*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

After years of HD envy I finally made the jump to HDTV.  I know it is hard to swallow that a confessed geek like myself doesn’t already own an HDTV.  The reason is I bought my 32inch Sony TV at the worst possible time years ago.  I wasn’t about to run out and buy another one until the prices were lowered.  When I purchased my Sony, at the time anything good started at $5,000.00.  Plus the newer components such as HDMI, 1080P and others were still being tossed around.  So, I waited.

After researching HDTVs for months I decided on the Samsung LED DLP HDTV Model HL-T5687S 56inch (pictured to the right).  This model has a lot of features:

1. 10:000:1 contrast ratio
2. SRS TruSurround XT
3. 3 HDMI Inputs
4. 1080p
5. Slim model (14 inches deep)
6. Built-in Tuners: NTSC/ ATSC / Clear QAM
7. LED – No lamps to replace or color wheel

The biggest feature of this model is I don’t have a lamp to replace and the color wheel (I’ve heard this was noisy).  With LEDs the word on the street is it will start up in about 15 seconds of turning it on.   The funny thing about this whole ordeal is I had to order three TVs to get one. 

Last Thursday night I ordered a 61inch from Amazon.Com because the price on the 61inch dropped to $2149.00.  I patiently awaited for confirmation for my order which didn’t get sent to the vendor it was actually shipping from until late Friday night.  Saturday morning I woke up to check the status of the order and went to the page the TV was on and instead of being sold from some random vendor it was selling directly from Amazon for the same price but with free shipping!  Thus I called the vendor and canceled the order. They just got it anyway and hadn’t even processed it.  As soon as the order was canceled I placed another order for the same 61inch model. 

Some of you are probably thinking at this point, didn’t you order a 56inch though?  The back story is on Saturday, after I placed the second order, the wife and I went to town looking for a new entertainment center to hold this 61inch beast.  We shopped and shopped and shopped and thought we finally found a unit that would really complement the house.  A timeless style we would enjoy for many years (picture to the right).   We drove back home and it hit me. I never measured the height of the TV for the entertainment center.  I kept measuring the width.  I called back to the store and the sales person measured it for me.  It was 37 inches.  The 61inch TV was 37.8!  I’m screwed!

I jumped on Amazon.Com real quick and canceled the 61inch.  Buying a TV this big was starting to become a chore.  I drove back to town to re-measure and see if I could make the 61inch TV work.  I fought a hard battle but in the end I was forced to get the 56inch.   No matter what I tried, the 56inch was the only size that was going to work with the furniture we chose (and no there were no other choices we liked).  Wife was now happy because she loved the furniture, but my manhood lost 5 cool points.  Wife 1, Husband 0. 

I got back home and ordered the 56inch TV which turned out to save me $300.00.  The 56inch was shipping from Amazon for $1849.00 and Free Shipping.  Yeah!  Last night it boarded a plane from Dallas and is probably sitting in the Jackson, Ms airport crying wanting its daddy.

Remember part of the subject?  ……so much to upgrade?  Well it doesn’t stop with just a new TV and entertainment center.  Now that I have HDMI inputs and outputs everywhere, my Sony receiver isn’t going to cut the mustard anymore.  After endless hours of shopping, reviews, feature comparisons, etc.  I settled on the Onkyo TX-SR705 7.1 receiver.

1. 7.1 channel
2. 130 watts per channel
3. 1080p upconversion (big time plus)
4. XM and Sirrius ready
5. WRAT
6. Audyssey MultiEQ XT
7. 3 HDMI inputs

I think it truly is the best bang for the buck out there in mid-range receivers.  Last on the list is the Logitech Harmony 890 Advanced Universal Remote Control.  This will serve as my magic wand to run this whole setup.  It supports up to 15 components and of course is programmable to 175,000 different components.  I think I’ll be covered 🙂

I came to a realization this evening when working on a new release of our internal CRM application.  We are in the middle of re-designing our CRM from the ground up with new data structures and tons of new features.  That may sound like a drastic measure but the functionality of it as well as the scope has changed over the years so that’s why we are redesigning it.  As a result we are taking the time to build our middle-tier using Windows Communication Foundation leveraging the Web Services Software Factory for WCF. 

