Ted is a fine writer, and his points intelligently argued. I am perhaps a bit more direct (crass?) and less politically correct, so I thought I might elaborate a bit on his thoughts. It is not just that our technical decisions are influenced by emotional context. In fact, the Dilbert Principle applies - we are all sometimes idiots.

As technologists we delude ourselves into thinking that we make clear-headed decisions based on logic. Nothing can be further from the truth. Not only are we influenced by emotional factors, they are often the dominant factor in our technical choices.

I remember noticing even as a kid how fads would come and go in our neighborhood. One week it would be spinning tops, another paper airplanes, another endless games of Monopoly (today’s equivalent would be video games and web sites - and I date myself intentionally for reasons that will soon become apparent). Technology fads operate in much the same way, though the time span is measured in months and a few years instead of weeks and months.

The C# vs. VB .NET debate has been raging for years, with the VB .NET folks claiming (correctly) that it’s a fine language and raging that Microsoft insiders refuse to give it the support and respect it deserves. Meanwhile the C# folks feign obliviousness (oh, we didn’t provide VB .NET support or samples for that new SDK? Oh… well… uh… we didn’t have the resources?).

This misses the point entirely. The C# vs. VB .NET dilemma is purely emotional. The VB .NET folk (of which I am one) will continue to use the language because, gosh, it really is a bit more productive than C#. Besides, any good VB .NET programmer can read C# examples or even code C# if necessary because we know it’s all about the framework, and any half competent VB .NET programmer can do C# in a matter of hours, if not days.

Meanwhile the C# developers within (and outside of) Microsoft will ignore, denigrate or avoid VB .NET because, let’s face it, it gives them something to feel superior about. When a C# developer says “VB .NET is the language of idiots”, by implication that developer is not an idiot. That’s a strong emotional statement - especially given that the rapid pace of technology change means that each and every one of us spends more and more time feeling like an idiot (which we are, in the sense that the percentage of available knowledge that we know continues to decrease because what there is to learn increases faster than anyone can possibly learn it - I’m just one of the relatively few people willing to admit it openly).

If a C# programmer, can gain some emotional comfort to offset this by labeling VB .NET developers idiots, who can blame him or her?

I’ve reached a point in my career where many working software developers are younger than I am (many of my contemporaries have become managers or architects, and while I do some of that, I still write lots of production code - mostly because coding is what I enjoy most). I’d always bought into the idea that software development was a “young person’s game” and wondered how long I’d be doing it - but I’m beginning to wonder if that too was an emotional belief unfounded in truth. I’ll write more on that later.

What I do know, that many younger programmers don’t, is that the amazing “new” technology that they are excited about that is sure to change software development forever is, more likely than not, just another fad. Moreover, I also know that most of the new technologies coming from major vendors (including Microsoft), though always labeled as “new technology that is going to change the way people develop software or use technology” is, more likely than not, just marketing hype that is trying to create another fad.
Ok, that’s phrased a bit cynically - because it makes it sound like they are being manipulative. They aren’t (mostly) - it’s just that they, like everyone else, are viewing the technology through an emotional lens. My emotional lens is scarred and cloudy, not because I’m a pillar of reason (I’m not), but because after you’ve lived through enough fads you get better at spotting them. Or put another way, once you’ve been burned often enough you start thinking twice about what part of the technology furnace you shove your hand into.

I don’t know that I’ve gotten better at making reasoned technological choices - but I’ve gotten a lot better at avoiding emotional and unreasonable technological choices - and in figuring out when it is ok to make a technology choice based on emotion.

Ted asks at the end of his post:

“In short, I actively seek to defeat technical folk etymology, if only in the small area I personally can affect.

Do you?”

You can’t defeat it - emotions will almost always trump reason. But sometimes you can co-opt it. Fads aren’t defeated by reason - they burn themselves out naturally only to be replaced by the next fad. Just remember that when you’re trying to prevent someone from making a terrible choice based on emotions, it’s not enough to use sound reasoning - you need to come up with an emotional argument as well if you hope to succeed.

