*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Recently at work we have been having some discussions around standardizing .Net development around Rockford Lhotka’s CSLA framework.  My team has been digging into CSLA for several weeks now generating business objects using Codesmith Freeware 2.6 and working through Rockford’s book generating CSLA objects for our main product.  With only a few weeks into it and no real production time behind the framework we are having a hard time jumping on one side of the fence or the other.  There are things we like about CSLA such as the ability to restructure an application from a two tier to a three tier application just by changing the config file.   Maybe those of you that have used CSLA can chime in and provide some constructive criticism or positive feedback about your experience.

Before you jump in and start commenting here is some background on why this is being considered.  I think it is important to know why we are considering this path. 

The main reason we are looking to standardized development across various teams is we have teams moving to .Net and we have teams that make it hard to move engineers among the various projects as needed.  Today there isn’t a standard on how applications should be built and each team builds things the way they chose.  Some people may think that is good since it gives developers flexibility but it also causes problems.  For example, one team may use NHibernate and another might use something else.  If a team member needs to be reallocated to provide an additional resource to a project the problem arises they are no longer productive because they don’t know NHibernate.  Now of course this can be said for any variety of things.  Obviously having a standard each team follows would be beneficial.

In addition to reallocating resources other teams are moving into .Net from various other platforms.  Given the fact there are 15 ways to do data access alone we are trying to minimize that thought process so the engineers can focus mainly on business development not the “how”.   The CSLA framework is very attractive from this angle because it provides a wealth of documentation whereby we could hand an engineer a book and they can learn how things are done.  They also don’t have to know the internals of CSLA since they are going to focus on business rules, validation and security. 

That’s some of the thought process going on.  There are other things we are considering as well but I don’t want to get into all of the details.   The community in general seems to be somewhat happy with CSLA and then there are some that are not.  I have always said you really don’t know a product until you put it into production.  For those that have heard me speak, you know that I don’t normally speak on topics until I have put them in production and gone through all of the rusty washers.  So for those of you that have used CSLA for a lengthy amount of time what are the rusty washers or shiny pennies you found?    

Please keep your emotional flames to yourself, I don’t want this to get ugly and turn into a Y vs Z vs X debate, just the facts.  Ok, that’s it.  Ready?  Discuss! 

I mentioned the other day that five team members from work were coming to Mississippi for the weekend.  Chris arrived this morning about 11:00.  Soon after arriving we found out his luggage never left Detroit.  Hopefully it will arrive when we go to pickup the other guys at 8:30 tonight.

After getting in we headed to “The Front Porch” to eat a nice Southern buffet for lunch complete with fried okra (which Chris had never tried), brisket, turnip greens, purple hull peas, gumbo, cornbread, yeast rolls, mash potatoes and gravy and much more.  I think Chris ate his own weight in brisket and couldn’t stop laughing when the guy that served him was so nice.  Or maybe it was his accent. 

After that we went to the house and I gave him the tour of the Elder Estate.  He took a ride on the John Deere in the back yard and was disappointed at its speed.  As I pointed out the JD is made for hauling and is geared low.  So far so good and no one is in jail yet.

For those that want to follow along I’ll be uploading all the pictures to Flickr to the Mississippi Retreat 2007 set.

Team building is an important part of work.  A lot of companies, ours included, promotes team building exercises.  This helps to build moral among the team and if other teams are included it helps to break down silos.  Currently I live in Hattiesburg, MS but I work remotely for a company in Michigan called Quicken Loans.  Being a remote team leader has its challenges, one of which is team building.  How do you do team building when you are 1,000 miles away?  This weekend we are doing what I think is going to be the ultimate team building exercise. 

A few months ago I was sitting around thinking what I could do as a team exercise.  The team is unique in the fact it is made up of all guys who all have similar personalities and are close to the same age.  Typically as long as there is fun and adult beverages involved they are happy.  The team members always kid me about living in South which I love.  I thought what better way to show them how the other half lives than invite them to come down for a weekend getaway fun trip and stay with The Elder?  That is what I did.  I put out the invitation and not surprisingly everyone on the team accepted.  We set a date when it worked for everyone, ordered plane tickets and made it happen.  Friday all of them are flying to Mississippi for a weekend in the South. 

