DaveTheDave

Keeping your skill set relevant

2009-06-23T17:19:08Z

I just read this post by Joel Hughes. I agree with the sentiment, but I would disagree with his categorization of languages. Joel lists,

Interpreted, procedural
Compiled, procedural
Functional, concurrent

From a learning perspective, it doesnt matters if the languages are compiled or interpreted. Programming style and the typing system are more important. The way I have tried to keep my skill set relevant is by ensuring that I have at least a rudimentary understanding of,

An imperative statically typed language – C#
A functional language – F#
A dynamically typed language – IronPython

I have been meaning to make some forays into a language with concurrency built into the core of the language (Erlang or Scala) but so far I have struggled to get started. I need to find a real app to work on. Languages for creating DSL’s are also something to consider (Oslo and Boo for example).

Ian Cooper recently posted about a similar topic on CodeBetter titled ‘Should you learn frameworks or principals’. He writes,

As someone who interviews people I look more for understanding of the principles than the minutiae. The problem is that there will always be a new 'better' framework, a new popular paradigm. There is always the possibility that a new language comes along that we want to use instead for a given project. People who understand the principles can adapt. People who focus on the detail are intransigent to change, because they have too much invested in the framework that they have become an expert in.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. If you are proficient in a dynamic language and can articulate the differences between statically typed and dynamic language features, I would consider you eligible for any job programming in a dynamic langauge (ie. the fact that they may not know the syntax of Ruby is largely irrelevant if you have a deep understanding of Python).

Firefox, with regret, your fired

2009-06-18T17:05:52Z

I am a long time Firefox user and advocate but I have recently decided to move to Google Chrome as my main (non development) browser.

Excessive memory usage has been a longstanding problem with Firefox. Up until now, i have endured the memory penalty for the sake of a number of near indispensable Firefox add-ins (the multi-machine bookmark synch functionality in XMarks is top of this list). I have, however, found that recently, perhaps as a result of the ever increasing number of media rich and JavaScript heavy websites, that the memory usage in Firefox has become completely unacceptable.

Here is my task manager after using Firefox 3.0.11 during a typical 8 hour work day (read blogs, reddit, ycombinator, watched a couple of Mix09 videos, etc),

To add insult to injury, if I close all tabs apart from one, Firefox only re-claims approx. 20mb of memory. I know that the memory wastage might be down to the extensions that I have installed but frankly I’m past caring. If this is the case, Firefox should limit the amount of memory available to each extension.

I have trailed Chrome over the last few days and I like it a lot. Its lightning fast and the process per tab architecture makes it more stable than either IE or Firefox (it also means that if I close down a tab, the memory used by that tab is immediately reclaimed). I have found website compatibility to be good - its only had a problem with a couple of heavy flash and JS sites. The add-in architecture is still under development, but its only a question of time before the add-in ecosystem rivals that of Firefox.

I will still use Firefox as my main development browser. Firebug is actually indispensable when it comes to web development.

I know nothing about the internal architecture of Firefox, but I’m guessing that as excessive memory usage has been such a longstanding problem there is something inherent in the architecture that makes it nearly impossible to solve without a major re-write.

Microsoft slowly becoming enlightened

2009-06-15T17:17:55Z

In a number of recent projects, Microsoft seems to have consciously adopted a more open approach to the development of developer related tools, languages, and frameworks.

The canonical example is ASP.NET MVC, but there are others (MEF, Iron Ruby, Ajax Control Toolkit).

Each of these projects has the following characteristics,

Early release of beta source code to community
During a prolonged beta phase, there was active participation in the community by a key individual (the ‘Program Manager’) from Microsoft - Phill Haack for ASP.NET MVC, Glen Block for MEF, etc. These people tend to be prominent bloggers. Personalities are important here – these individuals have to be respected and liked by the community.
Microsoft actually listened to the feedback and visibly incorporated suggestions for improvements into multiple pre-releases. This wasn’t just a PR exercise.
Microsoft released the final version under Ms-PL allowing community to fork/fix critical bugs outside of official release cycle.

The upside for Microsoft is that they are receiving invaluable feedback early in the development cycle from the experts in the community who will actually use the software in production. In return, MS are releasing it for free as in speech so the source can be changed, re-distributed, forked, etc.