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This actually posed an interesting challenge. Jim used RSA encryption (about 10 bits) to encrypt the strings. I’m not sure why he chose an asymmetric algorithm instead of a symmetrical algorithm - as the primary result of this choice is to make it hard to create new Email addresses (in a symmetric algorithm you could use the decryption key to encrypt as well - so the loss of the original page would have had little impact. In an assymmetric algorithm having the decryption key offers no help). Fortunately, the algorithm itself is reasonably simple and widely published. Though I use cryptography a great deal, this was actually my first time doing the math, and translating some of the mathematical requirements into computer algorithms took a bit of thought. It was also the first time I’d really thought about modulus math. Finally, there was the Javascript coding itself. Though my primary expertise remains VB .NET and C#, I’ve gotten to do quite a bit of Javascript in the past couple of years (both in web projects and some Ajax work), so that part was relatively simple. By the way, I love the Visual Studio 2008 Javascript debugger - it doesn’t get much attention, but it’s very cool. As a side-effect I also got a nice prime number example to use next week at SD-West when I talk about the TPL, I mean “the Parallel Extension to the .NET Framework”.

So ultimately I was able to get it to work. It’s now live and hopefully will serve as a good resource to those left stranded when Jim’s page went down, and the rest of us in our never-ending battle to fight spam.

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Lately things have been a bit quiet here. I haven’t posted much on my blog. I don’t speak at too many conferences (though I will be at devconnections next week and probably in Spring - it’s actually a very cool conference, so I do encourage you to consider it if you’re looking for one to attend). I’m not writing much.

Why?

Well, I know this may sound odd coming from someone who obviously (if you look around this site) has very diverse interests. But the truth is that despite the time spent writing, speaking, developing other sites (like searchdotnet.com), I’ve always been and continue to be primarily a coder.

Not a manager. Not a trainer. Not an architect. A coder.

Yes, I do all those other things. But first and foremost I write code. Why, I even ship code.

The other day I had one of those really great experiences that are, I think, the reason I still code. I thought I’d share it.

I do a small amount of consulting. Small projects. I particularly like tough problems. On this particular gig I’d worked with the client to come up with a very elegant solution to a problem - but one that I wasn’t sure would work. I dove in one afternoon and before I knew it, it was 4 am. I hadn’t intended to work that late, but the project was a seemingly never-ending series of obstacles and I kept coming up with just one more thing to try. In fact, I had my computer off at 3 and was about to go to sleep when sure enough - one more idea needed trying (which worked! - which is why I was able to fall asleep at all).

I slept for maybe 5 or 6 hours, then dove in again. By noon I not only had a proof of concept - I had completed that part of the job.

Aside from that sense of relief ; that my design was, in fact, viable - I think the greatest satisfaction came from knowing that I still have what it takes. I may not stay up with all of the latest technologies (there are just too many technologies to keep up with, so I increasingly have to pick and choose), but when it comes to solving a problem with code, I’m not only as good as I was, I’m better (because now I know that it’s not just about the code, it’s about the cost of the code - something I really didn’t get when I was starting out).

I know many coders who have moved on to other things. Management is common. Speaking and training is as well (though let me stress, I know some great speakers and trainers who write production code also). Some have gone into real-estate (oops!). If you’re one of those who have drifted away from coding, and you miss the coding, maybe it’s time to give it a try again. I’m not talking about VB or C# necessarily - the learning curve on .NET is probably too much for casual software development. Check out other languages.

For example: lately I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on Powershell. Don’t believe the marketing - that’s it’s a management and administration tool. Well, it is - but it’s actually a very cool .NET language. And despite it’s C like syntax (curly brackets), it’s incredible interactivity (it is a true interpreter) feels a lot like traditional BASIC. If you’re looking to “play” with .NET, and don’t mind spending time in a command line environment, check it out.

Well, that’s it for now. Remember to stop by searchdotnet.com - I recently added some more expert sites (thanks for the recommendations) and while it isn’t “code”, it’s still one of the recent things I’ve done that I think represents a real contribution.

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When I’m traveling on business, I’m like most “road warriors” - I have a full featured powerful laptop that can handle not just the basic Email/web stuff, but development work, run virtual machines, etc.

But sometimes I travel for fun, even take a short vacation now and then. And on a vacation, a developer laptop is like a sailing with your anchor dragging behind you. You’re constantly worried about it getting lost or stolen, or breaking. That’s not much fun.