What do you do with five guys from the North (4 michiganders, 1 canadian) in Hattiesburg, MS for a weekend?  Turns out there is a bunch of things depending on scheduling.  Friday night they will be landing at the local airport around 8:30 PM.  We have some great BBQ places in the area so I’m going to pickup some BBQ at a local place and we’ll have some BBQ on the deck when we get back to the house.  Of course you can’t have BBQ without a frosty adult beverage so I’ll be picking up a couple containers of some Mississippi brew from Lazy Magnolia brewing company.  After some BBQ and a tour around the home stead we’ll head to town to checkout the local scene.

Saturday we are loading up in the Aspen and heading to New Orleans, LA.  I’m not sure where we’ll eat lunch at but a local cajun place for sure.  I have to get the Michiganders and the Canadian some authentic gumbo, and other southern dishes to fill their bellies.  After that we’ll hit downtown New Orleans, Pat O’s, Hard Rock, etc.  Assuming we make it back from New Orleans in one piece on Saturday, Sunday we are going to eat at the best buffet in Mississippi and then head to the coast (about 60 miles from my house).  During downtime I’m sure we’ll fire up the XBox on the HDTV and try our hands at Guitar Hero II. 

All in all it is going to be a fun filled flavor of the South weekend with gorgeous 75-80 degree weather.  A quick note for the guys coming down, leave your LLBean jackets, shirts, and boots at home.  You won’t need ’em!

Codemash 2008 scheduled for January 9th-11th is only a few months away.  It seems like only a few months ago I was watching Jim Holmes walk around the Kalahari Resort in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops with six inches of snow on the ground outside.  Good times.  Another Codemash event is just around the corner and rumor has it the sessions have been finalized. 

I have two sessions slated for Codemash, both of which will be given on Workflow Foundation.  The first session is an introduction to Workflow Foundation.  Here is the abstract:

Your boss comes up to you and gives you some business logic one day at work. You spend weeks coding it. As soon as you get done he informs you the rules have changed. You want to smack him/her in the face but you politely smile and say thank you, I’ll have that done in a few weeks. Little does your boss know you’ve used Workflow Foundation to map out all the business logic. You quickly make the change declaratively within Workflow and go back to reading your RSS feeds. While this scenario isn’t true, it can be if you use Workflow Foundation. In this talk we’ll explore what Workflow Foundation is from the ground up so you’ll have a good sense of where to get started when you head back to the office.

In this session I hope to give a really good no non-sense introduction to Workflow Foundation.  What I mean by that is I’m not going to spend 30 minutes talking about Workflow Foundation and then show a demo.  I think for developers to really get WF they have to see it, touch it, caress it, squeeze it and call it George.  I can tell you all day long about Activities and Extensibility but until one sees just how cool it is you aren’t going to really get it.  Bottom line is plan on getting your feet wet with Workflow Foundation as soon as possible and then I’ll explain what the heck is going on under-the-hood. 

The second session I’m going to speak on is “Building Custom Workflow Activities”.  Here is the abstract for this session:

Workflow Foundation is a powerful tool that allows you to declaratively design and map out application logic. While a lot of custom logic can be created using the Code activity provided out of the box, it doesn’t work very well when you move workflow out of Visual Studio and into the hands of business analyst or end users who want to re-configure workflows. The real power of WF shines through when you build custom activities that can be re-used on numerous workflows by end users and other developers. In this session we will look at Workflow Foundation from the ground floor all the way through building custom workflow activities from scratch. In the end we’ll design a reusable workflow activity that can be easily configured complete with validation.

This session is all about code.  I think there are only 4 slides in the whole deck that basically explain why you want to write custom code activities in Workflow Foundation.  From then on it is all about code.  It is called “Code”-mash no? 

AT&T finally released their official ROM to upgrade the 8525 to Windows Mobile 6.  Living on the cutting edge I downloaded the ROM during lunch on Friday and started the update.  The download is currently available from the HTC web site although it is stated the ROM will no longer be available after February 2008.   Why the upgrade will disappear I’m not sure I haven’t investigated it yet.  It is worthy to mention that Good Mobile Messaging users are instructed to not to upgrade to this version.  Below you will find out how the upgrade went along with what features are enabled by default by this ROM.  Although I did the update on Friday I wanted to run it phone for a few days before posting this article.  Let me say that so far it has been really stable and I haven’t found any problems as of yet.

Performing The Upgrade

Once you get the download onto your machine double click the executable.  After a long series of checking your download you will be presented with this screen.

