (sound wise) that this device produces is always less than the original pedals that it’s trying to emulate. Also, the switches are a little bit unreliable and cause a little gap when changing sounds. I tried to fix this, but the device is very inaccessible and doesn’t lend itself very well for modifications or extensions.

Less is better

These days I’m back to where I came from: two simple pedals that don’t have a gazillion options but just do their work and are very efficient:

On the left we have the Proco RAT and on the right it’s the Digitech Bad Monkey (‘told you we’d have some guitar-geek talk in this post, remember?). These guys are simple, reliable and their output is just the way I want my distortion to sound without losing dynamics and tone. Full control!

So, what does this have to do with ASP.NET web development?

Nothing of course It just struck me that at about the same time I switched from ASP.NET Webforms to MVC, I also changed my pedalboard to accomplish the same result: making the end result better with a more simplistic approach. The yellow monster in the first picture is like Webforms with ASP.NET AJAX where I have a love-hate relationship with. The two pedals in de second picture feel like the MVC and jQuery combination (loosely coupled, only connected with a little patch cable), that brought a lot of fun lately and work very well for me.

Yeah, great analogy, NOT! I didn’t subscribe to read this blah about some guitar thingy.

Well it just something that went through my mind this morning and writing about it also gives me a chance to post some crappy gear pictures, like it or not. Here’s another one for free:

P.S. the empty spot above the pedals is normally reserved for my Electro Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe but this drama queen is broken at the moment and deserves a single post of its own.

Since the server is running IIS6 and not the usual LAMP stack, I was prepared for some struggling, but it was pretty easy.

I started with installing the IIS FastCGI extension, PHP 5.2.8 and MySQL 5.1.30. After that, I only had to install WordPress and things were ready to roll.

For pretty extensionless urls, I found the Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter that also redirects the old SubText url’s to the new pretty ones.

The most challenging part was migrating the old posts from SubText to WordPress, but luckily, I wasn’t the first one who attempted this.

Please leave a comment if something is broken, or when you find links that point to the old blog.

The comments were a little bit disappointing for my taste, but one from Robert Pappas was very interesting:

The gap between stateless HTTP and OOP is nearly as wide as the gap between OOP and RDMS.
This is why we have at least 6 major Web Frameworks for Java…and all of them have serious drawbacks (from my experience anyway).
But yes, your concerns are valid. There is a mis-match, and I’m not sure if it can be address in a seamless way. (Without switching to Object Databases)

And he’s right! The impedance mismatch that people often talk about, also exists in web programming. So instead of one impedance mismatch we have to deal with at least two of them! That makes a developers life even worse, according to the rest of the comment.

What struck me about this comment is the negative tone that might have been caused by frustrations when trying to bridge the gaps between relational databases, OO and web programming. Lots of developers are constantly searching for the one and only Holy Grail of Software Development and get frustrated when it appears that what they found is all but the Holy Grail.

Embrace it

One day, I came to the conclusion that the Holy Grail of Software Development doesn’t exist and that made developing software so much more fun. It’s just the mind set! Accept it and embrace it, stop searching for the Holy Grail and use the tools that help to embrace the mismatch instead of fighting it.

Back to .NET web application development: choose a good O/R mapping solution and something like ASP.NET MVC or Monorail. Definitely not the Holy Grail, but these tools embrace the impedance mismatch and that sure made development less frustrating and much more fun!

In the near future, I’ll be writing about the following topics:

• adding an ASP.NET MVC application to your legacy Webforms application;
• running the same legacy application in IIS 7.0 integrated mode;
• a multi-part post about validation with Castle validators and ASP.NET MVC;
• any other interesting topic that comes up during development.

In this blog, I’m mainly going to write about the technical stuff that I’m encountering on a day-to-day basis. Currently I’m especially interested in the things that ALT.NET adds to the Microsoft .NET environment, so you can expect some posts in that area.