For now on you may address me as my proper title:

I wish the title was a little less blasphemous; therefore you may alternately call me 'King Nerd'.  That would also match with my wife who is a "Slightly Dorky Nerd Queen".

I also scored quite high on the version 1.0 test:

Remember, that is 92 percentile!

--Nathan Zaugg

It's not often I get such high compliments!  So when I do I like to brag!

--nz

 Hi Tim,

I’d like to convey our satisfaction with the development work Nate Zaugg completed on the Hotel Online Reservation site for the Jackson Rancheria.  As you are aware of the previous issues/delays surrounding the delivery of the Online Reservation site through your conversations with us, we were a bit skeptical it would only take the estimated two days to complete the work that was needed to complete the deliverable to our satisfaction given the previous months in which there was very little progress.

Though it is unknown to us whether Nate was hired in or put under contract, we do know it is individuals like him that get things done.  He was able to skim the Opera Web Service manual and our previous in-house development code, and then code from scratch to integrate the Online Reservations to our new Internet site.  It was impressive.

We appreciate the expertise you have granted us by bring Nate on-site and hope he is kept aboard your company in some capacity whether for us or for any of your other clients. 

Thank you,

Steven

Utah Code Camp
I was hoping to get my retrospective posted much sooner but because of the lousy firewall at work I couldn’t post on a lunch break, which is what I usually do.  I think that my friend Anthony Park said it best in his blog post; there was too much Microsoft.  Personally, even if there were a lot more than Microsoft presentations I would likely attend mostly the Microsoft ones.  After all, that is the technology I have chosen to specialize in and is where most if my interests are.  I am intrigued by things happening in other technologies, and would love to have gone to some of those presentations.  I don’t know why, but the Microsoft presentations tend to be a bit on the dry side so something else would have been nice!  To be fair, here is the break-down:
Microsoft Specific: 8
Other Vender Specific: 5
Non-Specific: 7

I would have liked to see a Linux Install Fest going on for those who didn’t want to attend any of the presentations for that hour.  Having the DARPA robot challenge seems like it would have been really cool.  They did that at the Desert Code Camp.  A programming competition for a big-ticket item would have been awesome!  An “Experts Corner” would have been pretty neat to have someone in the field answer any questions you have.  Having other things going besides just presentations would be what makes these fun!

More Code at Code Camp
My friend Phil Gilmore says it best; I expect that I’ll see some code at code camp!  To extend that some degree I’d say that if the presenter is not into their IDE showing code within the first five minutes of their presentation I should walk out!  I was almost saddened by David Yack’s presentation on WPF/E!  How can you make that technology boring?  I really don’t know but for the most part it was!  We never (really) got to see any code!  Sure, there was some code in the PowerPoint and even the result of that code but we get a *lot* more from watching how you get that code to execute then we ever could from even the best-made power point!  Presentations need to be taken up a notch (myself included)!  They should be as fun and entertaining as they are educational. 

Environment
I would like to see Code Camp moved to a more central location.  Most of the people attending live in either Salt Lake county or Weber/Davis county.  Neumont University is at the extreme southern end of Salt Lake County and is about 30 min’s down the road from where most would expect to drive for people coming from the north.  I would think that the University of Utah would have been a great location for Code Camp.  Also, Neumont had some issues!  They had probably the best-deployed wireless network I’ve seen anywhere with the largest room having something like 6 wireless repeaters.  Too bad no one could use it!  This location has been the home for UDUG for years and they have always refused to provide the wireless WEP key.  Secondly, there has *always* been access problems with this building!  People get locked out and there is nothing you can do about it!  I personally had people come to see my presentation that were not able because the building was locked!  We even had to be shuttled up the elevator because it was locked!  To make things worse, there is no cell phone reception so people can’t even call to have someone open the door!  Neumont has got to go!  At the very least, I am bringing a wireless repeater next time and I am going to block the door open with a rug and put a sign with a telephone number to call if the door is locked!  Resource planning is also a big must!  Knowing what session’s people have signed up for would have helped a lot!  I got put in a small room with a large crowd!  I am willing to bet that more would have come if it wasn’t so crowded!  Why would you think the .net 3.5 presentation was going to have a smaller turn-out compared to O/RM mappers?

Double Sessions
I would personally have *really* liked to have seen every presenter give their presentation twice.  We were running three rooms at once and if there were two or three presentations you wanted to see in one hour you had to pick!  Having two sessions makes it much easier to get what you want out of Code Camp.

Silent Sponsors
My friend, Anthony Park, mentioned that in the Desert Code Camp they have a concept of silent sponsors.  I think that’s a pretty good idea for the most part.  On the other hand, I would rather see a well-funded “sell out” code camp than a meagerly funded one.  The give always were mostly a joke (with the exception of the iPods and Mice).  It would have been cool to give away a computer, a Plasma TV, a laptop, a Windows Media Center, an Xbox, Office 2007, more t-shirts, etc..  Though overall I would give this year’s prizes a B+. 

