*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I was going through mail this morning (no not email, real mail) and my mortgage lender sent me an advertisement regarding Total Protect’s Home Warranty. I normally don’t read ads but this is from my lender so I read them all just in case. It’s funny because now that we are home owner’s my biggest fear is some major gizmo in the home is going to all of a sudden quit and I’m going to have to fork over thousand’s of dollars to get it either fixed or replaced. Probably my biggest concern is air conditioning. We have two air conditioning units for our home. One cools the north wing and other the south wing. If one of them all of a sudden goes, we are talking thousands of dollars. Living in the heart of the south where temperatures are above 90 degrees each and every day for 4-6 months out of the year doesnt’ help my feelings either. My mother-in-law just had to replace an air conditioner. Her air conditioner was over 20 years old but she doesn’t run it that much. I figure it got about 4-5 years of solid use compared to mine since our’s stay on all the time. Insurance is primarily peace of mind but is it worth it? According to the brochure I got the price of the coverage would be $36.95 / month and a $50.00 deductible. Using the quote rate on their web site our deductible would be $95.00. Either the mortgage lender doesn’t know how big our house is or they are cutting us a break. Either way I’m going with the $50.00 because that’s what I have in writing from them. So $36.95 / month is $443.40 a year. If an air conditioner blows up within the next year or a refrigerator, I’m ahead. If a washer or dryer goes I break even since I can buy a new dryer or washer for that amount of money. But what about stoves and garbage disposals? The bottom line is how much stuff breaks? I don’t know nor can I remember from growing up. What are your thoughts? Home Warranty insurance good or bad?

For anyone that knows me, you know my musical taste lies in the 80’s. Call it what you will, the 80’s still rock. Nothing gets me coding in the morning like a good dance hit from the 80’s. I found a web site that allows you to watch over 1400 80’s vidoes! You remember videos right? The things MTV started back in the 80’s but abondoned for crappy shows like “Real World”? If you want to get your 80’s video fix for the day head over to http://www.freephotosandvideos.com/ and ROCK OUT!

Tom Hollander, who is on the Enterprise Library team, posted to his blog the Enterprise Library team want everyone’s feedback for the .Net 3.0 framework release.  As I sat and thought about this in relation to .Net 3.0, the more I thought about it and started to write about it, it just all became crystal clear.  Here’s my wishlist for EntLib 3.0:

1. $20 – Add the EntLib console configuration tool into Visual Studio IDE.  Lot’s of people mentioned this in comments, so it looks like this should definitely be on their list.
2. $20 – Integrate GAT to assist setting up EntLib based on the best “patterns” and “practice”. 
3. $60 – Workflow Block

Integrating GAT with EntLib
Number one above is is self-explanatory so let me first start with number two.  If you think about abstracting and best practices and patterns you think of EntLib, however, there is one missing piece of the puzzle.  That missing piece is there is a best practice and pattern for how to setup and use EntLib.  If you are starting out using EntLib you are more than likely not going to use an “established best practice or pattern” as to how you should use EntLib.  I’ve seen this over and over when you want to create a new application to use EntLib you wind up holding onto one configuration file that you are familar with and copying and pasting.  Wouldn’t it be nice to simply install EntLib and using the GAT (guidance automation toolkit) you could create an “Enterprise Library Web Service”.  The GAT would then guide you through a configuration wizard of best practices and patterns on the recommended configuration and setup for EntLib based on the chosen application.  At least this would provide a baseline, and I think, a higher adoption rate of Enterprise Library in the enterprise.  It would also make it easy for anyone to start using thereby eliminating lots of training overhead to get up and running.

Workflow Application Block
Let me explain my reasoning for the Workflow block and why I invested so much into it. First and foremost Tom asked what we would want in regards to the 3.0 framework.  One of the new features of the 3.0 framework will be Windows Workflow Foundation.  For developers, this simply means you have a new set of APIs namespaced as System.Workflow. 

If you look at the existing blocks of Enterprise Library ( data, logging, exceptions, etc) these are all derived from currently existing Namespaces within the framework. The goal of these blocks are to abstract, simplify and tie each block together so it can be used with one another.  This is where the power of Enterprise Library comes in.  Since this would be a 3.0 release of Enterprise Library, Workflow is a major new namespace that will be available to us in the .Net 3.0 framework.  Having an easy way to re-configure workflow through an application config file and/or manage workflows via an application block to me makes perfect sense. If you’ve played with Windows Workflow Foundation you realize a lot of things could be abstracted.  Really this abstraction is no different than how EntLib provides the data block today.

