My .net journey

With the release of Visual Studio 2017 and .net core, I’ve seen a few folk talking about their story with the platform. This is mine.

I’ve never been the biggest Microsoft fan, ever since I grabbed a copy of Mandrake Linux and figured out how much more tinkering was available and how much more logical certain operations were than on Windows 95. But it was definitely still a tinkerers platform.

But I got an internship at Edinburgh University whilst I was a student there, funded by Microsoft. I got a laptop for the summer and a iPaq (remember that?) to keep. I also got a trip to Amsterdam to meet the other interns and some folk from Microsoft, back before they had much more than sales people in the UK. And they told me, no matter how much anyone hates Microsoft, they always hate Oracle more.

It meant that I was among the first to get the .net 1.0 CD, so I could legitimately claim later that yes, I did have 2 years of .net experience.

But from there, I stayed in Linux, learning the joys of Java Threading on Solaris (top tip : Sun really should have known what they were doing, that they didn’t means I can see some of why they failed – it was far easier working with threads on Red Hat or Windows).

And then I did my PhD, digging into device drivers, DirectX and MFC. I hated Microsoft’s Win32 GUI stuff, but the rest, in C++, was quite nice. I enjoyed being closer to the metal, and shedding the Java ceremony. I trained on templates and started to understand their power. And Java just wasn’t good enough.

I wrote research projects in C++ and data analysis engines in Python. It was good.

But Java came back, and I wrote some media playback for MacOS, and fought iTunes to listen to music. And I vowed never to buy from Apple because both were a right pain.

And I needed a new job. And I’d written bots in IronPython against C#, so I got a .Net job. And I missed the Java and Python communities, the open source chatter. And I wanted to write code in C# that was as beautiful and testable as C++. And I wanted to feel that Bulmer’s Developers! chant was a rallying call, not a lunch order from a corporate monster.

So I found alt.net and it was in Scotland, and I wrote a lot of code, and I learned that open source did exist in c#, and that there was a conference named after that chant and I met more like minded developers. I fought my nervousness and my stumbling voice and I found some confidence to present. And blog. And help write a package manager. And then everyone else learned Ruby.

And then the Scotts joined Microsoft and alt.net became .net. And then LINQ came and I remembered how clean functional programming is, and I started feeling like I was writing Python if I squinted hard, and ignored types. And then core came, and Microsoft had some growing pains. But it’s a sign that the company has completely shifted in the right direction, learning from the guys who left for Ruby. And Node.

I’m proud of what I’ve built in C#, and it’s a much better language than Java, now. It’s definitely the right choice for what I’ve built. The documentation is definitely better than Apple or Sun/Oracle produce, although MSDN and docs.microsoft.com are having some migration pains of its own.

And alt.net is making a comeback.

And I still use Python on hobby projects.

Always be finished

I’ve been living on a building site for a while, at home and at work. The work at the office above ours was ambitious, chaotic, noisy, messy and overran. It was a challenging project, turning a “derilict” into a funky new office.

Home was a simpler proposition, a greenfield site, with a well tuned team putting up a batch of similar houses. Each house in the project was a clear finishing point. The work was completed on or near budget, although there have been many bugs in the finished product. Nothing to break the deal, but enough to be annoying, and a few that need serious attention before things get worse.

The most interesting thing for me however was complete the overall project looks. At each stage the customer perception is paramount, so roads and car parks are built and finished in places where in a few months they’ll be ripped up to put houses on because that’s the most central place to put the marketing suite so customers can see their house quicker.

And the perfectly manicured lawns at the show home will be ripped up to build a driveway for the garage. And the landscaped street gables get cut back to move the marketing suite. But at each stage there’s a clear “here’s what’s being built” and “here’s the rest” even when what looks complete is not the final vision.

The perception even extends to certain rules for residents to ensure consistent façades and a complete presentation, with no unsightly trade vans, for the entire site until the last one is sold.

When you build software, how finished do the “temporary” solutions look to the customer and the developers. Do they look hacked on, unreliable and in desperate need of a bug fix, or do they look finished and smooth to the end user, with a few backlog tickets describing what it really should do. No hint to users or competitors that something is about to change.

It’s not enough for everything you release to be complete and tested. If users can see the cracks, it will colour their impressions. Fix the snags and delight your users.

Microsoft Edge, ungooglability and a new class of bugs

Microsoft definitely has a naming problem. .net core was one thing, but calling a browser Edge was just trolling developers. Try searching for “Edge CSS” or “JavaScript Edge”. It’s a lesson in frustration, which means the bugs in the new browser are extra painful to debug because it’s that much harder to find the blog posts and Q&A for the last person to fix the problem.

And Edge doesn’t behave like IE, or Firefox, or Chrome. I’m sure Microsoft, like the other vendors, are updating OSS frameworks to help them target Edge, but there’s still a lot of Javascript and CSS that breaks silently, so no Console logs to help, no odd numbers in the calculated CSS, and no hacks to persuade Edge that it can render just like the big browsers.

I want to like the browser, I really do. Anything that brings the end of IE closer has to be welcomed, but even after the Anniversary update of Windows 10, it’s far from ready. If I try to open IIS failure logs in Windows 10, it opens up IE, and displays with the correct CSS, and then tells me I should use Edge, where the CSS is broken. It’s frustrating as a user, and as a developer. It’s an alpha product, and it should have been treated as such. Give it to devs, allow power users to opt in, and iterate it. Microsoft still needs to learn what it means to develop in the open.

Documentation

Unfortunately the problem is then compounded by Microsoft’s documentation problem. For all the faults of IE, at least Microsoft had a good reputation for documentation at the height of MSDN. Unfortunately, MSDN is starting to decay, and there’s a number of conflicting alternatives springing up. For us developers, the seemingly preferred route for latest information is blog posts (or the comments thereon – which were the only source of information for a knotty Docker problem we had), but there’s also GitHub, docs.microsoft.com and the occasional update to the existing MSDN documentation suite.

Microsoft seem to be trying to frustrate developers. Especially when they have evolving, and conflicting APIs (I’m looking at you Azure, and the Python vs PowerShell vs Node APIs, and the Portal experience). The documentation experience at Microsoft feels like the Google UI experience before Material Design. And it needs a similar overhaul.

I love seeing Microsoft trying to be more open and I see it working, to a certain extent, in the C# and .Net space, aside from the .Net Core RC release cycle chaos. They’ve come a long way from the days of alt.Net (although I agree that we need to recapture that passion, both for the sake of new developers, and for the sake of keeping Microsoft in check), but they’re in danger of alienating developers once more with the confusion, and the inconsistencies within certain platforms.

In that context, removing project.json and keeping .csproj was the right decision. One clear and consistent path. Now go and apply it across the board.

Give yourself time to think

I’ve spoken before about how a quick time out to grab a coffee can help you get to the bottom of a problem, but sometimes you need longer. You need time to switch off and think. 

I feel guilty about just sitting and thinking, despite trying mindfulness techniques, so for me, my best thinking comes when my body is busy but my mind is free. Sometimes in the shower (and apologies to my wife for those days when I take an extra 10 minutes to think through something), sometimes swimming, sometimes mowing the lawn.

Take time to get bored. Boredom is not boring. Boredom gives you ideas.

Read these…

• in praise of boredom – Why boredom is anything but boring : Nature News & Comment 
• How being bored out of your mind make you more creative 

Action is good, thinking then acting is better. Make time to think.