Compare the success of ASP.NET MVC with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Although Microsoft received a lot of feedback on the ADO.NET Entity Framework, the entire development process was far less transparent and there was no single individual, well respected within the community, keeping the project on track. The release of the Entity Framework prompted the infamous ‘ADO.NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence’.

Id like to see Microsoft take the ASP.NET MVC approach for all products where they don’t intend to charge for the end deliverable. The early evidence seems to suggest that there is no downside. Personally, Id like to seem them take it a step further and become true open source projects that allow community contributions during development. These projects would become more like the development model pioneered by Python – with a ‘Benevolent dictator for Life’ role fulfilled by Microsoft with the full trust of the community. Legal and IP problems aside, I would imagine the problem might be finding enough capable people to fill this role.

Syntax Highlighting with Subtext

2009-06-05T11:02:17Z

After trying various HTML based solutions for syntax highlighting, I decided to go with the javascript based SyntaxHighlighter to pretify source code on my blog.

SyntaxHighlighter runs in the browser, supports multiple languages, and has a LPGL licence (the author, Alex Gorbatchev, accepts donations via PayPal).

To install SyntaxHighlighter into Subtext, you need to link to the SyntaxHighlighter Javascript files in Subtext \DTP.ASPX.

You can either download the js files and copy them onto your webhost, or link to a free hosted version on the SyntaxHighlighter site.

If you want to host the js files yourself,

1. Download SyntaxHighlighter from here.

2. Extract the files from the SyntaxHighlighter zip file.

3. Copy the files in the SyntaxHighlighter\Styles and SyntaxHighlighter\Scripts directory to the Subtext Scripts directory on your webhost (you dont need every single javascript file – pick the javascript files that correspond to the languages you need).

4. Modify the Subtext \DTP.ASPX file to include the following tags,

<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shCore.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushBash.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushPlain.js") %>"></script>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="scripts/shCore.css"/>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="scripts/shThemeDefault.css"/>
<script type="text/javascript">
    SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'scripts/clipboard.swf';
    SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</script>    

<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushCpp.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushCSharp.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushCss.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushDelphi.js") %></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushDiff.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushGroovy.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushJava.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushJScript.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushPhp.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushPython.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushRuby.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushScala.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushSql.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushVb.js") %>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<%= VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Scripts/shBrushXml.js") %>"></script>

If you want to link to the hosted version (2.0.320), include the following markup in \DTP.ASPX,

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shCore.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushBash.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCpp.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCss.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushDelphi.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushDiff.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushGroovy.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJava.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPhp.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPlain.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPython.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushRuby.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushScala.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushSql.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushVb.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/styles/shCore.css"/>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/styles/shThemeDefault.css"/>
<script type="text/javascript">
    SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/clipboard.swf';
    SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</script>

Obviously you probably wont need to link to every javascript file – only the languages you will be posting about.

To format your code, surround it with a <pre> tag and set the css class to brush: [language] where language is one of the supported SyntaxHighlighter languages. For example,

<pre class="brush:js">
    alert("Hello world");
</pre>

Alternatively, install Live Writer and use the PreCode Snippet plugin. Ive seen many complaints about LiveWriter on the tinternet, but, for simple blog editing, it works well enough.

There is also a SyntaxHighlighter plugin for the FCKEditor (which is the default online editor in Subtext). Not 100% sure how you would install this with Subtext but Im sure its not too hard.

Hello

2009-06-02T10:07:46Z

After much trail and error, I finally managed to get SubText 2.1.1 working on GoDaddy (actually the instructions in this blog post are accurate and easy to follow - my problems were of my own making).

I have been meaning to start a blog for a while. I agree with Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that its important to exert some control over your online presence - from the show notes for StackOverflow podcast 52,

Joel notes that if you’re shy about putting things online, you are letting other people control your online identity — and that will hurt you much more in the long run than any potentially questionable things you might possibly put online.

My dream is that my blog eventually scales the giddy heights of distinctly average and if just one person reads it and finds it useful my life will be complete.

I am a software engineer living in Loughborough in the UK. I have been developing software, in one form or another, for the last 25 years. My current day to day work consists of product development in .net technologies, specifically C#, ASP.NET, WPF, and Silverlight.