Greg Hurlmn, Codr.

On fans and fanboys

To say that people have some opinions about Windows 8 would be an understatement. To say that the majority of these opinions are educated would be generous. Today Gizmodo published an article, as they often do:

If you’re not intrigued by Windows 8 and Metro, if you can’t recognize that it’s a big leap forward, if you’re not excited about what it means for you, personally then you don’t really care about technology; you care about brands. You care about platforms. You care about politics. You’re a fanboy.

Look, we all lean certain ways. I have my own set of preferences. I tend to vote for Democrats and buy Apple products. But that’s because they tend to support my priorities, not vice-versa. If the Democrats suddenly turned their backs on science, or Apple began pushing out products with buggy cluttered interfaces, I’d look elsewhere. I don’t really get those who treat brands like sports teams, offering blind allegiance over self-interest. That’s just zealotry. God bless that file system; my platform, right or wrong.

— Mat Honan

As always on the internet, read the article, stay for the comments (oy).

http://gizmodo.com/5840704/if-you-already-hate-windows-8-then-you-hate-technology

A New Ringtone Challenger Appears

From Windows Phone Secrets:

Microsoft today provided an informative post on the Windows Phone Blog describing how the next release of the OS, codenamed Mango, will support custom ringtones. Which is to say, it won’t: The support is in there, but there’s no built-in UI for custom ringtones. So you’ll have to get a third party app for that or make your own.

— Paul Thurrott

I have just one thing to say to that:

[caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”400” caption=”Challenge Accepted.”][/caption]

Tomorrow, tomorrow…

Lots of .Net people, the kind that comment on Channel 9 posts at least, are upset about this HTML5/JS turn of events. Ex-Silverlight PM Scott Barnes (aka @MossyBlog) had this to say to them:

From https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/A-quick-look-at-Windows-8#c634425768270000000:

The sun..will come out tomorrow…you can bet your bottom dollar……*sob*…the sun will come out tommoz…you *sob* can bet your bottom dollar…. be as what may…

— Scott Barnes, no longer with Microsoft

This, after a blog post of his earlier tonight, that *nailed* the Windows 8 “situation” to a T:

It’s a game of perception at the moment and whilst Microsoft staff will try their best to hold backs the horde of “Is Silverlight dead? Is .NET dead? TELL ME MAN.. TELL ME” panic. The reality is this will bleed out beyond the Twitter / Facebook confines and into the cubicles. It’s got approx. a lifespan of around 6months to fully kill off assuming Microsoft doesn’t follow up with a “What Just Happened” explanation.

— Scott Barnes, again

Go read his entire blog post. You’ll be glad you did.

Windows 8. Web developers, start your engines.

Not you, “ASP.Net developers”. Web developers. The ones that bothered to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without it being wrapped up in tidy lil’ controls. The ones that saw XAML for the first time in 2003 and thought to themselves, “this looks like HTML for Web Forms”. The ones that have embraced HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Knockout, etc. etc. etc. Not because Microsoft told them to (though the .vsdoc IntelliSense for jQuery was nice) — but because this is who you are, what you live for, what you do.

Now, I don’t know how many web developers are going to jump all over writing Windows apps all at once. Not many at first, I’m sure. What will the fleshed-out dev story be? Will the concept of server-side code have any say in the matter? And what of Windows Classic apps? Windows 7.5 will still be living under the surface - so all your old stuff will still work (not necessarily on an ARM processor though). Windows 7.5 — Windows Classic — will be known, over time, as icky yucky Windows, corporate Windows. Bet on it. It’ll be Windows 9 or 10 before that comes to pass, but it’s the direction it’s headed.

So.

Web Forms developers, go learn SharePoint (seriously, go - it pays well, and demand is through the roof). Windows Forms developers, if you haven’t made the leap to WPF yet, don’t bother. Silverlight developers, I hope you like mobile and/or specialized enterprise development. ASP.Net MVC developers, keep on keepin’ on, though maybe bone up on your JavaScript skillz if you haven’t in a while.

Two things to look at today, if you haven’t seem them already:

Thing the first: The Windows 8 unveil video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I

Thing the second: PDC is now BUILD. No, BUILD doesn’t stand for anything, so don’t ask. Nice design on that site. Built on Orchard even. BUILD will be where Microsoft tells the developer story. I’m assuming that they’ll be streaming at least the keynote, if not also the sessions afterwards — I hope so, anyway.

