Scott Hanselman

Imagine that the web itself had an app store, and your clicked "New Releases" to see the latest websites that the web just published. It would be 99% crap. And that's being generous.

Having a section in your App Store called "New Releases" is always going to make your store look bad, just like it would the web. Most of the web is random garbage. It's curation - both professional and social - that makes the internet great.

• Professional curation are sites like BoingBoing that have a team of folks that go looking for awesome. If you only hang out at BoingBoing, the whole internet is awesome.
• Social curation are sites like Reddit that have a mob of anonymous strangers that go looking...for stuff. If you only hang out at Reddit, the whole internet is...different.
• Another kind of Social curation is discovery by hanging out with your tribe. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter, even those crazy links your parents insist on emailing you (while including the cc: list from the previous 15 forwards.) We see the internet through these filters: our friends, and our trusted news sources.

Notice that the Chrome Web Store doesn't have this "latest" or "newest" section. The whole thing is curated. You can't find garbage on that store unless you go searching for garbage. Nothing makes it to the front unless it's picked, selected, loved.

The same is true for the iTunes/iOS App Store. It feels high quality because only high quality apps are ever put in front of you. You have to actively LOOK for crappy apps (there's a whole iceberg of them). The larger the iOS store gets, the more "Hall of Fames" and "Best of the Best" collections are created by humans who work there, thereby increasing the general sense of awesome.

These Halls of Fames and Recommended Apps are the App Store equivalent of preferred shelf placement at a physical store. Awesome stuff, popular stuff, or influential stuff is at eye-level or on an end-cap. Crappy stuff is buried - you have to look for it. I don't want to see an aisle at the grocery store that's "newest releases." It would be totally random and likely not give me a good impression of the store.

Intense curation is good and bad. First, it is exclusionary by its nature. Curation is filtering. You're counting on humans to basically check out every app there is and decide what's awesome. There's likely also some "who you know" type stuff going on. That's gotta stress the indie developer out. How do you get noticed? Word of mouth sometimes works, but not until there's some critical mass. It's not like Angry Birds would submit a new app and then cross their fingers and hope it gets noticed. For every discovered gem that the iTunes store declares "New and Notable" there's surely ten that are "Knew Someone at the App Store" or "Had a PR Person."

Without solid curation, nearly every list sucks. NetFlix works so hard on their recommendation engine -even giving $1M prizes to anyone who could make recommendations better - and I still end up going to http://instantwatcher.com more than I go to NetFlix. Why? Curation.

Certainly if you go looking for crap, you'll find it, but if you're an App Store, try to hide your shame.

In the take no prisoners (new) world of App Stores, good curation is perception management. It also sets publishers up for success. Read about the story of the iOS app "A Beautiful Mess" and how they have been playing Whack-a-Mole with evil copy-cat apps. Apps with the same name and icon trying to get downloads on the back of A Beautiful Mess's success. With a more aggressive policy on this kind of stuff, the iOS App Store could help the folks at A Beautiful Mess focus on their app, and not an endless defense of their own online brand.

That's a mess, even with the victim actively trying to fix the problem. It's worse if the brand in question isn't paying attention. Look in fear at the Windows 8 App Store when you search for "Facebook." Every single one using the Facebook name and Facebook icon. And every single one likely sucks.

Remember Broken Windows Theory, with my modifications.

The theory states that maintaining and monitoring [App Stores] in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime.

You gotta fix those broken windows before your App Store turns into a bad neighborhood.

Sponsor: A huge thank you to my friends at Red Gate for their support of the site this week. Check out Deployment Manager! Easy release management - Deploy your .NET apps, services and SQL Server databases in a single, repeatable process with Red Gate’s Deployment Manager. There’s a free Starter edition, so get started now!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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First, I encourage you to listen to episode 327 of the Hanselminutes podcast. We called it "Everything .NET programmers know about Asynchronous Programming is wrong" and I learned a lot. I promise you will too.

Often we'll find ourselves doing three or four things on one page, loading stuff from a number of places. Perhaps you're loading something from disk, calling a web service, and calling a database.

You can do those things in order, synchronously, as is typical. Add up the duration of each Task:

public void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    var clientcontacts = Client.DownloadString("api/contacts");
    var clienttemperature = Client.DownloadString("api/temperature");
    var clientlocation = Client.DownloadString("api/location");

 
    var contacts = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Contact>>(clientcontacts);
    var location = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(clientlocation);
    var temperature = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(clienttemperature);
 
    listcontacts.DataSource = contacts;
    listcontacts.DataBind();
    Temparature.Text = temperature;
    Location.Text = location;
}

Each of this three calls takes about a second, so the total type is 3 seconds. They happen one after the other.

Intuitively you may want to make these async by marking the public void Page_Load with async and then awaiting three tasks.

