Thankful not just today...

Today is Thanksgiving over here in the U.S. It's a day that spurs us to think back over the past year and remember all the things for which we're thankful. While Thanksgiving the "Day" is almost over, I think we all need to remember that today is not the only day in which we should remember to be "thankful."

This year has been very turbulent for a great many people... both in the U.S. as well as the rest of the world. The crumbling housing and financial markets have sent shockwaves through an already fragile economy, with ripples that can be felt worldwide. Violence such as the recent attacks in Mumbai has shattered lives. The passage of Proposition 8 in California and similar referendums in Arizona and Florida have torn apart the stability of many families. For these things, no one can be thankful.

But even amongst these tragedies, there is room for most of us to be thankful. Most of us have been spared being directly affected by the worst that 2008 has tossed at as, and for that we can be thankful, even while we think of those who have been less fortunate. Amongst the darkness there have been rays of light shining forth. While the elections on November 4th were marred by Proposition 8, a brighter light shone forth that day.

In each of our lives we can find something for which to be thankful, something to lift our spirits and encourage us to make the new year a better one than the last.

So, looking back on 2008 and forward to 2009, here are a few of the things for which I'm thankful:

• A stable job in a time of uncertainty.


• A job that I actually enjoy with people I enjoy working with.


• The love of my partner, family, and friends.


• A house when so many are finding theirs in danger.


• The joy brought into my life by the adoption of my two newest cats.


• The memory of many years of love given by my sweetheart kitty Ophelia who passed away last year.


• The continuing joy and love given by my other surviving cat Edison (also a rescue).


• My health.


• The good health of those I love.


• November 4th and the hope for a long overdue change in our country's direction.


• That Vista on my new laptop doesn't suck as badly as I was afraid it would.


• That I get to sleep in tomorrow!


• The presence of Hope which for so long seemed absent.

OK, so they're not all profound, but being thankful for the little things in life is just as important as being thankful for the big things. They're also easier to find. So for all those little things in life and the ability to find them, I'm thankful.

Change is Good (part 3)

The ever-growing (and changing) framework
As if .NET wasn't big enough already, I'm afraid to find out how many new classes were added between .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5. With so many classes and types in the framework, can anyone really call themselves a .NET expert? I know I'm a long way away from knowing every class in the .NET 2.0 framework, and I seriously doubt there's anyone out there who's used all of them.

Let's face it... we're all specialists nowadays. As much as I like to consider myself a generalist, a multi-purpose programmer, a Rennaissance man of code, if you will, I'm as much a specialist as anybody. I've specialized in the APIs that I've had to use to get my work done. Right now that means I've specialized mainly in .NET. And a subset of .NET at that. I've had no need for Remoting yet, for example, but I'm sure others use it all the time. I've used the classes in the Reflection namespace fairly often, but I'm sure there are plenty of .NET programmers who've never needed them. And as much as I love Java, I haven't written a line of Java code for at least three years now, so yeah, I'm a specialist.

I just happen to be a "specialist" who specializes in learning technologies as needed. ;-)

Seriously.

Each time I'm faced with a new problem, one of my first thoughts is "has Microsoft already done this for me?" If I can't find a class for what I need in the humongous .NET framework, then I wonder "has someone else already done this for me?" And if they have, then I ask myself "can I convince my company to buy it?" (assuming it's not open source) It's the lazy programmer's approach to code, but it works fairly well. Of course, if I find out that Microsoft or someone else has written a class or API that might fit what I need, I then need to learn how to use that! But isn't that still much easier than writing it yourself?

Besides, once you've gone through that learning curve, you've added another tool to your programmer's toolkit and become just a wee bit less specialized.

I'm currently being "lazy" by trying to learn about NHibernate, but that's a story (or several) for another time.

What if I don't care about .NET?
Well, I'm not going to say that you should! I'm certainly not a Microsoft advocate -- anyone who's ever been on the receiving end of my rants about the latest idiosyncracy I've found in Visual Studio or the .NET framework can attest to that. But honestly, Java's not much different. Ten years ago, Java was a much smaller creature than it is today. And when you consider the various flavors of Java like J2SE, J2EE (especially J2EE!), and J2ME, your typical Java programmer has as much of a learning curve as your typical .NET programmer.

And hey, life's not any easier for you web programmers out there, you know. First, do you use ASP, ASP.NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, or some other language as the basis for your web apps (this decision probably isn't yours to make if you're not your own boss)? Add to that the fact that you'll probably need to get fairly good with JavaScript, HTML, DOM, etc. And what about AJAX? There's Atlas, Dojo, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), etc. And I haven't even mentiond Flash and AIR yet! (well, OK, I just did).

