We have a concept of what the learning curve represents, and unfortunately, the same thing can represent 2 opposite concepts. What makes more sense to me is looking at a learning curve from a classical labour cost perspective and more keenly towards labour productivity. In this sense, the learning curve is interpreted, broadly, as: the more you work with something, the more productive (cheaper, better, faster, more knowledgeable) you become. And one can recognise that sentiment when it’s expressed variously with respect to success, specialization, expertise, productivity, quality or minimizing costs. So where’s the investment?

Programming technology changes rapidly, and sometimes to the detriment of programming and business, sometimes not, but also to the advantage of progress and for the sake of technology itself. But changes are also forced to be incremental in order to be successfully adopted, since any radical departure will result in a prohibitively expensive learning curve where the economic costs outweigh the advantages of the change. Similarly, you also cannot force change too frequently, even if it’s small enough, since you never get to break even or realise a profit from the previous change. I think this last point might also be reflected in the current developer attitudes towards the “next big Microsoft thing” and the ubiquitous jading of old hats. Everyone seems to hanging five for a bit before moving forward. Or maybe Douglas Adam’s theory is kicking in?

At the same time though, you need to keep moving forward. So where do you invest your next generation of development so as to minimize the costs of the learning curve if you want to remain marketable and competitive across:
* web development
* mobile application development
* backend systems
* any platform (platform agnostic)

C++, C, C#, VB, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby… ?

All these languages have their pro’s and con’s and more importantly, costs. As an example, I recently looked at Symbian C++ development, and the learning curve is relatively expensive. The idioms alone take time to get to grips with, so although you got a very powerful API, C++ on Windows desktop, or legacy ATL knowledge is not easily transferrable to a Symbian C++ development effort. Possible, but no as easy as say, being able to use a standard framework and language, with the same idioms, on both (all) platforms. That would be the ultimate prize (for me).

And it doesn’t have to be the same language. Case in point, i’m currently using Monorail (.NET web development) and RoR (other web development) concurrently on different projects and i’m enjoying the benefit of being able to work in a predictable (hence productive) manner switching between the two, relatively seamlessly. Whereas, switching between asp.net webform development and RoR, as an example would not be feasible. The traditional 30% context switch overhead would double.

So if you’re faced with “what to learn next”, take a closer look at the learning curve and where you can (need to) apply that knowledge in the future, in order to remain competitive- whether globally, or within your own department. Maybe it’s stating the obvious, but it’s surprising just how un-obvious the obvious can become when there are a lot of flashing lights going off all the time. So it’s not always about the language or the technology, but also a lot about the “way” in which things are done; which, by nature, is usually a little more sublime to spot since it’s hiding in plain sight

Monorail rocks, but getting going in #Develop can be cumbersome in that you need to create a lot of placeholders. Fortunately, you can create a template which you can drop into your data/templates/project/CSharp sub-path of your #develop installation
for example: C:\Program Files\SharpDevelop\2.2\data\templates\project\CSharp
Using this template, you can now

Create a “MonoRails” web project

Have it create all the skeletal placeholders

Build (change relevant config settings) and view when hosting it locally

This template in it’s current form references the Castle binaries from the install directory. You might want to change that bit of detail if your installation is not “standard” (ie. next > agree > all > next > finish).

Download Template

What’s up with everything being ported to .NET? There’s nothing more boring than copying somebody else’s idea, unless of course, your own ideas are pretty crap

And (sup)porting a dozen applications to be used with the .NET framework surely cannot be considered as innovative either- it’s real name is “market strategy”. I must confess though, we’ve (that is, i) benefitted much from having tried and trusted Java libraries (example, NHibernate) ported across, but i’ve also wondered many a time, why not just use Java then? And now emacs.net?

An aside, what i loved about the marketing around NHibernate is that it builds on the solid reliability and legacy robustness of Hibernate in a Java world

But it’s all just recycled software ideas and methinks a large pop of the lemming community are looking for “innovation” in all the wrong places.

<warning>Massive Generalisation About to Occur</warning>

Software developers are more into being “advertained” (advertisement + entertainment) than any other population group i know. Trouble is, i always presupposed we’re more critical than most. But perhaps we’ve reached a point where we’ve started buying into our own hype? Afterall, we can make it fly with words like interoperability, multi-platform and integration. Oooooo… :p

Exception handling is important enough to get right. And there’s plenty of sample code out there to help you get it right, nonetheless, i come across two major variations:
catch (Exception ex) {
throw;
}

and

catch (Exception ex) {
throw ex;
}

There’s more about catching general Exception but that’s beyond the scope of this post. So, moving right along…

There is one other variation:

catch (Exception ex) {
throw new Exception(ex);
}
But the first two are more interesting. The second (throw ex;) is the least desirable, unless of course you have a good reason to not preserve the stacktrace.

Code attached rethrow.txt

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but this was super unpleasant to uncover.