However, Page_Load is a page lifecycle event, and it's a void event handler. Damian Edwards from the ASP.NET team says:

Async void event handlers in web forms are only supported on certain events, as you've found, but are really only intended for simplistic tasks. We recommend using PageAsyncTask for any async work of any real complexity.

Levi, also from the ASP.NET team uses even stronger language. Basically, DO NOT use async on void event handlers like this, it's not worth it.

Async events in web applications are inherently strange beasts. Async void is meant for a fire and forget programming model. This works in Windows UI applications since the application sticks around until the OS kills it, so whenever the async callback runs there is guaranteed to be a UI thread that it can interact with. In web applications, this model falls apart since requests are by definition transient. If the async callback happens to run after the request has finished, there is no guarantee that the data structures the callback needs to interact with are still in a good state. Thus why fire and forget (and async void) is inherently a bad idea in web applications.

That said, we do crazy gymnastics to try to make very simple things like Page_Load work, but the code to support this is extremely complicated and not well-tested for anything beyond basic scenarios. So if you need reliability I’d stick with RegisterAsyncTask.

Using async with voids is not stable or reliable. However, all you have to do is call Page.RegisterAyncTask - it's not any trouble and you'll be in a better more flexible place.

public void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    RegisterAsyncTask(new PageAsyncTask(LoadSomeData));
}

public async Task LoadSomeData()
{

    var clientcontacts = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/contacts");
    var clienttemperature = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/temperature");
    var clientlocation = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/location");

    await Task.WhenAll(clientcontacts, clienttemperature, clientlocation);

    var contacts = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Contact>>(await clientcontacts);
    var location = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(await clientlocation);
    var temperature = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(await clienttemperature);
 
    listcontacts.DataSource = contacts;
    listcontacts.DataBind();
    Temparature.Text = temperature;
    Location.Text = location;
}

You can simplify this even more by removing the (in this case totally unnecessary) Task.WhenAll and just awaiting the result of the Tasks one by one. By the time Task.WhenAll  has happened here, the tasks are already back. The result is the same. This also has the benefit of reading like synchronous code while giving the benefits of async.

public async Task LoadSomeData()
{

    var clientcontacts = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/contacts");
    var clienttemperature = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/temperature");
    var clientlocation = Client.DownloadStringTaskAsync("api/location");

    var contacts = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Contact>>(await clientcontacts);
    var location = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(await clientlocation);
    var temperature = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(await clienttemperature);
 
    listcontacts.DataSource = contacts;
    listcontacts.DataBind();
    Temparature.Text = temperature;
    Location.Text = location;
}

This now takes just a hair over a second, because the three async tasks are happening concurrently. Async stuff like this is most useful (and most obvious) when you have multiple tasks that don't depend on one another.

Do remember to mark the .aspx page as Async="true" like this:

<%@ Page Title="Async" Language="C#" CodeBehind="Async.aspx.cs" Inherits="Whatever" Async="true" %>

Related Links

• Async methods in ASP.NET 4.5
• StackOverflow ASP.NET Lifecycle Events

Sponsor: A huge thank you to my friends at Red Gate for their support of the site this week. Check out Deployment Manager! Easy release management - Deploy your .NET apps, services and SQL Server databases in a single, repeatable process with Red Gate’s Deployment Manager. There’s a free Starter edition, so get started now!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A parody Twitter account called Confused .NET Dev last week tweeted:

For a web hoster Azure has a crazy learning curve: Blob, Table, Queue, Service Bus, Access Control, Drive, CDN, etc @ http://t.co/20Dmz4SoNB

— confused .net dev (@ConfusedDotNet) August 14, 2013

A "crazy" learning curve? CDN? Table? Drive? OK, if you say so, but still, point taken, there's maybe some terms in there that may not be immediately obvious. Here's a few things you should remember when developing for the cloud as well as a small glossary that I hope helps this "confused .net dev" and his or her mixed case Twitter account.

Cloud Concepts

IAAS

Infrastructure as a Service. This means I want the computers in my closet to go away. All that infrastructure, the boxes, network switches, even software licenses are a maintenance headache. I want to put them somewhere where I can't see them (we'll call it, The Cloud) and I'll pay pennies per hour. Worst case, it costs me about the same but it's less trouble. Best case, it can scale (get bigger) if my company gets popular and the whole thing will cost less than it does now.

IAAS is Infrastructure like Virtual Machines, Networking and Storage in the cloud. Software you wrote that runs locally now will run the same up there. If you want to scale it, you'll usually scale up.