Summary
I believe that this code camp was overall more successful than the last one that was just 6 months ago.  I think that for the most part the presentations were better quality than before.  We need more advertizing and more appeal!  We need people to know about it and want to come!  We need more than the same people coming to these things!  On the inside we need a bit more organization.  I’m not a big fan of “matching power points” either.  Hopefully we can address many of these things and have an even better code camp next year!
--Nathan Zaugg

I am presenting at this year’s spring code camp.  I will be presenting on .net 3.5 and its impact on application architecture.  I’ll be doing my best to put together one heck of a presentation so be sure to mark your calendar to attend.  I don’t believe you have to go for the whole thing but it all looks interesting to me!

--nz

CODE CAMP OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
What: Utah Spring Code Camp
When:  April 14th 2007 9:00-5:00
Where: Neumont University
Registration: http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com

The local .NET Users Group and SQL Server Users Group is conducting a “Code Camp” for local software programmers next month at Neumont University.  The code camp is by the community for the community.  Always free and Always for the community.

We will have Sessions on .NET, SQL Server, and Oracle.  Presented by experts around the valley!  
 
The Saturday, April 14th event is scheduled from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The conference is free please register at. http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com
Lots of Sponsors and Lots of software and Tech Gadgets to giveaway!
You can check out www.msutahevents.com  for a session schedule and speaker list for the Code Camp.

The Long-Awaited (at least by me) release of VPC 2007 has finally come!  Microsoft hasn’t released a Virtual PC Platform sense 2004 and with that version being incompatible with Vista we *really* needed a VPC solution quick!  Especially those early-adopters of Vista like myself.

The good news: Its FREE!
The bad news: I don't see a link for Mac OS X yet.  Currently, unless I am mistaken, there is one for 2004
More good news: They now have an x64 version!

Without further delay, here is your link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

-NZ

I was really curious about how many lines of code a project of mine had compared to another.  Before you know it I write a simple application to count code!  I admit that there is probably hundreds in existence already, most of which are much better than mine, but I am a programmer and dammit I like to do stuff like that!

Well, I hope this is useful to someone else someday!  If you change it, please send it back to me so I can have the changes as well.

Thanks!
NZ

In a discussion with a friend a couple of weeks ago he mentioned a term that I hadn’t heard for a very long time and wanted to focus some discussion on.  The term was “Anti-Pattern”.  I realized that in code, anything that does not belong to a pattern belongs to an anti-pattern.  As an architect it is our job to identify Both patterns and anti-patterns in our projects.

Some of the anti-patterns I have come in contact with lately I will describe below but I would like to get a community support in identifying as many anti-patterns as possible.  I think it’s just as important to identify the anti-patterns as it is to identify any other design pattern. 

Anti-Pattern #1 – Event Chain:

Often times when writing a MVC style application we want to pass messages from a control 3 children deep (or more) back to the controller so it can take appropriate action against another view.  Some have tried to solve this problem by creating an “event sync chain” where every parent/grandparent/etc. of this control must both implement and publish events to pass along to the controller.

Example:

public class View1 {

public void InitializeComponent() {

                                doc = new Document1();

                                doc.OnOpenSearchPage =+ new EventHandler(OpenSearchPageMethod);

}

//… the rest of the class …//

}

public class Document1 { // my parent is View1

public event OpenSearchPageDelegate OnOpenSearchPage;

public void InitializeComponent() {

                                control = new Control1();

                                control.OnOpenSearchPage =+ new EventHandler(OpenSearchPageMethod);

}

//… the rest of the class …//                       

}

public class Control1 { // my parent is View1

public event OpenSearchPageDelegate OnOpenSearchPage;

public void ButtonClick() {

if ( OnOpenSearchPage != null )

                OnOpenSearchPage.Invoke(new EventArgument());

}

//… the rest of the class …//                       

}

Resolution #1 – Interface Controller Recursive Lookup

Step 1: Make your main controller implement an interface with all of the methods you wish to call

Step 2: Remove *all* sync chains!

Step 3: (optional) include a property for the parent of the main view that has a reference to the controller by the interface.  If you commonly invoke methods in the controller at this level this is very useful!

Step 4: Create a function that looks recursively for the controller, and then call the method that you need directly into the controller.          

public IController GetController(object sender) {

if ( sender is  IController ) {

                return (IController)sender;

} else if ( sender.Parnet != null )

                return GetController(sender.Parent);

else

                Debug.Assert(false, “This control is not housed by a controller”);

return  null;

}

Remarks:

Using an event is a great way to pass messages from a child control back to its parent, but if you have to pass events up through multiple generations (grandparents and great-grandparents, etc.) then you have encountered an anti-pattern.  Sense is generally considered a bad thing to reference your parent directly (let alone a grand-parent) then using an Interface is a great way to keep the abstraction but still keep the code loosely-coupled and reusable.

