Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Last Friday, myself and a colleague, Laurence, undertook what is possibly one of the most nerve-racking things a developer can do, in what is otherwise a very safe line of work: we wrote code in front of people. Now if you have never done this, you’re allowed to wonder what the big deal is; if you have, you’ll know what I mean. There were around 30 people, effectively looking over my shoulder whilst I wrote the front end to a super duper game: noughts and crosses (or tic tac toe if you prefer). It was extremely nerve racking; but it was great fun too.

Why would I want to write a game of noughts and crosses? Well we were giving a presentation on Test Driven Development (TDD) to Eurotherm’s R&D department. To do such a talk, one really needs to write some tests, and if one writes tests, one really needs to write code to pass those tests. Thus why I was sitting there, with people watching me write code. The presentation went very well, despite it being the first time either myself or Laurence had attempted such an ambitious task. Now part of the reason it went so well is because I have learned that essential ingredient to any presentation: rehearsal. I practised writing the code about ten times before the day. But I also think there was another ingredient to the success: TDD itself.

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This year’s Flash on the Beach event takes place from November 4th - 7th. Now while the organisers are providing evening entertainment, there is far better entertainment on offer on the 5th: Bonfire Night. For those of you attending who live outside of Britain, you may be unaware of Bonfire Night. It involves lots of fireworks and, in parts of the country, parades, noisy, smoke and some amazing sights. It just so happens that my home town, Lewes, organises one of the country’s biggest, loudest and most visually spectacular bonfire night events in the whole country, and it is just 12 minutes train journey from Brighton. The more adventurous visitors to Flash on the Beach may wish to arm themselves with lots of warm clothing, drinks of their choice and a camera before visiting this amazing spectacle.

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Imagine you live in the States (if you already do, I guess it won’t take much imagination, but work with me here) and want to attend a Flash conference. Do you visit Flashfoward in Boston; or do you fly thousands of miles across the Atlantic to visit Flash on the Beach in Britain? Well it seems that the smart money says visit the latter. Jon MacDonald lives in Oregon, yet he is saving himself a few hundred dollars by coming to Britain for a Flash conference. As he points out on his blog, not only does he save himself money, he gets to have a holiday Britain too. Perhaps Flashfoward might want to rethink their ticket prices!

When I registered for Microsoft’s MIX:UK event, I received an automatic invite to the Mix:UK backnetwork. All very fine and dandy I thought and so I filled out all of my details and joined. I didn’t find it overly useful, but it had potential.

Today I received an automatic invite to the Flash on the Beach backnetwork. Now that is handy, or so I thought. I followed the links, expecting to find my details already filled out. They weren’t. I had to create a new username and password, so perhaps they’d appear when I did that. Nope. Two backnetworks supplied by the same company - Madgex Limited - with two copies of my data and no way for me to share it between the two.

Perhaps I’m just naive, after all these “social networks” are provided by the conference organisers to promote their conference and they are therefore unlikely to be interested in helping to promote others. But that’s not the point in my view. I want to share my profile across the two and I don’t much care what the conference organisers think. So for me, what could have been a great conference networking tool is ruined by poor implementation.

However I’m an eternal optimist. I’m a great believer in complaining when things are wrong, as they will never be put right otherwise. So perhaps Madgex will fix their product for me

Scott Guthrie announced yesterday that the final release of VS2008 would have a new feature: access to the .NET framework source code when debugging.

The reaction though from some has been fascinating. In my view it’s a really useful feature that is long overdue and Microsoft deserved to be thanked for providing the feature and chided for taking so long in equal measure. Others go further though. Gavin Clarke, over on the Register, suggests that “Microsoft is continuing its hesitant slide towards open source by releasing .NET code under a look-but-don’t touch license.” Well maybe; but I doubt it as a “look-but-don’t touch license” makes sense as Microsoft keep control of .NET; a true open-source “take-it-and-screw-with-it” license doesn’t make sense as Microsoft could quickly lose control of .NET. At the other end of the scale, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in an eWeek.com article argues that “Microsoft’s so-called opening up of .NET Framework is setting a trap for open-source programmers. Open-source developers should avoid this code at all costs.” I personally think that Steven is being downright paranoid in suggesting that Microsoft are seeking to destroy the Mono project with this move.

When we see Microsoft threatening patent action against Linux on the one hand and opening up their source on the other, it is easy to invent conspiracy theories and to fear the worst. I feel the reality is simpler though. The sales and marketing aspects of Microsoft fear anything that they perceive might hurt sales, so they fear Linux and love secrecy. The developer aspects of Microsoft recognise that the software world is too big, with too many opinions, for one company to control it all and that openness leads to bigger and better things for all. Developers will be developers; marketing people will be marketing people and the paranoid will see conspiracies where really there is just normal human behaviour.

I came across a great cartoon yesterday from a cartoonist I’d never heard of before, Randall Munroe, who does an online comic at xkcd. If you find the words difficult to read, click on the cartoon to go to the original, larger copy. Enjoy!

Life used to be simple. If you did Windows, you did Office. If you did Linux, you did Open Office. If you did Macs, you drew pretty pictures, edited movies and probably used some obscure office package that was the best thing since white plastic on gadgets. Then along came Google with a funny idea: run the office app “in the cloud” and access it via web browsers. Turns out though that the big guns of the computer world didn’t think it such a funny idea after all and are taking it seriously. So this week has seen Microsoft launch the beta of their Office Live package and Adobe have bought up Virtual Ubiquity (which was of no surprise as they funded its start up in the first place), the producers of the Flash-based word processor, Buzzword.

Of course in true “emperor with no clothes” style, people seem unwilling to point out the obvious: the web browser is a really clunky naff way of supplying the power of office tools, but since when has common sense ever stopped people? I don’t think it is all a bad thing though, as the desire to run desktop apps within a browser is pushing the development of Silverlight, Flash, AIR and the like. And the collaborative features of the Google spreadsheet program should hopefully push “real” office apps in the same direction. Sometimes a funny idea can have great consequences.

With Silverlight 1.0 released, I guess we have all been wondering what Adobe’s response will be. After all, Silverlight appears a better product than Flash 9, so a response is clearly required. Well their response has been made and it’s right to left text! Uh?

OK I’m being unfair, there are some other new bits, it’s just that they seem to make a huge play of the fact that finally, after ten versions of Flash, they are providing proper text support. In addition, 3D rotation of objects becomes easy to do and a new bitmap filter system, complete with a new language, codenamed Hydra, is to be introduced in the new player version.

Aral Balkan videoed the one new and interesting bit (according to him) of the keynote speech at this year’s MAX event in Chicago. As an aside, what is it about keynote speeches? This one sounds as unrevealing as Microsoft’s MIX:UK keynote. Anyway, that aside, the video is available on YouTube, which handily allows it to be embedded in a blog. So see for yourself what the new features in Flash Player 10 will be: