Here’s the slides from Jim‘s and my recent presentation at Tech Ed 07 on the Gold Coast and in Auckland:
LearningToLiveWithTheStaticTypingFascistAndTheDynamicTypingFanboy-TechEd07.pptx (Powerpoint 2007)
LearningToLiveWithTheStaticTypingFascistAndTheDynamicTypingFanboy-TechEd07.ppt (Powerpoint 2003)
You may also be interested in having a read of the abstract.
Silverlight
Software Factories
DSLs
Currently, Microsoft’s take on DSLs is GUI editors, not written language or code. At the Software Factories talk, a GUI tool in Visual Studio for drawing your business entities and relationships was billed as a DSL.
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
New in the Enterprise Library 3.1
Jim Webber and I will be co-presenting at Tech Ed Australia and Tech Ed New Zealand this year. Here’s the low down:
Gold Coast
Thursday 9 Aug
5pm – 6:15pm
Auckland
Tuesday 14 Aug
2:20pm – 3:35pm
“What’s best for your enterprise? Is it the ‘glue that never sets’ and flexibility of dynamic languages like Ruby, or the tried and true, hard and fast rules and tool support of static languages like C# 3.0? Are there different trade-offs for green field development and integration?
And more importantly, which is best, the Mac or PC?
In a dynamic, and combative presentation, Jim and James will let their alter-egos run amok and answer these questions from the perspective of a seasoned enterprise architect and a l33t hax0r. By the end of this session you will understand the interplays between the two personality types, have had a few laughs, and picked up a few tips on how to use both technology
sets in harmony in your enterprise. “
Hope to see you there!
Better than money can buy. Made by my dad 🙂
A present from my adorable fiancée 🙂
I generally use Subversion for source control when given the choice. In day to day usage, I like to use Tortoise SVN as it gives you a GUI with tick boxes for files to check in. However, it’s handy to use the command line tool for project setup and automation.
Often, there is a subversion repository already set up and running on another machine. In this situation, I generally:
svn remove log/* svn commit -m "removing all log files from subversion" svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/svn update log/ svn commit -m "Ignoring all files in /log/ ending in .log" svn remove tmp/* svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/ svn update tmp/svn svn commit -m "Ignoring all files in /tmp/"
There’s more Rails/Subversion info to be found on the Rails wiki.
The Castle Project is an interesting open source alternative to ASP.NET / ADO.NET. Among other things, the Castle Project provides a Rails-like development framework for .NET. It has an ActiveRecord implementation built on top of NHibernate, a very Rails-like MVC setup called MonoRail, and uses NVelocity for template style views. It’s worth checking out. This screencast gives a bit of an overview.
There’s tough competition around the corner though, with Orcas already in beta, providing XAML, LINQ and O-R mapping.
Are C# and .NET losing ground as Martin Fowler suggests? Or is Java’s market share dropping? What about Ruby? And what about the Australian market in particular?
Here’s what I’ve been able to find.
Job Trends
Which technologies have the most demand for people?
From Indeed.com, which claims to search “millions of jobs from thousands of job sites”, but I suspect may have a USA focus:
“Best Talent Index May 2007” from Best People Solutions gives an Australian perspective:
Here’s job counts from the (largest?) primarily Australian job search site Seek on 5 June 2007, 3pm (today):
| Keyword(s) | Number of positions found |
| Java | 3,414 |
| “.NET” or “dot net” | 2,744 |
| “c#” or “c sharp” | 1,722 |
| ruby | 100 |
As an aside, I remember doing a search on Seek for “ruby” about 6 months ago, and getting under 20 jobs mentioning it.
Search Engine Number of Hits
Extract from the TIOBE Programming Community Index for June 2007:
| Position Jun 2007 |
Position Jun 2006 |
Delta in Position | Programming Language | Ratings Jun 2007 |
Delta Jun 2006 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 |  |
Java | 20.025% | -1.10% | A |
| 2 | 2 | |
C | 15.967% | -2.29% | A |
| 3 | 3 | |
C++ | 11.118% | +0.45% | A |
| 4 | 4 | |
(Visual) Basic | 9.332% | -0.85% | A |
| 5 | 5 | |
PHP | 8.871% | -0.72% | A |
| 6 | 6 | |
Perl | 6.177% | +0.17% | A |
| 7 | 8 |  |
C# | 3.483% | +0.25% | A |
| 8 | 7 |  |
Python | 3.161% | -0.30% | A |
| 9 | 10 | |
JavaScript | 2.616% | +1.16% | A |
| 10 | 19 | |
Ruby | 2.132% | +1.65% | A |
I think this gives a good idea of web buzz, but suggest that most non-IT companies do not publish information about their projects and chosen technologies and languages on the web.
Conclusion
The data collected suggests that:
Thanks
Thanks to Jason Yip and Suzi Edwards for their help finding/sourcing information.
In a model class which has ‘quantity’, ‘quantity_already_taken’ and ‘quantity_requested’ properties, I add the following:
def before_save quantity = 1 if quantity == 0 if quantity + quantity_already_taken > quantity_requested ......
Tests blow up everywhere with:
TypeError: nil can't be coerced into Fixnum (on the line with the addition)
Why?
After a little more debugging, it is clear that ‘quantity’ is nil. How could that happen?
The answer lies in the fact that Ruby requires an explicit self reference when using attribute writers (aka, property setters) within the class itself. This feels clunky to me, but for your information, here’s a rationalisation of the explicit self requirement.
So, in case you’re wondering, what happened above is that the ‘if’ line created a nil local variable called ‘quantity’! This local variable then had higher scope precedence than the class attribute with the same name. The addition line was then using the local ‘quantity’ rather than the class attribute and hence failed with the nil error.
All fixed by explicity referencing self:
def before_save self.quantity = 1 if (quantity == 0) if quantity + quantity_already_taken > quantity_requested ......
Let me tell you a sad tale. One day, out of the blue, the digitizer on my palm started to drift. Every hour, it got worse. This meant that when you tried to click a button like ‘Add’ the Palm thought you clicked ‘Delete’ – no fun at all! It was possible to temporarily improve the situation by running the re-calibration program built into the system, but within a few hours, where you clicked again had very little relation to where the Palm thought you had clicked. After about a week, it was not possible to run the re-calibration program, as the digitizer was so far out (program just looped forever so I had to reboot the Palm). I discovered that there are actually keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and that the 4-way nav button gets you most places, so the device wasn’t a total write off. However, it was slow and cumbersome to use.
Now, one month later, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to know that things are better, the sorry tale has had a happy ending (touch wood!). Much googling led to many suggested approaches to fixing the problem including:
However, all of these approaches ended with disappointment and no noticeable improvement.
Finally, near buying myself a new device (aside: it is a shame that Palm has not managed to produce a device significantly better than my several year old Treo 600), I came across a site selling replacement Treo 600 digitizer/screen modules. They kindly provide a very useful movie on pulling your Treo apart to help you replace your digitizer/screen module. With little to lose, I decided to open up the case of my Treo and see if there was anything I could fix.
Following the instructions in the movie was not too difficult. I didn’t have a small star alan key myself (required for opening the case), but I borrowed one from my dear dad, who has an amazing tool collection. Also, lacking a plastic case opening tool, I used a butter knife – this worked OK, but did damage the plastic of the case a little. If you have something made from thin and strong plastic, like the case opener in the movie, it would be a better tool for the job. I had a great time pulling everything apart and finally had all the components spread out before me. I cleaned the screen carefully (there was a fair bit of grot around the edges), fixed the buckled taping on the side of the screen, and put everything back together, carefully re-seating the various cables.
And now, almost a month later, the digitizer still seems to be working fine! Hurrah! So if you are contemplating what to do about your Palm’s broken or drifting digitizer, I recommend pull it apart, clean it all and re-seat cables and then hope for the best!
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