Here are a couple of scenarios how I would want to use the Workflow block.  For example, imagine being able to configure EntLib when an exception is raised to be processed through the Workflow block instead of how we do it today via Categories. So based on the exception type, time of day, user that created the error, what phase the moon is in and how the stars align at that given time, the error could be routed via the Workflow block to the appropiate place.  With place being an email, log to database, notify pager, create a support ticket in an internal helpdesk system, notify your helpdesk, whatever.   Essentially what we *try* to do with EntLib today a lot of the time is make our logging blocks do workflow by creating tons of different categories based on different rules.  We wind up with a HUGE config file that becomes, well, HUGE.  Instead of doing things the way were are today, just simply have a workflow that you can define to handle all logging, exceptions or whatever.   

That’s my $.02.  I’ll be here all week.

One of the biggest challenges I see team members at work struggling with when trying to learn .Net is “how to get started”.  If you are a developer with lots of experience, coming into VS and .Net things are very different let’s face it.  For example, what’s the right way to setup a project?  What’s the difference between a solution and project?  Everyone knows about n-tiered architecture, but how do you pull it off in Visual Studio?  If you are using TFS how do you setup projects so they can be easily versioned?  How do you organize the name spaces of projects?

I put together this video cast which is about 30 minutes long which I hope addresses some of these questions.  It should serve as a good starting point as how to setup a project when starting out, things to think about like namespaces and how to name your projects.  I’ve built a lot of production apps over my time and what is in the video is all based on experience so if you know of an “easier / better” way please drop me a line.  In the future things like GAT (guidance automation toolkit) will provide an easier way to accomplish what I’ve outlined in the video.  If you haven’t looked at GAT, you should definitely do so. 

Watch The Video Cast

(this is a repost of a post that was lost due to data loss)

Last week was Tech Ed week.  Sorry I didn’t blog any entries on it.  I was still recovering from my web host loosing 2 months of my data.  It is hard to recover from a loss like that.  Not to mention  I spent ALL of my energy walking 11 miles a day riding the bus back and forth from the conference.  Everything you’ve read about the bus and traffic situation in regards to this year’s Tech Ed is absolutely true.  Enough of that though, let’s talk about the goods!

Now that Tech Ed is over, the raffles and drawings are being done by the vendors.  Everyone that went to Tech Ed and registered at every single vendor’s booth like I did should be checking their spam filters daily during this time just in case something gets caught.  That would be terrible to actually win and not know about it.  

Last night I learned that I was the Tuesday winner of the “Cingular Mobility Pack”.  This is a GREAT win because it includes all of the following hotness:

1. Cingular 8125 Pocket PC Phone (HTC Wizard, I-Mate K-Jam, etc) ($499.00)
2. Cingular 2125 Mobile 5 Smartphone  ($299)
3. Sierra Wirelss Aircard 860 PC Modem ($199)

Is this complete hotness or what!!!!!? Depending on how you rate the price of the 8125 phone, this is a $1000 or $1200 retail value.   For those “not in the know” let me explain the 8125 phone real quick.  First and foremost it is a Pocket PC with a sliding keyboard.  Allthough it is branded as the 8125 from Cingular it is in fact known as the HTC Wizard since HTC is the manufacturer.  It is also known as the I-Mate K-Jam, the QTec 9100 and so on.   The phone has WIFI, Bluetooth, full keyboard etc.  It is a beast of a phone and a great form factor.

The same phone in an I-Mate K-Jam unlocked version was being sold at a discounted price at Tech Ed for $630 so it isn’t a cheap device by any strech of the imagination.  When I went to the Cingular web site to grab the links I noticed they are running a special on the 8125 phone right now for $189.99.  But that is one of those sign up new plan deals, not if you just walk in and buy it.

The funny thing is I picked up an 8125 while at Tech Ed and as of Monday I’ve been enjoying Direct Push email on it after applying the new update.  I’ll be doing a post about the phone later to give you some more insight.

Quick FYI:  For my personal taste I liked the K-Jam phone better because of the keyboard.  But $630.. are you kidding me?  I was talking to Steve Riley about his K-Jam phone and his take on it was to get the QTec version of the “HTC Wizard” phone because the K-Jam comes with software that slows it down.  Anyway, now I have 2 8125’s and a 2125.  I’ll probably give the 2125 to my wife if she wants it.  Of course, one of the 8125’s is going on Ebay. 

Josh Holmes won an I-Mate K-Jam at one of the parties on Tuesday night and he proudly rubbed it in our face all week. So for Josh, back at you now buddy!!!!!!!!!!

Update 6/24/2006 8:56 AM
It turns out the wife doesn’t want the 2125 phone.  She wants to keep her Motorola phone that she has been using for almost 2 years now. Her unwillingness to change is my personal gain! So as it stands I think what I’m going to do is keep both the 8125 and the 2125 and simply swap them out when I need to.  For example if I go mountain biking, fishing, running, saving the whales, solving world peace and hunger or whatever I’ll just take the sim card out (another reason to have a GSM phone thank you very much Verizon) and put it into the smaller 2125. 

My OEM 2GB MiniSD with SD Converter came in that I picked up from Digital Media off of Amazon for the low price of $40.  Not only is the price outsanding, but having the ability to convert the mini to a standard SD card is awesome.