PAAS

Platform as a Service. This means Web Servers and Web Frameworks in the cloud, SQL Servers in the cloud, and more. If you like Ruby on Rails, for example, you might write software against Engine Yard's platform and run it on Azure. Or you might write iOS apps and have them talk to back end Mobile Services. Those services are your platform and will scale as you grow. Platform as a service usually hides the underlying OS from you. Lower level infrastructure and networking, load balancing and some aspects of security is abstracted away.

SAAS

Software as a Service. Like Office 365, SharePoint, Google Docs or Adobe Creative Cloud, you pay a subscription and you always get the latest and greatest.

Scale Up

Get more CPUs, more memory, more power. Same computer, but bigger. Like, one 8-processor machine with 128 gigs of RAM, big. Gulliver.

Scale Out

More computers, perhaps lots of them. Maybe eight 1-processor machine with 2 gigs of RAM. No, maybe 32. More little machines, like Lilliputians working as a team to move Gulliver.

Compute

If a computer is working for you, its CPU is working and that's compute. If it's a Virtual Machine or a Web Server it doesn't matter. You get charged pennies per hour, more for larger CPUs.

IOPs

Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced "eye-ops." This is unit of measurement used to describe the maximum number of reads and writes to a disk or storage area.

Queue

Just like a Queue in computer science, it's a holding place that lets you store messages and read them back asynchronously.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Taking binary blobs within storage and caching them nearest where the content is request. If your customers are in Asia, serve the file from a data center in Asia.

Azure Specific Glossary

Web Sites

Web Sites are "PAAS," that's platform as a service. It's the IIS Web Server in the sky. This is the "Easy Button" as Jon Galloway says. You can take virtually any website and move them up to Azure using Azure Web Sites. You can run ASP.NET, PHP, node.js and lots more.

Azure Table vs SQL Azure

Azure Tables are similar to a document database or NoSQL store. Then there's SQL Azure, which is SQL Server in the sky. Great for SQL-like data with relationships and indexes, etc. There's Azure Storage Tables which is nice when you have a huge pile of records that maybe doesn't have a lot of interrelationships, but there's a LOT of it.

Access Control

Controls Access. Just kidding. No, actually I'm not. Also know as ACS, it's a hosted service that integrates with Microsoft ID, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other identity providers as well as Active Directory. It supports .NET, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, etc and you can use it as a centralized authorization store. You can call it with web services from any app and manage users and identities from the portal.

Notification Hubs

Push notification services for any mobile platform. Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Broadcast messages to a user across apps or send single notifications to a user,  a platform or any combination.

AppFabric Caching

In memory caching for apps that run on Azure. You can use existing memory on web roles or dedicate all of a worker roles memory to in-memory caching.

Mobile Services

This is a complete Backend in a Box for apps. This isn’t a great name because it’s not just for mobile devices. It’s a complete backend-as-a-service including authentication and CRUD data access with a dynamic schema in the backend. The services are server-side JavaScript and totally managed for you. Supports iOS, HTML, Windows Phone, Win8, Android, and more. 

Media Service

Media squishing and delivery in the cloud. Production and transcoding workflow, secure delivery to any device, scale up and down elastically.

Service Bus

Secure messaging across firewalls and NAT gateways. It also offers relayed messaging services. Most large hosted and reliable systems need messaging services, sometimes request/response, sometimes peer-to-peer, and sometimes one-way.

X-Plat CLI

An open source JavaScript-written command line tool for Azure management. With node.js and npm installed go "npm install azure-cli --g" and get a complete management console for Azure that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Big Data and HDInsight

Apache Hadoop in the Sky, running on Azure. Hadoop is a giant Java-based MapReduce system for creating data-intensive distributed apps. Azure adds lots to augment with .NET support, LINQ, reporting and more.

Blob

Binary Large Object...it's any binary blob you've put in Azure storage. Throw them in, get them back.

VHD

Virtual Hard Drive. Just like a VHD in Hyper-V or Virtual PC, this binary file represents a complete virtual disk.

Adding more than one disk to a Virtual Machine is a quick and easy way to get more speed for free. For example, if you've got a Virtual Machine running Windows AND a Database like MySQL, you'll have the database application and the Operating System competing for the maximum number of IOPs supported by the disk. Instead, make a new disk and mount it, putting the database on its own drive. This way you've doubled your IOPs with the OS on one drive and the database gets the maximum from its down drive.

Drive

You can mount an single Azure VHD as a disk drive within a Virtual Machine or you can mount Blob Storage as a virtual drive of its own.

Related Links

• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Enabling New Relic Performance Monitoring on Windows Azure Websites
• Penny Pinching Video: Moving my Website's Images to the Azure CDN (and using a custom domain)
• Penny Pinching Video: Moving an Azure Website between data centers
• Pinching pennies when scaling in The Cloud - lazy loading images and using the Azure CDN to save money
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: How to run a two day Virtual Conference for $10
• Azure Web Site Cheat Sheet

Did I miss anything major? I'm sure I did, but I wanted to show folks that it's a glossary, sure, but it's not rocket surgery.

