WindowsForms.com has added discussion forums for questions, answers, information, and rants... I know the product team is hanging out there so give them a holler! (well, they also hang out at a bunch of other sites, but I digress...)...

11:21:50 PM    comment []

I'd like to add a few more email pet peves to my rant...

First, check where you are sending mail. In Outlook you hit Ctrl-K and it resolves the names - make sure they are right.

Two, limit the number of people on a mail thread to the people that care. Don't CC a mailing list of 1000 people

Third, and most importantly, never respond to a large mailing list with "Me too" when someone asks you to be removed from it.

Why can't smart people figure out these basics?

11:18:32 PM    comment []

I hate MVC. I mentioned this earlier, but I think I need to expand on this a little. It's not that I'm lazy or haven't read Design Patterns. I just believe that simplicity wins. There are times when using abstraction models like MVC actually make your solution simpler. For example, when creating a word processor and you need to have multiple views of your document available at the same time - this is a great time that MVC will save you.

There are times when having design patterns baked into the platform just make it too hard to do simple things. Swing forces you to learn MVC to do simple tasks. I've heard that SWT fixes some of this, but I haven't got to play with that yet. (In truth, I haven't got to play with Swing yet - I've read some books and attended some JavaOne panels on Swing though).

You can always add complexity to systems, you can never remove it. Once you force a design pattern into a system it always shows through. You can provide layers to try and hide it, but it is always here.

This kind of debate comes up all the time at work. We have such a variety of developer customers some people wonder if we will ever be able to produce an API that works for everyone. People talk about producing a "RAD" API and an "Expert" API... personally I find that a bit insulting - I think that experts are exactly the people that have figured out how important it is to use RAD tools when they are appropraite.

I believe instead in an approach of producing scalable APIs. The API should scale from the begining scenario up to the expert. The API should reward people that learn the inner workings of it. In the same way that a user of EMACS can become 10X more efficient by learning all the archaic commands, so should an API provide unlimited headroom (ok, maybe i'm going a little off the deep end here...)

When designing APIs people should think - How will this be exposed in a tool? How will developers discover the features? What features are the 80% case, and how can I make that simpler? How can a developer progress from the simplest scenario into the full features of the API? Good API design is tough. It is a skill.

To you project managers out there: Good API design costs money. Pay up or the developers will stop using your technology - no matter how good it is.

11:11:38 PM    comment []

First the house update - did the inspection today. Went OK... found a bunch of minor issues and a couple not-so minor problems. We'll see how the sellers react to my proposal...

I wonder if they are reading my blog?

9:16:53 PM    comment []