MVC?

Why is Microsoft pushing MVC so hard? All I hear about the new certification exams is that they are very heavy on MVC and JQuery. We've been using plenty of JQuery at work lately, I feel really comfortable in there.

But WHY all the MVC? I'm sure I can pick it up. But I'm going into it a bit begrudgingly. I know eventually I'm going to have to tell somebody who's currently in elementary school how "we used to do some really cool stuff in vb.net. But MVC is such a different framework I'm not looking forward to the change.

Making Scrum Fail

http://glenndejaeger.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/how-to-make-scrum-fail/

I saw this article today about how to make scrum fail. We use Agile Scrum and I love it. others are not so enthusiastic. You do have to have the right people in the right roles.

I am posting a link to this because I think it's funny, not because I'm implying that we are falling victim to any of the conditions listed.

LINQ Rocks

I'm becoming a convert. The new job is awesome, I'm loving Raleigh. But this new gig has me focusing on a subset of VB.Net (ADO.Net) that I've never had to dive into before. and it rocks.

LINQ to Entities is a small but durable subset of ado.net introduced in framework 3.5. It gives you separated OOP layers to run between a DB (or multiple db's) and the rest of your framework. You can define an EDMX file to obfuscate your data, and it will generate the XML to connect your business layer to. These become your objects (entities) for the entity framework.

I've always been inherently opposed to OOP layers, they just add complexity when it isn't really needed. You end up creating spaghetti code with LINQ to Entity, but it's not as bad as it could be. and once it's built, it's built. I'm becoming a convert.

Once your data layer is built it's done. This makes the front end extraction considerably easier. You write linq queries instead of T-SQL queries, which are a completely different syntax.

The ease of front end development and flexibility of the LINQ syntax are what's really making me turn over the leaf. In T-sql, I'm hooked on aggregates. I can do anything in t-sql, been writing it for years. I'm still at the bottom of the learning curve from the LINQ syntax. But using .Include's to create joins has me intrigued. I'm actually looking forward to learning more. which hasn't happened in a long time with vb.net.

Last day on the job

Well, it's good to be changing jobs. Today is my last day on this work from home job, and next wednesday I start the new gig with a software company in Raleigh, NC. The new job is all VB.Net web sites over SQL Server databases, hosted in the same environment. It's going to be nice to have something stable that isn't a pressure cooker environment where anything can be thrown at me.

Here's to new beginnings!

New Digs

Well, it happened. I accepted a new job offered to me yesterday. Looks like all that whining about switching to C# was unfounded. The new digs are strictly VB.Net over SQL Server. Now I have to get a car, sell the house, work my way out of this job, buy a house.... geez. let the whining begin.

Tech support is a good thing

I've been tagging support for this one company trying to get help with connecting to an XML web service that they provide. A solid month hitting up the two contacts I got with no response, actively refusing phone calls and email responses. I eventually had to go back to my client (who chose this discount provider) and get them involved from the sales side.

It is so nice to actually get tech support from someone who know's what they are talking about. As technicians, I think we all have to strive to be that guy. The one guy who actually can provide some help even if the rest of the organization is comprised of dumbasses.

Yesterday my client went back to the salesperson, who tagged "that guy" and we had the problem fixed in 2 emails. They didn't have the numbers I was submitting in their system, the same thing I asked the other guys to check.

So go be "that guy" today. Take care of the small easy problems, and knock out as many as you can. Be helpful to our clients. They will appreciate it much more than an unreturned phone call.

ActivePDF

I have to profess love for ActivePDF. I think there are a bunch of PDF form filler services out there. But their ActiveToolkit software is top shelf. Today I am using it for a second process.

It's a DLL consumable with .Net, so you have to set a reference to the toolkit. But then you can open and manipulate pdf's inside of the toolkit in a bunch of ways. The first time I had to consume it was to prepopulate and/or extract data from a PDF. I got the data in an XML string, and looped through the XML nodes to shove them into the PDF. Open the input file first (source), then create the output file (destination), populate the field values in memory and call CopyForm to write the memory values to the output hard file. Very slick. I can also specify specific field names to populate, like a submit date.

Today I'm going the other direction. I am using ActivePDF to open the input (source) file, loop through each field on the PDF and inserting the field names (with some other identifying data and logging) into the database. Should be interesting and fun.