Just put out a new version of IceIp, now with c# source.  Get the details over here.

After reading Jason's post about Cargo Cult programmers, it made me think about times when this may be appropriate. 

A friend of mine who owns a software company has approached me to do some work for him.  He has a project that needs a few new textboxs, a few elements moved on reports, etc.  I told him I would look at the code see what we can do. 

After looking at the code, it was obviously a cargo coder job.  Win forms app, access backend, inline sql, with a ton of replace(string,”'”,”''”) lines, etc.  Looking at the code I can't help but cringe, but thinking of the apps purpose really put me in perspective. 

This is a very small app used to manage an intramurals sports league.  Now this is not a typical app out of his shop, but definitely closer to what he sees on a daily basis then what I see.  And I can't help but think, is there a place for cargo cult coders? 

The apps that they work on are typically one or two user apps for smaller vertical companies.  This is the kind of app that a coder like me might make into 4 tiers of highly abstracted objects, modular ui, the whole nine yards.  At the end I could step back and look at my masterpiece, and send a bill probably 2 to 3 times that of the cargo cult coder that would do the same app in half the time. 

So now should I preach to him design patterns, the beauties of tiered environments, and really try to push my passion on to him?  I think I could, but boy would he be bored.  But to the same point, if I worked on smaller apps like this on a daily basis, I would be bored.  This begs the question, is there a distinct line between the passionate, and the business side, and is there value in this line?  I think so.  Of course any developer he works with could catch the bug and start reading everything Fowler, and more power to them, but then I think they would outgrow their role, still leaving the need for a new cargo cult coder.  Thoughts?

In a design session earlier this week, two of us were working on our transaction handler.  One of the things that came up was how to implement IDisposable, since we wanted to make sure we did some housecleaning when the unexpected happens. 

We all know that we're in a managed environment now, and sometimes it becomes unclear to the developer what, and when to clean.  One thing we visited is setting objects to null/nothing.  I was pretty surprised to read that this can extend the life of your objects, but after thinking about it, it makes total sense.

The GC collects based on when the object was last used, and the CLR sees setting an object to null/nothing as a use, therefore settings to null/nothing has the possibility of extending your objects life. 

It is important to understand the distinction between disposing an object, and setting it to nothing.  The IDisposable pattern notes that in Dispose() we should free unmanaged resources, which is still very important.

Moral of the story, in most situations its appropriate to just let your objects falls out of scope, unless you are utilizing managed resources, in which you should implement IDisposable.  Not new information for anyone, but a friendly reminder since it was on my mind.

For anyone thats interested, I plan on releasing a new version of Iceip this weekend.  This time with the code.  Iceip is an app I made to keep my zoneedit profile up to date since I was sick of updating my ip daily.  There were other options out there for apps, but none of them suited me quite right. 

Iceip runs as a windows app, and works exclusivley with zoneedit.  My goal was to make an app with a small footprint that would find my ip, compare it to the last time it checked, and update a number of domains if my ip changed.  I have been using it for a few weeks now, and it works pretty well.  It also logs everything, so I could even see when snet had a fiber cut a couple weeks ago.

The app is written in c#, and uses a dataset to store all the options and history.  Again, basic, but does the job.  The new release will have an updated ui, and a few bug fixes.  You can always get the latest version from my home site.

I had just been looking at xtras.net, and had almost signed up.  So I was pretty happy when Jeff posted about a promotion they are running for .net bloggers, so I'm going to try to cash in on the deal.  Heres the details .

Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 for anyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.

I have always known that working with value types in .net can be a hassle, simply because sooner or later you want a null.  Not some value that represents a null, but a real null. 

At work we came across this yet again.  The issue is that any given entity can have a DateTime field, and how do you expose that in such a way that you can set it from any source, and get it in such a manner you can reliably check for null.

On past projects I have seen date fields exposed via string properties, and the accessors do the dirty work.  I am thinking we should be doing the same here, but now with more “inputs”.  Its frustrating that if you set a field from a DataReader.Item, a DataReader.Get(Type), or a DataTable, you may have diff values, even if the value is the same in the database. 

