.NET Celebrity Auction

Be a sport and click on this link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5552696499

Then make a generous bid. If you'll win, you'll get an hour (or more) of help from a .NET guru/celebrity (or possibly me). But more, you'll also be helping Tsunami relief efforts.

The top bid gets to pick their consultant. Then next, and so on and so on. If you are in southern Ontario, and you get me, I'll make it up to you by coming to your office - for a whole day, hang out, and bring donuts. What will I do? I can tell you everything I know about Visual Studio Team System (breaking all kinds of NDA rules, etc.), try to convince you to use data sets, do some code reviews, help debug something nasty, defrag your hard drive, organize your mp3's, tell you what DataGrid girl is really like, whatever.

I'm visiting Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal over the next 3 months so if you live/work near there, my offer stands, pending my schedule. I'll also be in Orlando possibly in June (for TechEd), LA in Sept (for PDC), and Chicago in August, so ditto on those as well.

For more info on how it all works....

http://www.stephenforte.net/owdasblog/#a61b646aa-ca24-47ef-b013-012bf852f79d

And finally, special thanks to the other RD's who are volunteering their time (especially all those fellow Canadians). Last but not least, special thanks to Stephen Forte and Julia Lerman for organizing this.

Trip to Ottawa and Requirements Traceability

I just got back from Ottawa, where last night I was speaking to the Ottawa .NET community about Visual Studio Tools for Office. (more on that later).

I wasn't surprised by the Grep Cup weekend inflated hotel rates, but I was surprised to find a “2.8% DMF Fee” on my hotel bill (on top of the 15% worth of federal and provincial taxes). Upon request, I was informed that this was a “Destination Marketing Fee” which goes to fund marketing efforts to promote tourism in the area. Various Ontario tourism centers (including Hamilton - go figure?) have been lobbying the provincial governments since post 9/11 in an effort for them to allow a tax (a real tax, not a fee) for the same purpose. This past summer however, the hotels decided that this was going nowhere so they decided to start collecting (on a voluntary basis) a fee (not a real tax).

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking the best way to attract people to your city is not to put a sneaky “DMF Fee” charge on those same people's hotel bill when they come to visit you and hope they don't ask about it. Even worst, because it's a fee charged by the hotel, and not a real tax - guess what - you pay tax on the DMF Fee. Icarumba! It turns out it's voluntary fee and not hotels collect it. The front desk staff sensed I was not pleased about being asked to pay for marketing fees on top of my room rate so they quickly waived the fee. But I wonder how many people willing pay this?

This all reminds me very much about requirements management and software development. Often, people, usually too close to the problem, design features into software that doesn't meet the requirements of the user. Take for example those goofy glyphs on the Lotus Notes login window. What about clippy? Is that satisfying anybody's requirements - or is it just pissing you off? With all of our best intentions, it is extremely important that we take the time to perform reality checks on what we are building against the requirements of our users.

Now to bring it all home. Do users really want to do their work in a web browser? Browsers are great for wandering and finding stuff, but do they want to see the value of their stock portfolio in a browser? You need to find the best environment for the job your users are trying to accomplish. If somebody is accustomed to using Excel to aggregate a bunch of their financial information, then maybe Visual Studio Tools for Office is the right tool for that job. While writing applications in Excel isn't exactly new, with VSTO you have the integration with the .NET Framework, Web Services, and the smart client deployment model, you can apply all professional development skills you have at your disposal to creating applications with Word & Excel. And don't worry, I have yet to see clippy show up in Visual Studio Office projects.

 

Oshawa .NET: Building Mobile Applications

I'm doing a talk at the East of GTA .NET users group tonight in Oshawa. This is the same MSDN User Group tour event sweeping across Canada. I'll be talking about some of the limitations of the Compact Framework and SqlCE. Should be fun - hope to see you there.

Registration Links and slides (afterwards) can be found here.

Penguins are sneaking into my house and leaving the doors unlocked.

