Category: Tech in the 603

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Retail IT in the Enterprise

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Lately, the projects I’ve been on have had me taking on roles outside my comfort zone. (I’m not talking about downtown-Boston… with the “Boston Express” out of Nashua, I’m ok with that.)

I’ve always been most comfortable, myself, in cross-discipline engineering roles, especially in smaller teams where everyone’s got good cross-discipline experience. The communications overhead is low. The integration friction is low. Everyone knows how it needs to be done, and people are busy building rather than negotiating aggressively.

These types of tight, focused teams have always had business focused folks who took on the role of principal consultant. In this type of situation, the principal consultant provides an insulation boundary between the technical team and the customer.

This insulation has made me comfortable in that “zone”: I’m a technologist. I eat, sleep, dream software development. I take the ability to communicate complex technical concepts with my peers effectively and concisely, very seriously.

So like I said, lately the projects I’ve been on have yanked me pretty hard out of that zone. I’ve been called on to communicate directly with my customers. I’ve been handling item-level projects, and it’s a different world. There is no insulation. I’m filling all my technical roles, plus doing light BA and even PM duty.

Somewhat recently, I emailed a solution description to a CFO. The response: “Send this again in user-level English.”

It killed me.

I’ve gotten so used to having others “protect” me from this sort of non-technical blunder. In contemporary projects, the insulating consulting roles are simply not present.

Makes me wonder about the most important lessons I learned during my school days… In high school days, maybe it was retail courtesy, and retail salesmanship in a technical atmosphere (“Radio Shack 101”). In college days, the key lessons might have been how to courteously negotiate customer experience levels, (from “help desk 101”).

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Compact and Full .NET Frameworks

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

One of the things I’ve been intrigued by for a while now is the fact that code compiled for the .NET Compact Framework (all versions) executes very nicely on the full .NET Framework.

For example, my personal hobby project, “Jimmy Sudoku”, is written in C# for the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. There are actually two install kits. The first is a .CAB file for Windows Mobile devices. The second is an .MSI for Windows 9x, XP, and Vista. The desktop install kit even serves two purposes. First, it installs the program on the desktop. Second, it leverages ActiveSync to push the .CAB up to the Windows Mobile device.

It’s a .NET Compact Framework app especially for Windows Mobile devices, but many ‘Jimmy’ fans don’t have a Windows Mobile device to run it on.

The coolest part is the ease in which all of the components inter-operate. The .EXE and .DLL’s that are delivered to the mobile device are the very same as the ones that are delivered to the desktop. Like Silverlight to WPF, the Compact Framework is a compatible subset of the full framework, so interoperability is a given.

Even better, you can reference CF assemblies in Full framework assemblies. One immediate offshoot of this in my hobby project… the web service I built to service “Game of the Day” requests actually references the CF assembly that implements the game state model and game generator code. The assembly that generates games on Windows Mobile PDA’s & cell phones is the very same assembly that generates games in the ASP.NET web service.

Admittedly, there are some bothersome differences between the CF and the Full .NET Framework. The CF does not support WPF. The CF has no facilities for printing. Also, while the CF does supports some of the common Windows Forms dialogs, it does not support File Save and File Open dialogs on Windows Mobile Standard Edition (Smart Phone / non-touchscreen) devices.

These differences can be overlooked to some extent, though, for the fact that one compiled assembly can execute on so many very different machine types. Further, with interoperability, one can extend a CF-based core code with full-framework support. For example, I’m currently playing with desktop print functionality for my hobby project.

Something that I’d really love to see, some day, is a good excuse to develop a Windows Forms app for a client that had shared components between the desktop and a mobile.

I can imagine that this model would be superb for a huge variety of applications, allowing a fully featured UI for the desktop version, and an excellent, 100% compatible, very low risk (almost “free”) portable version.

I’ve often thought this would work great for apps that interface hardware, like:
field equipment,
mobile equipment,
vehicles of all sorts,

…simply plug in your PDA (via USB or Bluetooth), and it becomes a smart management device for the equipment, using the very same code that also runs on the desktop.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Semi-IT / Semi-Agile

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

While working on-site for a client, I noticed something interesting. On the walls of some of my client’s “users” offices, along with other more classic credentials, are certifications from Microsoft… SQL Server 2005 query language certifications.