My needs for a casual laptop are different. It has to run Windows and be full featured, but doesn’t have to be fast - I won’t be doing any serious development work on it. It has to be light, maybe a few pounds. Oh, and it has to be cheap - so if I lose it or it breaks or is stolen, it’s no great loss.

There are some very nice ultra-portables out there, and more coming, but they aren’t cheap. In planning for this summer, rather than shopping for something new, I decided to explore another alternative. I have a Thinkpad 240 lying around that I hadn’t used in a while. Could it be brought up to date?

So for those of you who are interested in a nostalgic trip into ancient (2000) technology, or picking up one yourself ($75-$125 on Ebay), read on…

This Ol’ OS

Like most machines, this one has accumulated a lot of crud. So I knew I wanted to start with a clean OS install. And at this point Windows 98 is out of the question for security reasons. Even Windows 2000 (that I had installed previously) is borderline. So I was looking at XP. Fortunately, this laptop was just new enough so that IBM had updated the BIOS to support XP. So step one was to install the bios upgrade (that’s one of the nice things about IBM/Lenovo - they keep old support files and info up forever).

I had an old 40GB laptop drive to drop in the machine (easy to do with all Thinkpads), but how to get XP on it - given the machine doesn’t have a CD Rom drive? The PCMCIA drive bay that holds the CD doesn’t help - you can’t boot to PCMCIA.

Fortunately, XP can still support a traditional DOS install. So first I copied an XP image to a FAT32 partition on the hard drive (using an external adapter on another machine). Then I booted to a DOS floppy (created on another XP system), and did the DOS install. It took a while, and the partition organization is odd (system drive is D), but it worked perfectly.

Peripheral Vision

The Thinkpad 240 has a single PCMCIA slot and a single USB 1.1 slot. Worse, it has no built in network or wireless (modem is standard though:-) ), so it’s pretty limited. Time to go shopping…

Fortunately, I live near a Fry’s Electronics. Like most electronic/computer stores they have a wide selection of PCMCIA cards and USB devices. Unlike most stores, they have the bottom shelf.

What’s the bottom shelf? That’s where you’ll find the super-discounted no-name brand manual-written-in -something-that’s-almost-English of whatever it is you’re looking for. $40 later I was home with a high speed wireless USB stick, USB 2.0 PCMCIA card, 10/100MB USB adapter and a 27 in 1 memory card reader (it is vacation, and there are all those digital photos to store).

Getting the drivers on the machine was easy. A USB thumb drive let me copy the contents of the various driver CD’s to the system using the standard USB port. Once the USB 2.0 card was working, I could plug in a USB DVD drive I already had available, and I could install additional software. All of the other devices came right up and worked perfectly. All that remained was to leave the machine running overnight installing software from Windows Update.

Memory

A 300Mhz Celeron running XP… this really is just fast enough for the basics: Email, the web, Word - one application at a time. But a 300Mhz Celeron with 192MB? On some things it just died…

The problem is, 192MB is the maximum officially supported on this machine. Fortunately, we now have Google, and it turns out I’m far from the first person to want to upgrade this machine. I discovered that you can get 325MB on it (replace the 128MB memory card with 256 - you can’t change the built-in 64MB chip). But not just any memory will work - you need an older style that has 8 chips on each side of the card (or so say the people on the forum I found). That brought me to EBay, where for under $50 I found exactly the memory that was known to work.

Mission Accomplished

The extra memory made all the difference. The machine is still slow, but it runs everything (even Visual Studio 2005) and is stable. It’s clean - no personal information to worry about if it vanishes. And total cost was under $100 (I know, I’m not counting my time, but who really does when dealing with this kind of technical challenge)?

Meanwhile, it’s small, it’s light, and the various peripherals add hardly anything to the travel weight. It should work out well.

If you decide to give it a shot, remember that the 240 came in a number of different models - some of which have only 64MB. If you get that one, you’ll definitely need to upgrade the memory. Good luck!