WCF brings a lot to the table for us such as duplex messages, TCP binary messages and so on.  I’m a big fan of multi-tier design and good architecture design.  You know, the typical  UI->Middle Tier->Database approach.  Anyone that has built an application using three tiered design should know the majority of the work is in the middle-tier and about 70% of your effort is focused in this area. 

For our redesign, in the middle-tier we are following good architectural guidance by creating entities, separated business logic, separated data access and so on (WSSF really helps with this).   At times though I wish I could just drag and drop a database table onto a WinForm, create a strong type dataset and bind to a DataGridView control and totally forget the middle tier.  It sure is faster to code everything in the UI and hit the database directly this is no doubt.  In the end there are tons of draw backs though such as deployment, centralizing business rules, etc.  This is the first case in point that good architecture creates more code and ultimately takes more time.

This evening I was playing around with a test WinForm app for a prototype screen and realized since we are returning entities from the services layer we can’t just bind the returned collection of entities to a DataGridView control and get all the sorting / filtering goodness we get with a Dataset.  In the end I had to write more code to be able to achieve this.  Sure it only turned out to be about 500-750 lines of code that will get re-used over and over and over again, but the fact remains that I had to write more code because I followed a good design practice.  This is case in point number two. 

For those that leverage consultants this is the difference in quotes you probably receive from various firms.  Or for those that ask developers how long something will take and he/she tells you two months when you were hoping they would say two weeks.  Sure you can find someone to get it done faster, but did they get it done correctly?  Will the system be easy to maintain?  Scale?   Be easy to extend in the future?  These are the things that developers over time have come to realize when building systems and it is hard to justify sometime to the business or to clients (if you are a consultant).  Sure it may take a developer longer to follow a good three tiered approach, but the business gets a lot of benefit down the road by going with a better architecture.   

I’m sitting eating lunch and it just hit me that I wasted three hours of my life last night trying to install the Blackberry Plugin for Visual Studio that was recently released.  I tried to install it on 2 different machines and it kept trying to install SQL Server Express 2005 although it was already installed.    I told it to skip the SQL Server Express install and it canceled the install.  Yeah, the whole thing.  I then told it to go ahead and try to install it hoping it would bomb and then move on.  It did bomb and appeared to be running through the rest of the install but then it would die. 

I spent a total of three hours trying to get this plugin to install.  RIM, if you are going to publish an installer at least make sure it works.  Did you test it on Vista?  How about x64?  Did you assume that no one would have express already installed?  You do know there is a SP2 upgrade for express to even work under Vista?  Why was this bundled in with the installer in the first place?  I can’t believe the installer relies on SQL Server Express.  Really this just blows my mind that an installer would need express just to install.  WTF?

RIM, I’ve lowered my hourly rate to $150 since it was after hours so you only owe me $450 for this time wasting adventure.  I will only accept cash, sending me a $450 Blackberry is not acceptable. 

Last year I missed the devLINK conference but kept hearing tons of great things at other conferences or events I went to about it.  I had actually forgotten about it until Colin Neller, Memphis User Group President, reminded me by dropping my name in the hat of speakers.  So it shall be, I’ll be heading to Nashville, Tn in October.

I’m really looking forward to this event since there are some great friends in attendance.  I’ll be speaking on several topics this go around.  I put in for four topics but only two have made it on the prelim agenda so far:

1. Leveraging Enterprise Library in your Applications
2. New Features and Improvements for Smart Clients in Visual Studio 2008

The other ones on the radar are:

1. Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio
2. Building Custom Workflow Activities in Workflow Foundation – A Developer’s Primer

Last year around 400 developers were in attendance.  The crazy thing about devLINK is it only cost $50!  That’s a heck of a deal, especially considering the speaker line up.  According to Google Maps it is 425 miles, 6 hours and 22 mins. 

This will be the longest trip to date in the new Aspen, should be a fun drive in the hills with the 5.7 liter HEMI.

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 was recently released and it is now to the point where one could use it on a daily basis.  For me, there are a few things that are stopping me from jumping ship from VS2005 straight to VS2008 Beta 2.  A few of those revolve around the ability to install guidance packages such as the Web Service Software Factory for WCF and a few others.  

The good news is More Wally has already taken the plunge for those of us that are procrastinating and is reporting his ups and down with VS2008 in a series called Life With Visual Studio.  Keep that on the radar as he works through converting projects, etc.