In the past 3 weeks I have purchase, installed and used 2 Linux systems in my house....accidentally. First, I purchased a Roku High Definition Photo Viewer and MP3 video player for my TV. This is a nice little device that acts as a screen saver for your TV/Plasma Screen to avoid burn in....say of the DVD logo that you see from your DVD player when there is no disc inserted. The device sits between the TV and the rest of your home theatre video inputs - daisy chain style. It monitors the video traffic for no signal or no motion and after a time duration kicks in with your family photos. The photos can be retrieved over the network jack to a series of shares on your home network, or via a plugged in USB wireless adapter. It also has Compact Flash, SD/MMC, SmartMedia and memory stick slots. Not to mention of course I find out its running Linux. There was a bit of novelty involved in telnetting into my TV and using VI. That soon wore off when I discovered that the root password was blank, and that the change password binary was missing off install of Linux so I couldn't even change the password. Combine this with the fact that the setup wizard walks you through finding the network shares in your house and storing your userid/password credentials - this becomes a rather obvious security hole that could have been fixed by the manufacturers fairly easily.

Is this security attitude prevalent in the Linux world? I hope not, because yesterday I discovered another Linux box in my house.

I also recently acquired a NetGear Media Router. It's a regular router with the addition of a USB host port. This allows you to plug in a memory stick or a USB external drive to share as NAS storage. I was a bit surprised to see it show up in my Network Neighbourhood as a UPnP device named “Linux Internet Gateway“. There is also a GPL license in the box so I think that all points to it running Linux.

The device also has a nice feature that when you turn it on and it detects a network connection, it automatically decides to download and install updates to the flash bios. God forbid I turn the device off while it is doing this unbenounced to me. Bam, too late. I guess the power light goes from green to yellow when it's doing this. The 1 page card manual included with the device doesn't mention this nice “feature”. I found out the hard way. When you go the web page to administer the device in this mode you get to see that file system in it's raw form.

Downloading the manual tells me to reset the factory bios I have to hold down the reset switch with a pin for 90 seconds. Nice. I was able to do that but can't seem to get an IP out of the device any more.

I'm still evaluating the security risks of this device. It is slightly more secure with my data (via USB storage) by including a password on the administration of the machine - which is “password”. There is no password on the share it exposes and I can't see an option to put a password on the share so every body on my network (say when my geek friends come over and plug in) will have access to my financial records and family photos. Nice.

So I have accidentally installed 2 Linux boxes in my house with major security holes. I'm savvy enough to discover this on my own, but I doubt the typical residential consumers of these products would realize the security hole they are introducing into their personal data stores.

With the proliferation of these types of Linux devices into the average home, I'm sure this will draw the attention of script kiddies. Wouldn't it be cool to take over somebody's television set?  Maybe they'd throw some porn up during daytime TV, or steal my personal data - or delete it. Scary.

GDI+ Security Vulnerability

There is a new critical security vulnerability that affects a wide range of software that can't be easily patched through Windows Update. The vulnerability lies inside of GDI+ and can allow a maliciously formed JPEG image file to create a buffer overrun and inject malicious code - even through a web page's graphics...no scripting or anything.

Windows Update will go ahead and update major components but you also need to go to the Office Update site as well as update a bunch of other software you might have on your machine.

In particular for developers, the .NET Framework (pre-latest service pack) and even Visual Studio.NET 2003 and 2002 are affected and need to be separately patched.

The full bulletin with links for all the various patches are available here. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-028.mspx

If you go to Windows Update it will also provide you with a GDI+ Detection tool that will scan your hard drive looking for affected components. I strongly you recommend everybody jump all over this one quickly.

VS Live Orlando: Building "Operations-Friendly" ASP.NET Applications with Instrumentation and Logging

Yes, it's the longest title of all VS Live Orlando presentations! It's a big topic and it deserves a big name.

I'm heading out Monday night to hurricane country to deliver this talk on Tuesday morning. I like this topic because when you get into it, it's like an onion. It doesn't look like something terribly sophisticated but as you get into you find there are more and more layers to peel back.

DevCan 2004

I'm co-chairing two tracks of DevCan coming up in Setp/Oct in Vancover/Toronto (exact dates to follow) - see www.devcan.com for more.

