When you continuously seek out the limit, you’ll realize that it’s often much higher than you expected. Yes, you can make that screen even simpler than the bare-boned version you’re looking at. Yes, you can trust your employees much more than you imagined. Yes, you can launch without a billing system.

Once you train yourself to seek out the limit in all endeavors, you’ll get better and faster at correcting the inevitable oversteps, and hit that peak performance.

But if you never dare venture close to the limit, you’ll find that it’s shrinking all the time. There will be even more people you could possibly offend, even more bells that need whistling, ever more realities of the real world you cannot change.

From Seven degrees of slip.

Lately one of the limits I’ve hit were advanced threading concepts in .NET. It’s an area where I haven’t stepped much aside from some rather simple use cases & basic usage. But recently I had to solve few (non trivial for me) threading puzzles/exercises and today I’ve been hit by IIS showing ‘Deadlock detected’ for one of our Server components. It hurts…

In the same time it clearly shows a limit in my knowledge and experience. So, let’s hit it with an action plan: dig dipper in Threading. Then review those threading puzzles and sort out the deadlock out of the system.

Resources:

• Threading in C# by Joseph Albahari. It’s a book available online for free
• Concurrent Programming on Windows by Joe Duffy. Paper book and Kindle from Amazon

Both are well recommended on StackOverflow…

…the keynote speaker shared a story about a failed project. He joined the project a couple of years into the development, and the team had yet to release anything to production. He went on to detail that he was on the project another year and a half, with no production release in sight, and left the project.

This project was one of those legacy re-writes, given pretty much unlimited budget and resources, in hopes that this would produce the best possible replacement for the existing product. The project had budget, resources, executive backing and visibility, technical leadership, support from domain experts etc. etc. Yet the project was still a colossal failure. Why? It never released!

There are many reasons why you should release as soon as possible. But the main are to get a feedback from your target audience and validate your technical decisions. Both of them are extremely important at early development stage in order to confirm that you’re building what people will buy and you’re doing it right.

And everyone is guessing what will be Microsoft pushing in the segment currently occupied by Silverlight. Now we have two available options, the new guy in the block – the HTML 5, and the good old and trusty WPF. Won’t mention Windows 8 here as it’s way to the Enterprise is too long to be considered as an option.

So, everyone is watching the next move of Microsoft as there is not a clear winner – HTML 5 is too young to be considered seriously and WPF is too old to be considered as a long-time investment. When Silverlight was a competitor the choice was rather easy, now picture is much more blurred.

In my view

XAML & .NET will stay with us. Will it be WPF, Metro or anything MS will roll out for Desktop and LOB applications it will be based on those two pillars. At least for 7-10 years we’re assured.

I’ll make few guesses, what MS’s steps will be after Silverlight end will be announced (it will be interesting to read it in a year or two):

• A promise that Silverlight 5 will be supported for next 3-4 years
• A tool for a relatively easy migration from Silverlight to WPF (and/or Windows 8 programming model) will be available
• Newer versions of WPF will promote features previously hyped as Silverlight’s exclusives (in-browser apps, sandboxing, web deployment & updates and others) minus the ability to run in browsers on various platforms.

As for companies struggling with the choice right now (and it will probably true for near future), you’ll have to decide:

• Interaction and Data intensive applications, Rich User Experience, Resource Intensive application, deep OS integration – embrace the WPF and be happy (if you don’t mind to lock yourself to MS and Windows).
• Platform independent, high user base, moderately interactive UIs, presentation and manipulation of small amounts of data – your best bet is the Web: HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript will be your tools.

And if you still struggle with the choice the best thing you can do next is to look at your current development team. If they are more experienced and efficient with Web technologies you’re set. If they are mostly Desktop specialists then you’d want to explore their productivity to the max and get the release date closer. You’re sorted.

And the last word: don’t be a mono-disciplinary developer. Don’t lock yourself exclusively in Desktop or Web, Microsoft or LAMP or whatever. The day you’ll fail to pick, learn and use efficiently a new tool/framework will mean your career as a Professional Software Developer is done. Be open. Look around, there are so many amazing things in Software Development industry. Just pick something new and learn. It will be one of the best investments you can do in your future. You can do it right now…

• the progress dialog has fonts remembering about the times of Windows 95
• it’s impossible to move the dialog window
• clicking on close button has no effect on it neither
• after freezing 30 seconds or so it gives me a message box that I’ve cancelled operation and shows a URL with ~30 characters that I can’t click.