I’ve got a website up ‘n running and wanted to add a webservice to it, aight? Wizards make the job easy so here i go:

“Add > New item > Asp.Net > Web Service > Ok” Programming has never been so easy…
Navigate to webservice and … *poof!*

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Line 1333:
Line 1334:    OperationBinding FindHttpBinding(string verb) {
Line 1335:        foreach (ServiceDescription description in serviceDescriptions) {
Line 1336:            foreach (Binding binding in description.Bindings) {
Line 1337:                HttpBinding httpBinding = (HttpBinding)binding.Extensions.Find(typeof(HttpBinding));
    
[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
ASP.defaultwsdlhelpgenerator_aspx.FindHttpBinding(String verb) in
c:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727CONFIGDefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx:1335

Not gonna lie- it wasn’t altogether _that_ intuitive to begin with. Appenders, logging levels, loggers and a whole bunch of different configuration going on: it wasn’t just working. But, i thought to myself: many others are happy with it so it must be worth the initial pain. Of course, in a world of instant gratification and high-speed demands, how long exactly do you sit with a problem?

If it’s a maths problem, like something involving integrals, sometimes you can do nothing but sit with it. No amount of Google is ever gonna give you the answer. And if you think it can, i’ll happily take on the challenge But this is code…

CodeBetter, CodeProject, Koders and even log4Net itself have plenty of sample code and tutorials designed to get you off the ground. And they all have their strong points so if you thinking about log4net, take some time upfront just to read how different people go about explaining various setups and configurations. You’re bound to find one you like. So back to this particular log4net experience…

What i wanted is to have an open console running which recorded anything i wanted while my asp.net application was executing. i love consoles ‘cos of their simplicity, power, flexibility and in-obtrusiveness. in the right place, at the right time, they definitely rock. So that’s the mission.

There’s this article which gave me a great jump start in the right direction. I made a few modifications (i am programmer) and as a result… well, this picture is worth a paragraph or two:

More than anything, this is testimony that log4net really does work despite some of the comments and posts (and initial pain) and once you’ve got it down, you can add massive geek-value to your project. You also just might have fun, but keep that to yourself

for a .net “junkie”, migrating technology skills can be quite daunting- well, that is for me at least. after too long a delay, i finally decided to start shifting some of my stuff across to Linux. i like the community drive behind Ubuntu and so… here i am. I guess there are lots of reasons for finally getting going with this… thing is, i’ve always enjoyed having an eclectic knowledge of sorts about technology in general and after so long into .net, it feels like i have an ecelectic .net grasp of all things microsoft. not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just not what i _really_ wanted anyways, it’s also hard to be technology-agnostic and objectively equipped to recommend a strategy you can actively be involved in when the last line of Java code you wrote was… erm… *then*. and as great as some of the .net stuff is [and 3.0 and upcoming LINQ... oooohhhh] i can’t help but think i could be _selling out_ if i don’t make a decent effort to stay even half-decently current across the board. now if i can get my wireless card to work, i could start blogging from my new desktop

This was a commercial online system- tried to make a reservation and…

This last year, we have uncovered numerous websites with some severe flaws. And sometimes there are fairly _large_ websites where you’d think they’d have more professional skill available to avoid the kind of things we end up seeing…

And i don’t think ca$h (lack of) is the issue- in fact, i supect that sometimes there is more than sufficient being invested. The resultant product and runtime errors that crop up are, well… for the reader to discern. The names have been hidden to protect the embarassed.

First up: TheBrowserBackButton
This is a large university’s website. I was browsing through the Maths and Computer Science areas when i clicked on my browser’s back button:

Maybe this was intentional? It sure does help getting a call from the help desk and they can tell you exactly which line of code is causing the problem

A while back i was trying to find a solution to the delegate gotcha and stumbled upon, even more recently, some answers to a lot of my questions… they trackback and link with each other at some point, but my entry point to this discussion was mostly through, in no specific order:
Observable property pattern, memory leaks and weak delegates for .Net. - Alexey A. Popov
Simulating “Weak Delegates” in the CLR - Greg Schechter
.Net 2.0 Generics, Anonymous Methods, and Delegate inference bug - Udi Dahan

After reviewing a lot of the different solutions, i’m currently experimenting with an idea. Given your usual suspect:

public class EventSource
{
    public event EventHandler FireEvent;
    public void OnFireEvent( )
    {
      if(null != FireEvent)
          FireEvent( this, EventArgs.Empty );
    }
}

I’ve reworked some ideas and using WeakReference, rewritten the EventSource above as follows:

public class EventSource
{
    private Dictionary<EventHandler, WeakReference> origDelgs =
            new Dictionary<EventHandler, WeakReference>();   
    public event EventHandler FireEvent
    {
        add
        {
            if( !origDelgs.ContainsKey( value ) )
                origDelgs.Add( value, new WeakReference( value ) );
        }
        remove
        {
            if( origDelgs.ContainsKey( value ) )
                origDelgs.Remove( value );
        }
    }
    public void OnFireEvent( )
    {
        foreach( WeakReference aref in origDelgs.Values )
        {
            if( null != aref.Target )
            {
                EventHandler hdl = (EventHandler)aref.Target;
                hdl.Invoke( this, EventArgs.Empty );
            }
        }
    }
}

Now, at least, if my sink goes out of scope, it won’t get resurrected
Will continue experimenting with this idea and see how it performs….