I'm doing the architect track and web track. If you have ideas for content you'd like to see, or have a topic you'd like to present in either of those categories, send them to me. You don't have to be canadian, but it helps :)

New Service Packs for 1.0 & 1.1 .NET Frameworks imminent

.NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and 1.1 SP1 are in tech preview at the moment. Had a nagging bug and want to know if it's fixed?

The contents & links to Tech Preview Downloads can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/sptechpreview/default.aspx

 

Next Generation Developer Training

 
I've been (in some manner) involved in the software developer training business for over 10 years now. Over the past 3 years however, I've really been questioning the value and purpose of classroom training for software developers. So has Don Box. The internet has had a lot to do with that I think and the # of developers taking a week off work to sit in on a class has dropped in recent years. There was a buzz about elearning for awhile - but it hasn't really gone mainstream - and you hear about blended learning now too.
 
Vendor-based classroom training typically amounts to not much more than reference manuals. A component is introduced, a few demo's or scenarios on how you can use it - and a lab to follow. About 80% of what I see in these classes I could find on google. And the best part about google is that I can find it when I need it....just in time, on the job. After I learn something on google, I get to use it in a real life scenario so absorption is pretty high that way.
 
Classroom training has the advantage of taking you outside of your typical day (usually for a week) and forces you to sit and spend some quality time with some new technology on a grand scale. The problem with googling for small bits of information is that you miss the bigger picture and a full architectural understanding of how best to accomplish something. The instructor is an important part and can make the difference between a good class and a great class. But the problem remains with traditional training in that they are really just showing you how to swing their hammer. There is only a small percentage of leeway when an instructor can add extra value above and beyond the curriculum. The good ones do, but there is never enough time.
 
Several months ago we took a hard look at what people really needed and what kind of value we could bring to bear above and beyond what people could learn from reading the online help or googling. That extra value is of course the experiences of the instructor and the resulting set of best practices....stuff that you rarely find in any book.
 
The problem of course with relying on an instructor to make the difference is that sometimes they don't. And sometimes their experiences are different than others. You end up with a very inconsistent delivery.
 
So we decided to create new courses based primarily around the best practices captured from the experiences of several developers. We still cover some fundamental tools & techniques but quickly move beyond that into the best practices of how to apply that. The idea is to have students spend less time on things they can learn on their own time. How often to you get to spend a week with an expert who has been using a new technology for a few years? The idea is to maximize the time for that week.
 
We haven't relied on just our own experiences either. We've decided to lean heavily on the community in this regard, in particular, the content coming out of the MS Patterns and Practices Group. The culmination of all this work was the first delivery of our new courseware based on "Best Practices" a couple of weeks ago. It was also John Lam's first course with ObjectSharp. I had the opportunity to talk to a few students, including a couple of our own instructors who sat in on the course, and I even managed to drop in for about 30 minutes on the last day.
 
The comments are great on the evals too. Our evals are always good, but these evals were awesome. "The most professionally run course I have ever taken." "The best course I've ever taken". Our salesperson told me that she even had a student ask in the middle of the week if we were going to be handing out evals because he wanted to make sure he had an opportunity to comment on how great the course was. I'm really proud of what we accomplished but I'm even happier that we've touched a nerve with our customers and found a way to maximize the value to them for taking a full week out of their lives. I can't wait until I get to teach one of these new courses.

How to partition your classes between assemblies

Eric Gunnerson has great post with some performance inspired assembly guidelines for fewer larger assemblies. Versioning and Security units of work. Good reasons.

But a non-performance reason for partitiioning into more assemblies is to stop developers from doing things like referencing your data access layer classes from a user interface layer (without going through a business object layer). If you have your classes in 3 assemblies/projects: UI, BUS and DA, where UI references BUS and BUS references DA, then it's hard for a class in UI to call a class in DA - without going out of their way to add a project reference.

Should a project always correspond to an assembly? Well that's the default but you can create intermediate assemblies called netmodules and link them together with the assembly linker (AL.exe). Net Modules are MSIL but without a manifest. You create the new assembly which links the modules together (and adds metadata) with the AL.exe.

The only problem with all of this is that you have to use the command line to compile your projects into .netmodules and link them afterwards. The net result however is that still end up satisfying Eric's performance tips with the requirement for binary partitioned UI, Business, and Data Access layers.