Well today has been an interesting day.  I signed up for a day of presentations on user experience, which is something that can always improve. Turns out it are a bunch of presentations on Microsoft Expression (I guess in some ways that has to do with user experience )It’s not something I personally will be using as it is more designer focussed and I use visual studio for all my development and web design.

Over the last couple of months or so I have been sensing that Microsoft isn’t what they used to be and I’m not the only one that is inclined to think that way

Mostly because I’m currently working as a sole developer in my own company I feel very much left out by them.

Most of the issues I have is to quickly develop something, where I am in full control of what happens, is not something that is easily done in asp.net.  (For more on reasons why I like castle vs asp.net webforms : Am I too late, A bit further down the castle track

Back to the original story
Those presentations didn’t really hold value for me but I got into a conversation with 2 microsoft employees that were there with the goal of finding out why people like me are moving to rails and what microsoft isn’t giving us and they should.

My main points of discomfort would be:

Feeling of not being in control

Complexity to get it to render out pages

Slow development pass (might be ok if you’re a giant company in which people actually hold meetings and have managers but not in my case). I’m all about agile (not to be confused with the TFS agile method) development. Plan, build, ship within 2 months would be average.

Need to know a page lifecycle (which is statefull programming in a stateless environment, need i say more)

Complexity to get things done

No proper sample code available that shows something beyond “Hello world”

Anyway we had this interesting talk about it, now it’s again a case of waiting to see if they can make a change before the new year to keep me interested.

While I’m on the subject. Next week will be the week in which I’ll try to build my first RoR site. I’m pretty confident that it will work out and then i can finally assess myself which one is better for what.

Ok I’m off to buy Agile webdevelopment with ruby now

I couldn’t really say goodbye to vista. So I thought the cheaper option would be to go buy a wired headset in anticipation of the bluetooth headset drivers.

I am dissapointed that they worked in RC1/RC2 but not in the RTM release.

I can find some comfort in the matter that I’m not the only one that has these problems. http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=985349&siteid;=17&¬ification_id=413753&message;_id=413753&agent;=messenger

Hammet just announced that he will be creating an ironpython view engine for castle.  Read more about it here

del.icio.us tags: IronPython, Castle

Vista is a cool operating system but the fact that I can’t run IE6 on it plus the fact that I can’t get any of my bluetooth headsets to work with it make it so that I have to roll back to xp for the time being.

I can live without IE6 but not without skype :)

If somebody knows how to get a logitech or a motorola headset going on vista please let me know. That would mean I can stay on vista :D

I just started downloading the vista RTM of the msdn website

Ken Egozi has created a c# and vb view engine for castle. It’s not yet available for download but looks promising

You can check it out at : AspView - Yet another MonoRail ViewEngine

As I mentioned previously that I do like boo but i miss intellisense in visual studio and let’s face it at this moment NOTHING beats visual studio as an IDE. Although sharpdevelop scores a lot higher than eclipse in my book. And what an amazing tool they built with so little resources in comparison to the other IDE projects.

I like c# obviously but have been toying around with ironpython a little lately. Once i pass the decorator bit I’d sure love to port the brail view engine to an ironpython view engine (the only problem i see there is that i don’t have time :S to really do it.)

Anyway I thought I might share with you what i have planned as non-workrelated projects for the year that is to come.

1. Finish nblogr
2. Make nblogr work on linux and on mysql and/or postgres
3. Create the ironpython view engine (from here onwards i want to be able to use ironpython as my primary language)
4. Add forums to nblogr
5. Add CMS capabilities to nblogr (very distant future)

Let me know what you think about the ironpython view engine ?

As stated before I would love some help in any one of my side projects of course. Just drop me a line and I’ll figure out where to fit you in :)

I whished I had some more interesting stuff to talk about but the last 5-6 weeks I’ve been buried in some application and hoping to finish it this week.

del.icio.us tags: Castle, Brail, AspView, NBlogr, Programming, IronPython

A friend of mine just passed me on this link

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=sanmarco/index1.sxs

_

Welcome to Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

We’ve assembled a few collections for you to play with, and we’re working on adding more. In the future you’ll be able to “photosynthesize” your own photos, but we aren’t there yet.

_

del.icio.us tags: Cool stuff, microsoft preview

Over the weekend I got the idea of learning ironpython by moving the codebase that I have for nblogr to ironpython script and compiling it.

Everything went fine until I had to decorate a method to make it cache/participate in a transaction/set a layout on a controller because ironpython in all its beauty doesn’t support attributes on methods or classes.

I’m also missing a reference for ironpython. Something that shows the available functions and the syntax for inheritance etc.  which slowed me down of course.

Why do I want a dynamic language ?

The 2 main reasons are : Duck typing and readable anonymous functions.  In c# there is the concept of anonymous delegates but that code really looks like it has been hit by a train, ugly.

I’ve been writing in boo for a while now just as a templating language and yes I like boo a lot.  It combines the nice features of python with the c# language in a wrist friendly way. (I never got the point of wrist friendly thing until I got carpal tunnel syndrome, now it suddenly is a major issue)

I sure wish there would be a language service for visual studio to do boo development but I’ve been using sharp develop 2.1 to check it out.

SharpDevelop 2.1 is a nice piece of work definitely for an open source IDE’, it beats eclipse in my book

In boo everything is an object also your functions and expressions (read it has anonymous functions).  Boo is strong typed but mimics duck typing in some form.

To conclude this little intermezzo : my next project will be written in boo :)

On the ajax library front I would have to report that I haven ‘t looked at atlas/ms ajax since the beginning of september . I had decided to use it again when they finally release the framework.  So I’ve been checking out these other libraries that are out there.  I checked out jquery which is a cool library but it is also slower in execution than the other ones.

The next one on the list was scriptaculous and that is the one I’ve been using in my projects now.  Scriptaculous does exactly what is expected and uses the javascript prototype model which happens to be one i like :)

The move from the guys at MS to make their ajax extensions based on prototype was surprising but very positive in my book :) So when they release it i’ll look at creating an javascript provider for nblogr so that you would be able to switch between your favourite library (we have plans to support the major libraries out of the  box.) 

del.icio.us tags: Boo, IronPython, Programming, General

A while ago i posted that I was hiring somebody.

Well first of all ==> It’s not easy to find somebody

Secondly this might have been jumping the gun a bit because in light of some recent developments I’ve decided to move my whole operation to Welington aka “Silicon Welly”.Probably I’ll have to look into hiring somebody again around may-june next year.

So the goal is to be up and running in Wellington on the 1st of march. 

I won’t be boring you with all the reasons why I think Wellington is a better place to be than New Plymouth for a technology company. But one of the main ones would be that cows don’t really need websites or UI’s.

I hope I’ll find myself a proper place to settle. I’m looking for a reasonably small house (not shed or likewise) with a garden, preferrably one that will hold it’s ground and not slide of the mountain when it rains.

Looking forward to moving there :)

If so then maybe this post will give you some more clarity. It might also give your manager the push in the right direction.

http://danbunea.blogspot.com/2006/10/agile-methodo…