Pathetic experience.

I’m not about Java on servers and in the Enterprise, nor about the language. Why the Windows runtime/installers cannot be polished enough so that when it happens to meet the user face-to-face he wouldn’t run scared?

I have had similar “unnatural” feelings when I’ve started using FreeMind, a mind mapping software. It’s the only Java application I remember on my PCs. It works and gets job done. But it looks awful.

Anybody have a good example of any Java application that looks OK in Windows?

• Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
• Zero Day: A Novel
• The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel

Waiting in the queue, if previous items will be done or I’ll get bored by book about investments:

• Outliers: The Story of Success
• The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
• Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond

And have yet to finish the Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box, a great reading so far…

I hope it will be enough to keep myself entertained and get some new things to explore…

I’m third from the left…

The “big thing” in the back is a Diesel engine stripped from a big ship. Converted to an internal combustion engine working on natural gas and producing 6 Megawatts of Electrical power. Cooling/heating, turbo, oiling, ignition – those are only few subsystems of this complex.

One more picture:

My former employer, Romany Gaz Group, done all the electronics + software. It was a blast to work on. A mix of hardware, microprocessors and software, low level hacking and unforgettable feeling of true Research and Development work:

• writing in assembler for mythical Motorola 68HC11, an 8-bit microprocessor with a whopping 64 Kb of program memory and less than 1 Kb of RAM. Then come the HC12 with more memory and C compiler.
• in-house Real-Time Operational System with multi-tasking support.
• “advanced” user interfaces on 20×4 character displays and 5 button keyboards
• homebrew communication protocol spawning into few levels of OSI model
• tens of sensors and digital signals
• tens of output signals, valves, pumps
• a SCADA-like PC application for monitoring and control

And a fantastic team of talented engineers that tamed the beast. You have to hear it grumble…

Yes, the problem is worse if English isn’t your first language. And not even the second. For me it’s fighting with French for third place. But it’s the “default” in IT industry. So, you may like it or not but in order to enjoy some interesting career opportunities you have to know how to use it properly.

One of the goals why I started this blog was to practice writing in English. It worked well. It worked so nice that now I’m thinking to start one in French. I remember writing first posts, every one took hours to write and rewrite. Now it’s much more easy, if you have something to say you just put it down. It just flows. This gave me an amazing opportunity to easily engage in discussions here and there in the Web and profit enormously from this experience.

But I still think my English is not good enough and I’ve been sad because of lack of the time to improve it.

Enter The Writer’s Handbook. God bless the (forgotten) place where I’ve spotted this site. It’s a book composed from small chapters on how to improve your Writing. The format and style (small, to the point, no clutter) makes it possible to read it whenever you have few minutes: in the morning, warming-up before going hunt that bug, enjoying a cup of tea in the evening. And that’s what I’m doing.

PS: Also, as an exercise (not only in writing) I’ve updated my CV. Any comments on design, writing style or content are welcome.

Update:

Ruslan Rusu shared in comments a link to a chapter from Getting Real by 37signals, here is a fragment:

Hire good writers

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.

That’s because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

• Jump list (on letters using LongListSelector) and app search directly in application list. It’s a welcome change. When number of installed apps is past of 30-40, it’s very hard to find quickly the right app. I’ve tried to imagine a solution for this problem and came to idea that MS will let user’s create “folder” tiles to group apps, similarly to iOS. How will work solution from MS we’ll see when Mango will be released.
• Marketplace improvements and better search. Another much welcomed change. Whenever I had to find something in Marketplace I would rather fire up Zune if it’s available. Same, Games Hub is nice addition.
• Third party apps integrated in search.
• Improved hardware interoperability. Camera, gyro, compass. I’m cool for this stuff.
• Improved live tiles. You can “pin” part of your apps to a tile. Extremely powerful feature, if done right (by developer). Then you have animations and status updates on a tile, directly from the app and not a remote service.
• MULTITASKING. I’ve been waiting for it. “Only back” navigation isn’t the greatest experience when you’re trying to do few things at the same time. App switching speed is very impressive. I’ve seen demos of Blackberry’s PlayBook based on QNX and running few resource heavy games at once and I’ve beed astounded by how system manages that. I’m glad to see that WP7 offers similar experience.
• Sockets & low level network API. Skype is coming. Hope to see a decent IM app supporting ICQ & GTalk soon. And a VoIP/Softphone client too…
• SQL CE database. Good to have, may be useful for data intensive apps & offline capabilities.
• IE9 & HTML5.