I’ve heard a lot about the lines between IT and business blurring. We talk a fair amount about it back at HQ.

Interestingly, this case is a clear mid-tier layer between classic IT (app development, data management, advanced reporting) and business in the form of ad hoc SQL querying and cube analysis. In many ways, it’s simply a “power-user” layer.

The most interesting part about it is the certification, itself. The credentials that used to qualify an IT role are now being used to qualify non-IT roles.

Another trend I’m seeing is development ceremony expectations varying depending on the risk of the project. Projects that are higher risk are expected to proceed more like a waterfall ceremony. Lower risk projects proceed with more neo-“agility”.

The project I was on was apparently considered “medium” risk. The way I saw this play out was that all of the documentation of a classic waterfall methodology was expected, but the implementation was expected to develop along with the documentation.

In many ways, it was prototyping into production. Interestingly, this project required this approach: the business users simply did not have time to approach it in a full waterfall fashion. Had we been forced into a full-fledged classic waterfall methodology, we might still be waiting to begin implementation, rather than finishing UAT.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Energy Productization

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I think the ITER project, a grand-scale fusion project, is interesting. I’m troubled with it for a few reasons, though. I can’t help but think that there’s only a few reasons that we need it, and most of them have to do with power… of a controlling nature.

There’s already a great big huge fusion reactor throwing more energy at us than we can collect, let alone use… every single day… the sun.

Efforts to create fusion reactors here on earth are great for these reasons:
1) Energy for space exploration
2) Productization of energy
3) Weapons innovation

Once we learn how fusion’s done, we can build space craft from it that could potentially get us somewhere in the galaxy. That’s all well and good, but will it happen before we poison our existing biosphere?

Once we have fusion reactors, energy moguls can sell it. Oh, great! Instead of energy productization through oil, we get energy productization through fusion… because we can’t all have one of these great big huge reactors in our basements. At least it’s renewable. If the moguls are benevolent, it might even be cheap.

Finally, once we have fusion reactors like this, we’ll learn new ways to blow ourselves out of our collective misery… so I suppose the first two points are mute once this comes along.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Economic Detox

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

While contemporary headlines bode poorly for the U.S. economy, I see them as signs of hope…

I keep hearing high-pitched alarms about the weakening U.S. dollar, inflation, energy prices, the housing market bubble burst. We all see the ugly face of the these conditions.

Global trade has been a bitter (but necessary) pill for the U.S. Perhaps the Clinton-detonated U.S. economic nuclear winter (of global trade, NAFTA, etc.) is finally starting to give way to a new economic springtime in the States.

In the late 90’s US market, there were a lot of excesses in the technology sector. Then the bubble burst. When the dust settled, we (the US IT industry) found ourselves disenfranchised by our sponsors… corporate America beat us with our own job hopping. U.S. Engineers hopped off to the coolest new startup, and rode their high salaries into the dirt, while enduring companies went lean, mean, and foreign. We had become so expensive, we were sucking our own project ROI’s completely out of sight. By hooking foreign talent pools, the ROI’s were visible again.

Nearly a decade later, look what’s happening around the world… Many foreign IT job markets are falling into the same salary inflation trap that the U.S. market fell into… They are going through the same inflation we experienced. Their prices are rising.

Combine their salary inflation with our salary stagnation and a weakening dollar, and what do you get?

A leaner, meaner domestic competitor.

In a sense, it’s like that in many sectors of the U.S. economy.

So let the U.S. dollar weaken… It means that America can go back to being product producers (rather than mindless consumers) in the global market!

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

If It Looks Like Crap…

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

It never ceases to amaze me what a difference “presentation” makes.

Pizza Hut is airing a commercial around here about their “Tuscani” menu. In the commercial, they show people doing the old “Surprise! Your coffee is Folgers Crystals!” trick in a fancy restaurant, except they’re serving Pizza Hut food in an “Olive Garden”-style venue.