The point is, as each language grows and evolves, it becomes more complex. As each ecosystem (such as the world of web programming) grows, more languages spring up (sorry, Java folks, no pun intended) to fill the various ecological niches.

And I've just barely scratched the surface. Change is the name of the game for us programmers. We'd better enjoy the challenge, because like it or not, we're all along for the ride.

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Congratulations, California newlyweds

'nuff said.

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Change is Good (redux)

The three faces of .NET
Sorry for the long delay in this follow-up post... it's been a busy week. As I was saying last time, being a programmer means having to accept working in a field that's constantly changing: new technologies, new languages, changes to existing languages, etc. Even .NET is changing. The first .NET applications I maintained were written in .NET 1.1. While a perfectly fine language, .NET 2.0 was just coming out. VB.NET 1.1 finally made Visual Basic a "real" object-oriented language with inheritance, polymorphism, and Java-style exceptions. And I was looking forward to spending some time getting to know it.

Then along comes .NET 2.0. .NET 1.1, I barely knew ya! With generics (one of my favorite additions to .NET and Java in years), anonymous delegates (a handy copy from Java, but only for those of you lucky enough to be programming in C#; VB.NET doesn't support them), and a whole slew of other features calling their siren song, I abandoned .NET 1.1 like a jilted bride and never looked back. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, any new project I've written has been in .NET 2.0. Mostly VB.NET since most people in our IT department are more comfortable with Visual Basic, but there are times when I've used C# instead because it was the better fit.

And along with .NET 2.0 came Visual Studio 2005. Can I stress enough how much better VS2005 is over VS2003? Just being able to edit code while debugging again is a compelling enough reason to upgrade! Trying to work in the VS2003 debugger almost, almost, made me want to switch back to VB6.

And now there's .NET 3.5. Well, .NET 3.0 came along between 2.0 and 3.5, but it got ugraded to 3.5 so fast I almost got whiplash watching it. With the additions of LINQ, lambda expressions (added, along with a bunch of other enhancements such as implicitely typed variables, anonymous types, and extension methods mainly to make LINQ possible), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), .NET 3.5 is already starting to make .NET 2.0 look a little stodgy. I'm already sure I'll be switching to .NET 3.5 for future development eventually... the question is just how soon I take the plunge.

Oh, BTW, does anyone know why Windows Workflow Foundation got the short-shrift in the acronym department? The other .NET 3.5 "foundations" were abbreviated as WPF and WCF... why not WWF? Was Microsoft afraid of getting sued by the World Wildlife Fund like the World Wrestling Foundation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) was?

I'd probably switch over to .NET 3.5 right now if it weren't for one thing: my CI build server doesn't support it yet. Oh, I'm sure I can probably get it to work, I just haven't had the opportunity to look into it yet.

Change is Good

I think being a programmer means loving the challenge of always having to learn something new. Programming languages evolve, new languages appear, new paradigms emerge, and we as programmers need to learn, grow, and evolve along with them.

Still, even though new languages appear, the old ones never quite seem to go away. There are enough active programs out there written in older languages that still need to be maintained to support a whole fleet of programmers, and it's quite possible to have a long, healthy career without ever writing a program in C#, Java, or any object-oriented language. But for the rest of us, change is a part of our lives and we need to embrace it to survive.

So, what's changing?
Well, languages for one have certainly evolved, even since I started programming. I cut my teeth on computers by programming in BASIC on the Apple IIe and Commodore 64. In college, I learned Pascal and got a much better grasp of procedural programming. Later, I got my first introduction to object-oriented programming in C++ and never looked back. Granted, object-oriented programming existed long before I ever touched a keyboard. Simula was first developed in the 1960s and is considered the first object-oriented language. Smalltalk came along in the late 70s and helped spread the paradigm, but object-oriented programming didn't seem to become popular until the 1990s.

As is often the case in life, there have been detours along the way. My first programming assignments in the real world were writing VBA applications in Microsoft Access (starting back with Access 2.0) and maintaining an accounts-receivable application written in dBase II!

From VBA it was a small jump into Visual Basic and Microsoft's halfhearted attempt at slapping object-oriented features onto the procedural BASIC language. Still, it had classes (even if you couldn't truly inherit from them) so I did what I could to encapsulate my applications' behavior in objects and wired those objects together through events and messages passing. My current employer finally made the plunge into .NET a couple years ago, but there are still a number of VB6 applications that still need support (or migration). I hope to eventually have them all migrated to a more modern platform, but by the time I'm done we may be on .NET 10.0!

As if that's not enough, .NET itself is undergoing a rapid evolution. Between .NET 1.1 and the current .NET 3.5 there have been a number of significant additions to both the VB and C# languages as well as the framework. But more on that next time...