I can’t imagine that they’ll throw out .Net entirely… no, I can imagine it. After all, I’ve been writing Windows applications, services, web sites, etc. for ten years - and never a line of MFC code written, never an HRESULT interpreted (outside of the occasional pinvoke).

Still.

Regardless, I’m excited about the new direction. I’ve been dying to see Windows throw off some of the backward-compatibility chains for years, and if it takes the ARM processor to give them an excuse, I’m all for it.

Gopi Rao, of Helios and Matheson: BACK OFF.

So far today:

1. 1:35 pm, a phone call
2. 1:36 pm, an email
3. 2:14 pm, a bogus LinkedIn request
4. 4:43 pm, a phone call
5. 6:38 pm, a phone call

Honestly, seriously? Are you a frakking collector disguised as a recruiter? Is this really how TD Ameritrade wants to be represented?

Get a grip, go away.

Mono is dead, long live Mono

From today’s long-awaited Mono announcement:

Today we start Xamarin, our new company focused on Mono-based products.

These are some of the things that we will be doing at Xamarin:

• Build a new commercial .NET offering for iOS
• Build a new commercial .NET offering for Android
• Continue to contribute, maintain and develop the open source Mono and Moonlight components.
• Explore the Moonlight opportunities in the mobile space and the Mac appstore.

— Miguel de Icaza

I’m glad to see that the Mono team was able to get back on their feet so quickly, and that their new products will be source-compatible with MonoTouch and Mono for Android - too bad they couldn’t keep the rights to those products as well. Do yourself a favor and read the whole release.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/May-16.html

Dubious claims at Google IO

Everything can be saved to the web. That’s crazy! I could throw this into a river, and I won’t lose my stuff. No need for virus protection. No annoying updates. No patches. No patches for the patches.

— Vic Gundotra

If they think they can autopush OS-level patches to government and corporate clients, they’ve lost their minds.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/11/live-from-google-i-o-2011s-day-2-keynote/

Friends don’t let friends use ClearCase

For the last year or so, I’ve been forced to use ClearCase as my source control system at my current client.  Yes, ClearCase.  No, I didn’t accidentally update a blog post from 10 years ago and have it show up as new.  If you’re not familiar, this is ClearCase:

At least, that’s what it looks like when you try to do something like check in a file with a long path.  Errors?  Exception handling?  Hello?  Do or do not, there is no try… there sure as hell isn’t a catch.  Now, I’ve run into long path issues in .Net projects before, especially SharePoint projects.  The namespaces add up, and before you know it, Visual Studio is telling you that you’d best name your new file x.cs if you want to use it.

Not ClearCase.  No, it will crash, and when you restart, everything seems peachy — even if the server has given up the ghost on your files. The recent problem for me, apparently, is that my team’s project file paths had gotten a wee bit long, though ClearCase never felt the need to tell anyone.  Worse than that, there’s no way to know if your file’s path is too long before you check in unless you get your server team to tell you that ClearCase is storing files in E:\opt\rational\clearcase\var\cc\web\username.domain and even if you have the files stored locally in C:\Prj, the full server path is counted against your project files’ path.  So, 40 characters + the length of the longest developer username is lost for me.  Well, 216 characters should be enough for anyone.

We find this out now, months into the project, after a full day of nobody being able to check files in, and worse, nobody being able to refresh their views to get the major refactoring changes that were put in.  Of course.

I could go on and on about this crap platform… about how step 1 of integrating the ClearCase plugin into Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 is to install Visual Studio 2005… how there is no concept of a changeset - that a checkin/checkout of a file is atomic on the file level, that if you want to check out a bunch of files in your project to make some wide-ranging refactor, that you better be aware that nothing ClearCase does is recursive, and you need to select every single file individually that you want to work with, even as a group, and even then sit through clicking “Apply” on the checkout dialog and waiting a few seconds for the actual checkout to happen for every… single… file.

It’s one thing to have to wait 20 minutes for a checkout.  Its another that you have to sit there hitting Alt-A every 8 seconds for the duration as each file has it’s own checkout process.  When you’re doing it at 10pm on a Sunday night, it’s enough to make you quit software development altogether and take up knitting.