My plan is to make a DateTime replacement that will handle data coming from a variety of sources (via Object), and then always expose strings.  This seems like the cleanest way to implement it while still being able to encapsulate most of the work, but still seems far from ideal.

Has anyone seen any elegant solutions for handling this?  I thought I had seen “nullable datetime objects” around before, but when it came time to find one, I was SOL. 

I really wanted this to be more active then it has been lately, but it is for good reason.  I have been working on an article outlining the build process I have posted about.  It should hopefully be available later this month, and will outline how all of the products work together, as well as samples of how to tie everything together.   More details to come,,,

It was about a year ago that I found .net rocks.  After listening to the current episode, I decided to go back and listen from the start.  Last Friday I was finally caught up.

So first of all I would like to thank Carl, Mark, and of course Rory for giving us such a fantastic show.  I wear my geek badge proud as I drive down the road with my windows open, and the theme from google weirdo’s blaring, and the guy in the truck next to me looking at me really funny.  Anyone that hasn't given the show a shot, make sure you do. Check it out here

Here in lies the issue though.  After listening 2 hours a day for months now, what am I to do?  My first inclination was to only go to work when there’s a new episode, but I figured that both my boss and my wife wouldn't be very happy with that. 

So now with this void in my life, I guess I will either have to learn to like music again, or just start from episode one again.  Maybe I'll see into getting some old episodes of car talk as a nice happy medium. 

Build process prototype finally complete.  Thanks for McP's initial prototypes, I finally got the process working end to end today.  Although a bit of a chore to get everything going, once it's going there's nothing better then checking in some file and seeing ccnet kick off the whole process. 

ccnet watches vss (probably change this to a few daily builds)
ccnet kicks off nant build script
nant builds both sln, and test sln to versioned dir
nant kicks of nunit on test sln
nant kicks off fxcop on sln
nant kicks off ndoc/vbdoc and makes html/chm
nant cleans/copies to latest
ccnet collects nant, nunit, and fxcop results, emails buildmaster, and waits for us to check on web

Hardest part was getting fxcop and nunit results into ccnet.  After some searching, I found the easiest way was to kick out both logs to a XX-results.xml in the latest dir, then have ccnet merge the files into mail ccnet file.  The newest build of ccnet handled fxcop out of the the box.

Couple this with the document generation out of EA, and whats left for us to do?   Oh yeah, code. 

Recently, I got sick of having my ip change, and my dns not be updated.  I use zoneedit for all my dns needs, and have looked into a few options for dynamic updates.  Nothing was quite what I wanted.  I wanted a little app that would update my list of domains with the current ip, only if it changes, and if it can't update, email me the ip.  So after a few nights with the thinkpad, and I have a beta.  I have been using it here now for the last day and it seems to be working well.  There are a few issues, and the email portion is not implemented yet, but it works.

If you have never looked at zoneedit for DNS I would suggest it.  Full free DNS (first 5 domains), with well priced add-ons like mail backup.  With this app, using it with a dynamic ip should be a snap  :)

Anyone whos interested, or even if your not humor me and at least check out the link  :)

www.iceglue.com

After working with Together for VS.Net and Enterprise Architect, our initial thoughts were that Together, or at least the description of the next version from Borland, was the product for us.  The modeling was very simple, and LiveSource was a very nice feature.  LiveSource keeps the source, and the diagram in sync at all times, kinda cool.  This was despite bugs in how the current version of Together works with VSS.  There may be work arounds, but it seemed to want to check the whole project out for every change.

So we start to contact Borland while we begin testing Enterprise Architect.  Having always been a fan of Borland, I was floored by my experience with them.  It was so difficult to talk to someone about the product.  Horribly difficult.  After leaving a number of voicemails and emails to various people I was referred to, we never got any of our serious questions answered.  But two people offered to sell it to me.  To their credit, I was contacted by a support engineer a week afterwards. 

After testing Enterprise Architect, though, it was easy to walk away from Together.  Within two hour we had the corporate trial installed, a model deployed to SQL Server, and a couple developers working in the designer.  The designer, although not as convenient then being directly in the IDE, easily makes up for it with its power and flexibility. 