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I could not resist speculating on the consequences of a merger between Microsoft and Yahoo, to be named, I presume, Microhoo. First, the new company will need a logo, which will inevitably look something like this:

The advantages of such a merger is hard to deny. I can easily picture Steve Ballmer in a cowboy suit yelling “Microhoo!” in their T.V. commercials, while a chorus of CGI characters chant “where do you want to search today?”.

Frankly, it’s hard to see the benefits to Microsoft of such an arrangement, other than to provide the Office folks with a model for yet another completely new and incompatible user interface for Office 2009, this one with each application so full of custom user definable configurable widgets that the only thing missing will be space for the actual application content (not to mention the incorporation of annoying popup and layered adds that will appear on documents while you work on them).

The benefits to Yahoo, however, are undeniable and should strike terror into the execs at Google. With insight from Microsoft’s marketing folks, Yahoo will quickly be able to launch a new search service modeled after Microsoft’s product development techniques - one that is able to search sites that will not be launched for several years yet.

Will Googleclick (Google’s new name after purchasing DoubleClick) be able to use it’s total knowledge of the intimate details of every person’s life be able to overcome the challenge of Microhoo’s total control over every piece of computer hardware in the universe?

Only time will tell..

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But over the past couple of years a quiet revolution has happened at Microsoft that is starting to have a huge impact - especially on more advanced developers or those working with newer technologies. An impact on discoverability that is perhaps second only to MSDN itself.

We all know about Microsoft’s initial love-hate relationship with blogging. And of course, former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble was probably the single greatest driving force in getting Microsoft to recognize the value of blogging as a communication tool. But Robert was an evangelist, and while he may have exposed us to interesting technology, that’s not where the really important change happened. The really key change is that at some point it became common (encouraged?) for Microsoft developers to blog about their work. I suspect Robert helped bring about this change as well.

When I started working with Microsoft technologies, the developers lived in an ivory tower (with individual offices, of course), and it was extremely difficult for anyone not at Microsoft to actually communicate with them directly. Worse, anything they knew about the technology they created could only be released to the world after going through the filter of the product documentation group, whose expertise often seemed more in the area of obfuscation than communication.

Now, a few years later, the bloggers on the developer team have generated a substantial body of work. And while they do talk about all kinds of things, many of the posts are about the technologies they are working on - and as the ones who wrote the code, the information you’ll find there can be incredibly valuable.

It’s for that reason that when I built searchdotnet.com, one of the first sites I added was blogs.msdn.com - and that I tagged the entire site as “by experts”. These blogs don’t always come up on the top of the results, but I’ve found that the tougher the problem is, the more likely it is I’ll end up there, reading some incredibly detailed explanation of why a particular design choice was made and as a result what I’m trying to do can’t possibly work.

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Shortly after the interview, a listener (at least I believe it was) posted a comment on my post describing the launch of SearchDotNet.com where he noted “A little Google homepage widget would be a nice addition”

What a great idea. Of course, I’d never actually written a “gadget” for Google, but it turned out to be remarkably simple, at least as far as simple gadgets are concerned. First I wrote a “Universal” gadget from use on custom Google Homepages. These were also supposed to work on Google’s desktop, but it turns out the latest version has a bug that prevents this for now. So I went ahead and created a Google Desktop gadget, that’s a somewhat trickier process.

While working on the gadgets I also realized that the site still had the minimalist (i.e. ugly) user interface I’d thrown together on the day I launched. It may seem odd that I hadn’t noticed this, but while I use searchdotnet.com all the time, I actually use it from the browser search box (the site has implemented OpenSearch from almost the beginning, so it’s always available as one of the search providers on my browser).

So I spent the past few days cleaning up the site. Not that I’d call it beautiful, but it’s quite a bit better than it was. More important, it now makes proper use of both CSS and .NET master pages, so I’ll be able to more easily update the design later.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank readers who have recommended additional sites for searchdotnet.com - I didn’t add all of them (there’s a new section of the site that discusses inclusion criteria), but I did add many of them, particularly some great new experts sites.

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As a developer, the computers I use have certain characteristics that I think are common among most software developers - at least those in the Windows world. My machines tend to be reasonably powerful, and reasonably new. The software I use also tends to be very recent - in may cases pre-release. Older software, especially that used to perform builds, is relegated to stable systems or virtual machines.

