A Blog about Coding

Tag: my opinions

  • Should you use Third Party Software Components?

    Should you use Third Party Software Components?

    There are some good third party software components out there, that have been developed over many years.

    Over the years, I personally have used www.devexpress.com with both Winforms and ASP.NET Webforms, www.telerik.com on ASP.NET Webforms and www.obout.com on ASP.NET Webforms.

    Let me make the distinction between components and tools. This post is about components that you include in your software. Tools such as Resharper from JetBrains, JustDecompile, Fiddler and JustTrace from Telerik are excellent and highly recommended. In fact I don’t know what I would do without them.

    Should you use third party software components? Well it depends.

    If you are using Winforms and to some extent WPF, then considering third party tools to help with the UI layer is a good thing, because you will massively improve your Winforms user interface. DevExpress in particular has a very rich set of components for the UI, although there is no reason why you can’t mix and match and use components from a number of suppliers if your budget allows.

    If you are using ASP.NET, then the picture is less clear. My personal preference are client side UI components such as jQuery UI and Kendo UI used with ASP.NET MVC. If you are using ASP.NET MVC it is very easy to create a good usable layered architecture using conventions from MVC, and your own design in other layers, perhaps with the help of Microsoft Entity Framework or Telerik DataAccess to do your object relational mapping.

    For ASP.NET web development, I would highly recommend that you learn how to create code WITHOUT using the server side third party components first of all, so that you understand fully the problem you are solving and can work out what the benefits are in detail and if they outweigh the investment in money and time learning these tools.

    Also, you should not let these tools into layers other than the UI layer without very careful consideration, especially if you don’t fully understand what they are doing. Assuming your application is more than just a small app with a couple of pages in it, its important that you get your architecture right and keep to its design principles without having third party tools muddy your waters.

    Finally, some of these tool manufacturers DON’T WRITE REAL APPS. They employ bright young people straight from university who have no idea how to write anything more than a whizz bang very flash example that might be impossible to include in your app without destroying your own elegant, readable design and the principles of your own architecture. Not only that, they are closed companies in that they don’t want you to know how to write apps without them because I’m sure they fear that you might not use their services if you knew how to do it without them (nothing could be further from reality in my view).

    These are the things you should really be thinking about, not just the time you think you might save by using third party components.

    I hope to cover this subject more in future posts on software architecture and design.

  • When will Microsoft concentrate on Windows?

    When will Microsoft concentrate on Windows?

    I wish sometimes that Microsoft would just concentrate on its own products. Watching the Microsoft Windows saga over recent years, it appears to be far too interested in what its competitors are doing, to its own (and its customers) detriment. Let me explain.

    Microsoft is successful because of the huge success and installed user base of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Both of these products could be far better with just some simple tweaks. Microsoft appears to be more interested in watching Apple and others, and trying to play catch up with its own user interface, when it should have some confidence in its own ideas and concentrate on improving these.

    Here are some of the things I would do if I was in charge at Microsoft:

    • I would stop changing the user interface for changes sake. Its apparent that they have no ideas or plan of their own apart from to look at others. Make a strategy for the Windows user interface, and stick to it. If I can do that with the applications I create, I am sure that anybody with half a brain at Microsoft could do this. Every time they rip the interface apart its an opportunity for competitors such as Apple (who have had a much more stable user interface in recent years) to grab customers. Many people I speak with are sick to the back teeth of Microsoft continuously moving the location of commands so they have to spend time re-learning things they did learn in the past.
    • It would also be good if normal users would not be in administrator mode, that way you could have a more lightweight anti virus (I use Microsoft Security Essentials for my dev machines with real time scanning turned off).
    • Microsoft desktop search has never, ever worked properly in any version of Windows. Its totally useless. I use Agent Ransack which does a fast, brilliant job at finding files on my PC. Office 365 search is equally rubbish.
    • Office 365 does not let me remove an appointment that somebody else has set, I have to go and ask them to remove it even though they might have verbally told me not to attend the meeting – if I try myself, it removes and then comes back. How crap is that?
    • There are a lot of messages that come from windows that should have “Do not show this message again” checkboxes (and a place in the control panel where they can be re-enabled).
    • Why does the focus of the app move away, for example, when I open Outlook on my PC, I press New Mail and start typing and after a few characters I have to use the mouse to re-focus on the new mail window.
    • While on the subject of focus, give the user the option to have new apps open in the background and for the user to completely control the focus of the current app i.e. user should always change the focus manually.
    • When you press start in Windows 7, why does it sometimes refresh and disappear from under the mouse?
    • If you open a Window in Visual Studio for example on my multi screen PC, the window should open on the same screen as the original app, or if no original app, the same screen as where the mouse currently is.
    • It should be easier to control if an app opens maximised or not. A user with a 4K screen say, would probably not want any app to open in maximised.
    • Why put features in if they do not work properly? For example, double clicking on the window bar on my multi screen PC sometimes will maximise the window to all three screens. I never want that – I always want to maximise to the current screen. Again having the option to choose this kind of behaviour would be good.

    Some of these choices will not be for everyone but having a consistent place to go and set your options, properly categorised and named, would be really good.

    I could go on and on but here is a good place to stop.

  • Which is best – C# or VB.NET?

    Which is best – C# or VB.NET?

    The C# vs VB.NET debate is as old as .NET itself, although thankfully appears to be calming down in recent years.

    When I started using .NET over 10 years ago, I started with VB.NET because although I had 6 years C experience from a previous life, I was also experienced with VB6 and VBA, so it was a natural progression to get into VB.NET.

    While its important to specialise, to focus in order to develop skills in particular areas, its also important to consider the best tool for a particular job, and most definitely not get involved in “religious” arguments, I bet a lot of which are fuelled by the developers concerned not knowing the other language very well (or their own main language if it comes to that) and also not wanting to somehow “lose” the investment in time they have made getting this far.

    I have just browsed around the net looking for real information on the differences and most of what you read is just garbage. If a post starts with “I hate VB.NET” or “I hate C#”, for sure that person is unemployable in my eyes until they gain enough experience and perspective to be able to change their views in order to DO WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to produce the best possible system in all respects for their end user, irrespective of the technology required (I’ll bet a lot of people probably never get past this stage in their own personal development).

    Screen shot of Visual Studio 2012 Error List
    Aiming for zero warnings is a worthwhile aim

    Having used .NET for over 10 years, probably C# 60%, VB.NET 40%, my specific views on the subject are as follows:

    1. C# became a standard outside of Microsoft in 2006. Wikipedia has some more information on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29.
    2. By default the C# type system is better than VB.NET. If you use VB.NET make sure you turn option explicit on in the project settings along with option strict and ideally option infer as well. The benefit with option strict is that the compiler will pick up errors that otherwise would only detect at runtime, making VB.NET similar to C# in this respect. This is useful because type checking can be used to your advantage when writing or re-factoring code at compile time and it also helps produce errors and warnings (you are aiming for zero warnings aren’t you? If not seriously consider doing this as warnings can hide many larger errors).
    3. C# has some very succinct constructs, such as:var c = d ?? 0;andvar c = d as long?;
    4. More companies prefer C# to VB.NET, possibly for the above reasons and rates of pay are 15-25% higher for C#.

    I’ll be blogging more about the features in future posts.
    So I usually prefer C# if left to my own devices, but as related its important to remain impartial as well and to listen to other points of view, particularly your end users.