It clearly shows my point, and that the point applies to anything… books, food, appliances, vehicles, and software, just to name the first few things that pop to mind. You can have the greatest product in the world… it exceeds expectations in every functional way… but any adjective that is instantly applied to the visual presentation (including the environment it’s presented in) will be applied to the content.

If it looks like crap, that’s what people will think of it.

(Of course, there are two sides to the coin… What really kills me are the times when a really polished application really IS crap… it’s UI is very appealing, but not thought out. It crashes at every click. But it looks BEAUTIFUL. And so people love it, at least enough to be sucked into buying it.)

Good engineers don’t go for the adage “It’s better to look good than to be good.” We know far better than that. You can’t judge the power of a car by its steering wheel. Granite countertops look great, but they’re typically hard to keep sanitary.

When it comes to application user interfaces, engineers tend to make it function great… it gives you the ability to control every nuance of the solution without allowing invalid input… but if it looks kludgy, cheap, complex, or gives hard-to-resolve error messages, you get those adjectives applied to the whole system.

So what I’m talking about, really, is a risk… and it’s a significant risk to any project. For that reason, appearance litterally becomes a business risk.

For any non-trivial application, a significant risk is end-user rejection. The application can do exactly what it’s designed to do, but if it is not presented well in the UI, the user will typically tend to reject the application sumarily.

That’s one thing that I was always happy about with the ISIS project. (I’ve blogged about our use of XAML and WPF tools in it, before.) The project was solid, AND it presented well. Part of it was that the users loved the interface. Using Windows Presentation Foundation, it was easy to add just enough chrome to impress the customers without adding undo complexity.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

I blew it…

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

While working on the site, I accidentally deleted a core portion of the Jimmy Sudoku 2.5 puzzle generator web service. (Don’t ask me how… it was apparently so bone-headed that it took me a while to realize I’d done it.)

I’ve exhausted all my backup options… the backups were either too new (and therefore producing the wrong content format), or so old that the backup itself was corrupt.

The good news is 2.5 supported local game generation if the service was on the fritz. I guess that means its covered.

Anyway, if you send me proof of purchase of any rev prior to 3.0, I’ll send the fresh bits along.

Send it to me in email to jimmysoftware (at) kataire.com, and I’ll reply with a copy. (Your order number & date will probably suffice…)

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Compromise & Capitulation

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

There’s three different flavors of Windows Mobile in the 6.x line. Standard, Classic, and Professional.

Standard = Smart Phone, no touchscreen
Classic = PDA w/touchscreen
Professional = PDA / Phone with Touchscreen

One of the other interesting little gotchas is that the .Net Compact Framework 2.0 compiles the same for all three editions. Unfortunately, once in a while, you get a “NotSupportedException” out of the Standard edition.

A few days ago, in order to get my sudoku program published, I decided to simply avoid a problem I had with the Standard edition’s lack of a SaveFileDialog and OpenFileDialog. My avoidance manifested in a “not supported” message of my own, if the user tried to save / load a file in that environment.

Today, I capitulated… I implemented an alternative file save/load functionality which kicks in automatically when the program gets a “NotSupportedException” on the common dialogs.

It’s in 3.0.3, which I’ve re-published on PocketGear.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Jimmy SuDoku 3.0 Released

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Those of you who have worked with me on a project in the past few years probably know of my hobby project. It’s an implementation of SuDoku. It’s made for Windows Mobile devices (cell phones, etc.), but it also runs on Windows XP (et al).

The old version, 2.5, had been published on PocketGear. This last update was published in January, 2007, just before I started with Edgewater.

I’ve been hacking at it here & there since then, but the project suffered from lots of maladies… most significantly lack of time.

So after more than a year and a half, I’m happy to finally announce Jimmy SuDoku 3.0!

3.0 has a whole new game state model, based on CLR classes rather than an XML DOM. This means the puzzle generator’s fast enough on hand-held devices that it doesn’t need a web service to do the work for it. Another side-effect of this change is a smaller run-time memory footprint, though I’m not sure by exactly how much.

I also figured out how to leverage the hardware controls on WM6.0 & 6.1 devices so that non-touchscreen devices can play, too.