So, Microsoft took a slow start strategy with Windows Phone 7. Got it out robust but low on features if compared with iOS & Android. Made first update (the NoDo) to make small improvements and polish the update process itself. And Mango will be coming this year to put it on par with competitors. When you add to the game the power of Microsoft’s marketing machine, strong partner relationships and Nokia deal, then forecasts about WP7 getting over iPhone by 2015 sound very realistic.

And even if I understand principles of Web technologies, giving I know what things are how they are used, my real experience with development for Web is limited to WCF services hosted in IIS. I don’t have a finalised project done from ground up with any of modern Web development techics.

That’s why I really enjoyed watching today the Mix11′s Web Platform keynote. I know it’s a demo. I know that samples were extremely simplistic. I know that real world requirements are cruel. But I’m trully amazed by how fast basic things are done. You have a dabase backed site running in minutes. You can pick and customize a CMS and while your coup of coffee isn’t finished yet you’re filling the site with content. Entity Framework 4.1 looks very appealing with it’s code first approach. ASP.NET MVC3 scaffolding makes shaping your apps very fast. Oh, and HTML 5, of course…

And I’m impressed how Microsoft accepted Open Source projects as a part of development ecosystem. Just look how seamless OSS offerings/products are integrated in WebMatrix. Take a look at open source package management system – NuGet – filled up with thousands of freely available packages. If you add also it’s own projects that MS is publishing with a open source licence, it’s pretty clear that MS tries to keep up with community and support not only “enterprise” vendors but also mere mortals, you and me.

Also looking forward for tommorow’s keynote. I hope there will be some great announcements for Windows Phone platform. I’m missing very few things, net sockets and multitasking being most wanted. And a legal way to sideload an application will make me (and some enterprises) very happy.

Watching Windows Phone 7 Jump Start sessions make me more confident it my ability to develop applications for the platform.

Same time, I’m getting a bit worried about two things.

First one – inability to install on the phone an application that I have just wrote. It makes unhappy not only hobbyists that are writing code pieces “for fun” and, sometimes, they want to share them with their friends. But also it makes impossible to make use of the platform by a small/medium company that have created an app for their internal and private use. Inability to legally install any app on your phone – I’m not sure about it. I do understand that MS tries to protect users from potentially dangerous apps. And I understand that MS wants a “piece of cake” from every application sold for WP7. But this inevitably is stimulating “community” to create workarounds like jailbreaks, “custom firmware” and so on.

The second thing that worries me it’s “phone” focus. Look at the enormous success of Apple’s iPad, sold in millions last months. Tens of Android based tablets announced this fall. If Microsoft is limiting Windows Phone 7 only for smart phones, it’s a fail. Well, in a half of the year MS can announce new “tablet” platform, but it will be too late. Everyone interested will own already a iPad or an “Android pad”. Even me. At this moment I find it more practical to own a basic phone device and a 10” tablet. It just makes more sense…

In my experience, Windows 7 is not a player in tablet market nor in any other touch oriented devices. In same way how it happened with iOS and Android, Windows Phone 7 can be a good platform for a 10” tablet.  But I think MS either decided do not participate, or came later. If the latter, it already lost the battle.

As for my “develop for a mobile/tablet device” dreams, there are few viable choices: learn new platform or try a surrogate, like MonoDroid or Moonlight.

Updated:

Just found and want to add it to this post – Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn’t get the iPad. A very interesting analysis of relations between Microsoft and touch devices. Lots of rumors and guesses, few interesting ideas and few very precise elucidations of MS failures in this area.

As for the future of an eventual tablet device from Microsoft, I’ll bet on marriage between Windows Embedded CE and Metro UI. Only that can stand out of iPad and tens of Android tablets coming next year…