EA allows users to lock the various objects within the model, and does it pretty well.  You can lock and unlock items through a context menu in the model explorer, much like vss integration in vs.net.  I'd like to see more visual notifications of which items are locked.  Sometimes you start to type in a new member, and realize the object is locked. 

In all, though, EA seems like a fantastic tool.  The learning curve is pretty minimal, and has an extremely robust feature set.  As far as team enabled editors, I didn't see anything that comes close to the feature set anywhere near the price point of EA. 

Did more searching on c# edit and continue, and it's not hard to find proof of the opposite.  It's a shame.

http://blogs.msdn.com/andypennell/archive/2004/02/03/66949.aspx

Stumbled on this thread over the weekend.  Interesting read about the futures of VB.Net and C#, and why they may be on different paths.

First off, it's the first I have heard about c# and edit and continue.  I may have been the only one, but I was definitely happy to read that.  On the other hand, though, some of the things stated about the different paths make me worry slightly about VB.Net's future.  I hope Microsoft does not try to dumb it down for productivity, move away from the notion that VB.Net is a first class citizen.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=OY0SJiZCEHA.2256%40TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl&rnum=8&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dvb.net%2Bc%2523%2Bc%252B%252B%2B.net%2Bproductivity%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%3DOY0SJiZCEHA.2256%2540TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl%26rnum%3D8

We have been doing a decent amount of UML at work, and we anticipate that we will be doing quite a bit more.  We have been using Visio to model classes and sequence diagrams for some logical design, but find that the lack of team support is really a hindrance.

Because of that, I have been researching some team based UML tools lately.  I am actually surprised how few vendors there are with products.  I could only find a handful of UML tools that would work in a team environment, and most of them were very costly.  We are a relatively small team, and using something like XDE is a bit of an overkill, plus a huge cost that was never expected.

If anyone has any experience out there with UML tools it would be great to get some opinions on tools they have used in the past.  Below is what I have found so far.

Visio for Enterprise Architects (Microsoft)
Visio's UI is familiar, and Microsoft added UML support in an intuitive manner.  Adding diagrams and objects is very simple and fast, and quick to get used to.  The internal validations work very well, but too well in some instances.  For example, Visio doesn't allow an actor as a valid object on a sequence diagram. 

Visio does allow for very quick creation of diagrams, but its lack of team features are a major hindrance.  We thought about trying to partition the diagrams, but felt the integrating diagrams was going to be too much overhead.

Enterprise Architect (Sparx Systems) www.sparxsystems.com
EA is a very capable UML modeler.  The new version 4.0 cleaned up the interface quite a bit, and added to the already impressive set of features.  EA is very robust, and flexible.  I found moving around in diagrams to be very intuitive, and EA's handling of packages to be excellent. 

The UI does take some getting used to though.  Working with the actual objects can be cumbersome.  For example, adding an operation or attribute to a class is at 5 clicks away from the diagram.  After getting used to the UI, though, the amount of power is daunting. 

The professional version is team enabled, using a JET backend.  It also supports 2 models, using a shared file, or using a replication model.  Our team may be small, but maybe just a bit too large for a JET backend, so the corporate edition looks like a real possibility as it uses any oledb source.

Together (Borland) www.borland.com
My first impression of Together was that it was clunky and really a chore to use.  After giving it some more time, I have quickly changed my mind.  Once I got used to the VS.Net addin, I found it to actually be the most comfortable UML modeler I had used.  Working in the diagrams is very fast and easy, and navigating around is very simple also using the model explorer.

Together does not seem to be nearly as robust as EA, but has all of the elements you are used to working with.  Also, using what Borland calls LiveSource, your class diagrams and source are kept up to date on the fly.  I must say it was impressive to add a property in code, and switch to the diagram to see it already added. 

Right now Together doesn't support VB.Net (which is an issue since we are a VB.Net shop), but Borland has informed us that the next version will, and that it is slated for this quarter.  Since the diagrams are added directly to your solution, your source control ends up enabling team usage.  Right now there is a known issue that when you check out any of the diagrams, you will also need to check out the project (at least with VSS).  We have to evaluate how this may effect usage. 

Thoughts
Well I rambled on long enough about this.  Right now I hope we end up using Together, but it will really depend on what they can tell us about the upcoming version.  More details soon.