Scott Hanselman

Very well written and thoughtful article by Stephen Chu up at InfoQ.

To be fair, I still think .NET is great. It has offered me a place where I am consistently delivering great business value to my clients. However, I constantly remind myself that there are multiple ways and numerous technologies to solving a single problem, some better than others. By being loyal to one technology stack, I am bound to unconsciously make biased decisions, which will ultimately hinder my ability to deliver business value.

Here's some choice tidbits, emphasis mine:

There are a few hurdles I had to go through in learning Ruby. First, I had to go through the emotions of accepting the fact that it will take longer to find a new Ruby solution than to use an existing technology that I am comfortable in. This is by far the most painful experience. But, after a while, you will start cherishing the fact that you are starting to develop multiple ways to solving different problems, and that’s where the pleasure comes in. Secondly, reading about Ruby/Rails only gets me so far. Practically using what I have learned helps me to remember what I have learned. Remember, use it or lose what you have invested time to read about.

This article says, better than I could, why .NET folks should look at Rails. If you're resistant to change (or installing things) try Instant Rails. If you refuse to install anything, and still want to Try Ruby, then try it directly in your browser.

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'll be speaking with Patrick Cauldwell at the West Coast 2006 Patterns & Practices Summit (PNPSummit) October 9th-12th this year. If you haven't registered and you've got some training dollars, do check out this event.

Check out the schedule of sessions. Not only are Patrick and I there, but Corillian's own "Agilist" Wayne Allen is speaking on Continuous Integration as well.

There's a great lineup for this event this year, including talks from Ted Neward, Jim Newkirk, Peter Provost, Brad Wilson, Rocky Lhotka and many other technorati's with keynotes from Brad Abrams, Scott Isaacs, Jack Greenfield, and Rick Maguire.

Hope to see you there! I'll be ducking out occasionally for the Windows PowerShell Developer Conference happening the first two days. Busy week!

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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We needed to create an IIS Application and Virtual Directory programmatically and while we were doing this, ensure that the VDIR would run only under ASP.NET 2.0. We could certainly shell out to ASPNET_REGIIS.exe to do the work, but this would recycle the whole of IIS (basically every AppPool).

Scott Forsyth at ORCSWeb, my very awesome hosting provider, has an article on a simpler way to make this happen. (It's an older article and older code, but it does work on 2.0 with some simple mods)

It's pretty clever actually...he just spins through the scriptmaps and replaces the current ASP.NET version with the one he wants. The end result is that only that AppPool needs to reset, it's faster, and you don't need to shell out. Thanks ScottF!

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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Is it worth the prerequisite runtime installation of the .NET Framework 3.0? I think so. It was mistakenly "released" earlier this week, but only for @nytimes.com and @microsoft.com users. Today it's available to everyone.

The look and feel is very nice. The initial sync of content is a smidge slow, but it can be schedule and run in the tray. The NYTimes Reader can be run with just the arrow keys and page-up/down keys and includes the new scaling and text-flow techniques introduced by WPF which means it looks good on the largest or smallest of screens.

The same page appears in the left screenshot resized very small and to the right maximized. Notice the number of columns changes and the image adjusts to an appropriate position.

You can register (free) and download the NYTimes Reader yourself and enjoy. It's a great example of what WPF can do without being garish. It's a clean and elegant and ultimately newspaper-like experience, and it has full-screen mode - always a plus.

The only think that could have made it a nicer experience would have been support for ClickOnce, but they apparently wanted their installer to warn the user about the need for the .NET Framework 3.0 and walk them through it, which I understand.

You might think, why download an app like this that only gets Times content? Well, there's a crapload of content and it just about justifies an app...you get the whole paper. But for me, this app is a harbinger of what the first awesome WPF RSS Reader should look like. If this is what  FeedDemon could do for my feeds (Nick, are you listening?) that would be utterly wonderful.

This app has just the right design, font style, font anti-aliasing and font scaling, to make reading a newspaper on your an enjoyable tasks. Go get it.

UPDATE: I just realized that this feels a lot like PointCast. I bet some of these young Web 2.0 kids don't remember PointCast and we'll see history repeat itself, this time with WPF and RSS.

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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TechEd Europe is brilliantly being split into two halves - TechEd Developers and TechEd IT Forum. What a freaking awesome idea. I hope they do it that way in the states next year.

I'll be doing Patrick and my talk from TechEd US, with a new name (changed from Dirty SOAP):

ARC308 Contraxploitation (Exploiting your Contracts): A Dynamic Web Services Endpoint without WCF 
Scott Hanselman - Thu Nov 9 15:45 - 17:00 
Not every large system in the wild can use .NET 2.0, ASMX and WCF. Often the real world isn't very pretty, or formal use of .NET ASMX Web Services doesn't lend itself to a particular solution. Corillian's software handles a quarter of the nation's retail banking online population with .NET. The system is built with a contract-first approach using WSDL and a custom binding to generate in-process service proxies. When it came time for Corillian to present their Operations as SOAP, we created a dynamic endpoint - WITHOUT ASMX. We then extended it to support POX (Plain Old XML). In this session, we discuss the architectural and design ramifications of managing a dynamic endpoint and how this decision will positively or negatively affect our move to WCF. 

I'll be showing a lot more code, as that was a bit of feedback from the US session that I'll incorporate into this one.

As an added bonus, Mo's new U.S. Passport came, as did Z's, so it'll be a family affair!

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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