Sponsor: A huge thank you to my friends at Red Gate for their support of the site this week. Check out Deployment Manager! Easy release management - Deploy your .NET apps, services and SQL Server databases in a single, repeatable process with Red Gate’s Deployment Manager. There’s a free Starter edition, so get started now!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" Newsletter of Wonderful Things. Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. You can view all the previous newsletters here.

Here's the newsletter that I sent out August 5th. You can sign up here to the Newsletter of Wonderful Things or just wait and get them weeks later on the blog, which hopefully you have subscribed to. Subscribers get the goodness first!

Hi Interfriends,

Thanks again for signing up for this experiment. Here's some interesting things I've come upon this week. If you forwarded this (or if it was forwarded to you) a reminder: You can sign up at http://hanselman.com/newsletter and the archive of all previous Newsletters is here.

Remember, you get the newsletter here first. This one will be posted to the blog as an archive in a few weeks.

• OK, I admit that I DID read this deep analysis on the Klingon Forehead Problem. You will too.
• What happens when The Matrix style special-effects are applied to Major League Baseball? FreeD is amazing.
• The Wolverine Diet. I submit again, Hugh Jackman is 44 years old and I'm fat.
• An open letter to Sal Khan. Some math educators feel that the Khan Academy videos need more academic rigor.
• Excellent idea...a silicone band that holds your phone to your bike. Finn.
• 1978 Boba Fett Costume Screentest
• The world's most highbrow jokes.
• Calca is an amazing text based iOS calculator
• Geocities is back. https://neocities.org
• Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum.
• Jimmy Fallon, Robin Thicke & The Roots Sing "Blurred Lines" (w/ Classroom Instruments)
• Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,099-Panel Comic "Time"
• Another "World's Largest" photo: See Tokyo like never before.
• Woman's four-and-a-half-foot afro is the world's largest
• Female athletes' biggest opponents are their own breasts
• Do you have a digital or social media will? Who will maintain your life online when you're dead?
• Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming."
• Daria Movie Trailer (with Aubrey Plaza) - CollegeHumor Video
• A Universe Full of Planets
• 1,138 behind the scenes photos of the Star Wars Trilogy
• 10 Words That You’ve Probably Been Misusing
• Sorry, astrologers - this is what it really means when a planet is in retrograde
• A statistical analysis of The Simpsons to answer the question, mathematically - Do they like each other?
• Star Wars photoshopping contest
• 53 'Arrested Development' Jokes You Probably Missed
• Watch Michael Jai White and Kimbo Slice, two exceptional fighters, talk candidly about throwing a punch.
• How Nerf Became the World's Best Purveyor of Big Guns for Kids

Scott Hanselman

(BTW, since you *love* email you can subscribe to my blog via email here: http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman DO IT!)

P.P.S. You know you can forward this to your friends, right?

Sponsor: A huge thank you to my friends at Red Gate for their support of the site this week. Check out Deployment Manager! Easy release management - Deploy your .NET apps, services and SQL Server databases in a single, repeatable process with Red Gate’s Deployment Manager. There’s a free Starter edition, so get started now!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I got a very earnest and well-phrased email from a young person overseas recently.

Some time in my mind sounds come that Is that I am really a developer or just a good googler. I don't know what is the answer I am googler or I am developer. Scott Please clear on my mind on this please.

This is a really profound question that deserved an answer. Since I only have so many keystrokes left in my life, I am blogging my thoughts and emailing a link.

I've felt the same way sometimes when playing a video game. It'll get hard as I progress through the levels, but not crushingly hard. Each level I squeak by I'll find myself asking, "did I deserve to pass that level? I'm not sure I could do it again."

You get that feeling like you're in over your head, but just a bit. Just enough that you can feel the water getting into your nose but you're not drowning yet.

First, remember you are not alone. I think that we grow when we are outside our comfort zone. If it's not breaking you down, it's not building you up.

Second, anything that you want to be good at is worth practicing. Do Code Katas. Do a Project Euler problem every few weeks, if not weekly.

Third, try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work.

Fourth, think about the problem, deeply. Read about algorithms, read Programming Pearls, read about Design Patterns. Rather than copying code from Stack Overflow, copy patterns from the greats.

Fifth, get involved. Go to User Groups, Nerd Dinners, meet with others who feel the same way you do about technology. Stretch.

What do you think?

Sponsor: A big thanks and a warm welcome to Aspose for sponsoring the feed this week! Check out their Aspose.Total for .NET has all the APIs you need to create, manipulate and convert Microsoft Office documents and a host of other file formats in your applications. Curious? Start a free trial today.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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