When advising others, whether they are general users, small businesses, or enterprises, I take into account that their needs and perspectives are very different. Their systems may be older, and they often have favorite or legacy software which can be difficult, expensive or impossible to upgrade.

In my previous post I said:

First, I think upgrading to Vista is generally not worth the trouble. There’s still enough software that is “quirky” under Vista, and it’s demanding enough on computer resources, that if you have an XP system that’s working the way you like it you should leave it alone. I don’t believe in upgrading existing OS’s in general - plenty of time to do that when you get a new system (which you probably do every year or two anyway).

From a developer’s perspective, this is accurate. Allow me to rephrase this for these other groups.

I think upgrading to Vista is asking for trouble. Much of your current software won’t work properly under Vista, and upgrades (if available) probably won’t be free. If your system is more than a year old, Vista may slower than what you’re used to and, depending on your hardware, you may not even be able to run it due to missing drivers. Some of your USB and other devices won’t work either. If you have an XP system that’s working the way you like it you should leave it alone.

Let us not mince words. Unlike some past operating system upgrades, software compatibility was not a high priority for Vista.

Technology vs. Marketing

This does not upset me. Microsoft judged, correctly, that many of the security issues that plague Windows are a result of an architecture that has roots in a more innocent age, where security issues were much simpler and the Internet a plaything for a few academics. Vista represents in many ways a clean start. Those pesky UAC prompts will vanish as developers gradually learn to write cleaner code that does not require administrative permission. In the long run, the changes to Vista will the norm, and problematic applications will be as rare as 16 bit applications are today. Microsoft also developed good resources and tools to help evaluate systems and determine potential migration problems ahead of time.

Where Microsoft has erred, and erred seriously, is (as usual) in their marketing. With hype and advertising, Microsoft has gone to the masses and asked them to upgrade their current systems to Vista. They have done so without adequately warning people that their favorite software may not run or may require expensive upgrades. They have pressured hardware vendors to stop selling XP (or sell it only at a higher price on selected systems), forcing those buying new systems into a catch-22 situation where they must not only purchase new machines, but upgrade all of their existing software (at a cost often greater than the hardware).

Microsoft’s technology strategy with Vista will ultimately benefit all Windows users. But their marketing strategy with Vista is absolutely contrary to the best interests of many of their customers. It might be good for the bottom line initially, but ultimately is likely to backfire. While most of the comments I’ve heard about Vista from developer friends has been positive, most of what I’ve been hearing from non-developers has been uniformly negative.

My Advice for Microsoft

Remember, when the first 32 bit OS came out Microsoft continued to ship 16 bit operating systems for years - despite the fact that using WOW16, NT was able to run most 16 bit applications. Within the 16 bit OS line, backward compatibility remained outstanding, as it has (until now) within the 32 bit OS line.

Here’s my wish list of what Microsoft should do in the best interest of their customers.

1. Continue availability of XP on new machines for at least another year (license terms to PC vendors such that machine prices are the same regardless of OS choice). This will allow more time for software vendors and especially driver vendors to complete migration.
2. Include prominent warnings on upgrade packages letting consumers know that their current software may not run under Vista.
3. Support Virtual PC on all versions of Vista. Making Virtual PC free was a great move on the part of Microsoft. In fact, I’d like to see the software included on the system, with a consumer friendly shell or wizard.
4. Include an XP license for Virtual PC with each Vista license. When an application is determined to be incompatible, guide the user on installing it on the VPC image instead.

I have a friend who is running a rapidly growing business. He recently purchased a number of new desktops with Vista - he had to buy Vista because the vendor could not provide him XP on the lower cost machines. Unfortunately, some specialized software he uses in his business won’t work under Vista. So he ended up obtaining XP licenses, reformatting the drives and installing new systems. The cost to him in terms of time and frustration probably exceeded the cost of the hardware. Was it his mistake? Perhaps. But “let the buyer beware” is not the answer that he wants to hear, and he will always see Vista first as a source of frustration and cost and may never see or care about its benefits. That’s hardly the result of a successful marketing campaign.

My advice to non-developers is simple. If you’re buying a new machine and new software, go for Vista. But in terms of upgrading an existing machine - take your time.

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