Anti-Pattern #2 – Event Suspension:

Often times when modifying the state of a control we inadvertently trigger events that we don’t want to be called.  This can even result in infinite recursion if the event that is triggered is the same as the event we are currently in..

Example:

public void ListBox1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {

                ListBox1.OnClick -= new EventHandler(ListBox1_Click); // unwire event

                ListBox1.SelectedIndex = 0; // Reset this for some reason

                //… Do Some Other Work ..//

                ListBox1.OnClick -= new EventHandler(ListBox1_Click); // wire the event back

}

Remarks:

I have actually seen this a lot!  There is very little good reason to “un-wire” events.  The best thing I can think of to do is to provide a global variable to indicate that work is in progress for that list box.  A better idea might be to re-consider the design of the application in general.  WPF *should* help as there will be much less code written to manage the state of objects through anything but data binding.

Anti-Pattern #3 – Pass by Global?:

Sometimes we get confused about OOP and what things in a class should and should not be used for.  This can backfire!.

Example:

public MyObject ListObject {
               get { //...// }
               set { //...// }
}

public void MyMethod() {
          if ( ListObject != null ) {
                 // Do some work...
                 ListObject.Sort(); // Could cause a null reference exception.  Why? Another thread may have changed it.
          }
}

// some other class
public void SomeOtherMethod() { 
          MyClass1Object.ListObject = GetListObject();
             MyClass1Object.MyMethod();
} 

Remarks:

If there were only one method that did that and ListObject was not only used by these methods then this pattern *could* be safe, at least in a single-threaded enviornment.  The real problems come when this is multi-threaded and ListObject is unique to this (or this type of) method call.  It is better to pass ListObject in as a parameter [MyClass1Object.MyMethod(GetListObject()); ].

Just over a year ago I setup this blog with the first entry entitled “Blog....what the heck do we all need blogs for?”  There are two things that I have embraced in the past year that I think are valuable.  The first is Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/).  Wikipedia is a wealth of information and I could spend the rest of my days contributing to it.  It is what the Internet was intended for!  If you haven’t yet been converted to Wikipedia then I invite you to try it today!  

The second is, well, blogs!  This is, of course, very hypocritical of me to write my first blog on how it’s stupid that we all need blogs and then to say that over the past year it has been on of the things I have embraced the most!  I have noticed that there are, in fact, two types of blogs.  The first and most common is the personal blogs.  These blogs, like this one, are a bunch of mostly useless bits of poorly worded dribble that rarely speaks of anything of any importance and is never the place where great ideas are cultivated or shared. 

The other type of blog is an outlet of people, or in some cases companies or people in proxy of companies as with Microsoft. These blogs are used as the “proving ground” for new ideas, for news on the latest trends, for answers to questions that many have, or at times even for a good laugh.  You will know these blogs because there are never less than a dozen comments on even the most drab of entries and they tend to get hundreds of hits per day. 

Which type of blog do I like?  The easy answer is there are things I like about both of them and there are things that I don’t like about both of them.  I like the personal blogs because if it is someone I already know it is really nice to take a minuet here and there and catch up on what’s going on with them.  It’s important to still go to lunch with these former colleagues and friends but you don’t usually have enough time to fully catch up.  If I end up on a person’s blog that I don’t know then I am usually just annoyed! 

I like the other type of blogs for obvious reasons.  They give me a lot of information I can’t find anything else.  I get important news on upcoming products of interest and I learn a lot from some select people.  The thing I don’t like about these ‘blog for the masses’ is that after establishing a reputation or a following the opinion of this one person skews the perspectives of their readers.  It’s really not their fault, but some people fix themselves on a single point of view, they don’t diversify in their selection of blog readings and the views and opinion of one perspective is now shared by countless others.  It really doesn’t matter the subject or the author and this principal is not thus limited to blogs.  Anyone who does not diversify their sources and does not seek out to understand other points of view does not have an accurate portrait of the truth.  Said another way, no one person speaks truth.  It may be in complete accordance to their point of view and/or experience but this does not make truth.  Truth can only be found in perusing it and once it is believed to have been found it can not be thus verified.  Nor can it be shared in verbatim.  Obtaining truth is tricky!  It is up to each of us who desire it to do their due diligence to peruse it the best we can.  In much the same way blogs contribute to this problem they also can help solve it.  They often add to the limited sources of information which can be used by those looking for another perspective on this information.

With technology marching forward its worth wondering, is 2006/2007 going to bring as much innovation as 2005/2006 or is 2005 going to be a year in which other years will be judged.

--NZ