What follows next is a series of screens that for some reason scare the crap out of you and make you press next, next, next, OK, Yes I understand, Ok, next, you get the idea.  Basically these screens are telling you to not be an idiot.  Before you start make sure your phone is charged.  Also shut down other applications on your computer and just do the ROM update.  You never know when something could blow up leaving you holding a $400 door stop.  I’m scared but I’ll press next anyway 🙂

After this step the update queries the phone for a version.

I’m not sure why it didn’t find an existing version.  I didn’t care and just said to update the software anyway. 

And once again we get another screen as seen below.  I think the programmer that wrote this program should be fired and HTC should do a better job making users feel warm and fuzzy about doing an update like this. There is no reason why we have to go through all these screens.  I will bet a $1,000,000.00 updating Apple’s iPhone will not be this ridiculous with this many steps.  Ignore stupid screen and press next (again).

Finally we are brought to a screen that tells us how long it will take.  Can we just get on with the update!?  Click next again.

Finally we start updating the phone.  From this point forward it is about a 10 minute wait until the update stops.  Be sure there are no lightening storms in your area and it is a clear sunny day.  Or, use a laptop in case the power may go out.  If this point is interrupted, you officially have a bricked phone.   

We are done. 

Now we are officially done.   

After this step finishes the phone will restart and will run the default setup just like it did when you first bought it.  It will then install the AT&T software and configure it for AT&T’s network. So how does it look?  Well, the AT&T setup is really dreary.  Not pretty at all.  The first thing I suggest it going into settings and removing the AT&T theme and applying the windows mobile 6 theme.  This them is green and looks updated.  Much nicer. 

Screen Shots

Here are some screen shots to show you what is installed and how the phone looks after setup.

This is what the Today screen looks like after the install.  Compared to what it *could* look like it is sad.

A new feature that I noticed is the airplane mode in the Comm  Manager screen.  The previous version of Mobile 6 I was running didn’t have it.  A nice touch.  It has been so long since I used Mobile 5 I can’t remember if it had this or not.  I don’t think it did but you could turn on flight mode easily in Mobile 5 without it.

 If you are curious which office applications are included you’ll find them under Office Mobile.   Having the ability to read native documents is great and we’ve had this since Mobile 5.

AT&T puts a lot of useless crap into your programs folder.  Mainly things they want you to spend money on.  I mean after all, why should they include any applications of real value.  That would just be too cool.  Personally I don’t use any of their bundled apps just the standard built-in ones. 

More programs below.  FYI RSA and Screen Capture aren’t included by default I added those.

I mentioned the default theme is pretty bland so I changed it to the Mobile 6 theme.  Here is a screen shot of how that looks.

You’ll notice that nowhere on the phone via these screens shots is there any resemblance of Live search or messenger.  Those applications are not on this ROM update at all.  What the hell AT&T?!  I use Live Search all the time to lookup things and I can’t believe they didn’t include it.   I am also shocked by this because I’ve seen Mobile 6 demo after demo and this is a standard *feature* of Mobile 6.

Things that are bad about this update are 1) the install is still overly complicated and 2) lack of bundled applications.  While we can fix the bundled application problem by installing our own but the install process is still way to complicated.  The install process should be two clicks at the most and leave users feeling warm and fuzzy not scare the hell out of them.  I seriously can’t imagine my Mom doing this update and not having to call me. 

I will say that the phone up to this point has been really stable after the upgrade.  It has gone through hundreds and hundreds of emails and text messages without a problem.  As far as speed wise it is about the same as Mobile 5 if not just a tad faster. 

Should You Upgrade?

Really it is up to you.  I feel that AT&T has stripped this ROM of all of its joy and pleasure by not keeping in the Live stuff.  It just feels very lacking to me and I may seriously consider going back to the XDA ROM release.  If you read Jason Landgridge’s blog post about what’s new in Mobile 6 he outlines a lot of great features but the one missing is live search.  There are some nice features like Internet Sharing and although I get email in HTML format I have yet to have mine look like Jason’s example.  The features in Mobile 6 are good but it isn’t an earth shattering upgrade but it is an improvement.  If you are a geek like myself you would not be caught dead not having the latest ROM, keep your geek points intact and upgrade.  For the rest of the population it is potato potata.  Let me know how your mileage varies.