Fear and Loathing

Go get this:

Then meet me on the global battlefield (although I won’t be playing North Korea).

Matthew Broderick eat yer heart out.

We wrapped up taping the latest episode of Plumbers @ Work, our Canadian developer podcast that I do with John Bristowe and James Kovacs, on Wednesday. At the taping after bitching about how long it’s taking for the shows to get online, I was informed that our previous episode had made it up to the site (I’m always the last to know). As John is making up for the lapses we’ve had in the past by being the crazy midnight podcast editor that he is, Wednesdays episode has been cut and bagged and is now online as well. Thanks John!

• Episode #8 – Improbability Drive
• Episode #7 – Vogon Destructor Ship

Enjoy!

This guide is offered as a public service announcement to help you wade through the myriad of products and technologies made by Microsoft for those in this dilemma.

MS-DOS
You shoot yourself in the foot.

Notepad
You shoot yourself in the foot because there are no options to do anything else.

Microsoft Help
You try to shoot only to discover your gun doesn’t work. After searching for the topic the answer that’s given is “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”.

Excel
You can create a complex formula to calculate trajectory, angle, and bullet speed only to find out that you’ve created a circular reference.

Powerpoint
You put together a presentation about how you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot but can’t click on the trigger to start the slideshow because it’s too small.

Word
The spel chek on amunition prevents you frum pulling the triger.

FrontPage
You try to shoot yourself in the foot but realize that FrontPage has completed reformatted the gun and removed the bullets.

Access
You fill the gun with too many bullets and find that this action has caused the gun to become corrupted.

Project
As you try to shoot yourself in the foot your gun re-levels its resources and allocates the bullets for another user.

Outlook
You send yourself an email with an attachment on how to shoot youself in the foot only to find Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: ShootFoot.exe.

Microsoft Bob
You can’t find your the gun from all the papers stacked up on the desk and the dog keeps barking at you.

Clippy
You ask Clippy how to shoot yourself in the foot but he offers to write a letter about the pros and cons of gun control for you instead.

SQL Server
SELECT [Bullets] FROM [Gun] LEFT JOIN [Foot] ON [Leg] WHERE [Gun].[Bullets] > 0

Windows XP
You’ve tried to shoot yourself in the foot too many times and changed out the bullets twice so Windows prevents you from continuing and shuts down.

Windows ME
You decide to not even bother trying because it just isn’t worth it and wish you were in a better place.

Windows Vista
You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but it looks too darn pretty. Then your foot explodes.

Visual Studio Team System
As you try to shoot yourself in the foot the compiler warns you of too many code violations and that the connection to the Team Server is down and doesn’t allow you to pull the trigger.

XBox 360
Your gun overheats and locks up before you have a chance to pull the trigger.

SharePoint 2003
You get through 5 steps into the process, but then your foot tells you an error has occured.

SharePoint 2007
You try to shoot yourself in the foot but can’t find it because your foot has been security trimmed and you don’t have the right permissions.

Internet Explorer
Your gun is incompatible with your bullets and the trigger is disabled because you’re not in the right zone.

Feel free to add your own or improve on my pathetic attempt at humour.

Mike Cohn over at Mountain Goat Software has been in the Agile software development river since 1993. He's the author of the most excellent book Agile Estimating and Planning and really knows his stuff.

For those wanting to greenfield Scrum at your organization, he's got an excellent powerpoint slide deck to start from. It talks about what Scrum is and highlights the key things that you can use to show benefit to management. Mike encourages people to download the presentation and run with it, making adjustments as you need to adapt it your environment. The killer thing about this is the presentation is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. This is excellent for the Scrum community as we can go off a base from a respected source. I encourage everyone to join the bandwagon and help promote this by making it work for you. Scrum isn't a silver bullet, but it just plain works. You can grab the slide deck from here. Also available is a French version generously translated by Claude Aubry.

To add some icing on the cake, there's some great pictures of the Scrum process that Mike has made available of the process itself which really sums it up. These are great for decks or just print them out as a poster to hang in your team area to let everyone know the simplicity of the process. You can check out the picture files, also released under the CC license, here.

Watch for the Scrum tatoos coming soon to a blog near you.

We were finishing up our taping for the latest episode of Plumbers At Work, and the issue of IE7 (just recently released) vs. Firefox came up. The first thing that came out was of course the “browser wars” statement and that it’s still going on. Actually, I have  bit of a different take on what the war actually is and who’s winning.

Let’s face it. A web browser is neither rocket nor science. It sends a request to an address via a protocol, chatter goes on back and forth, and the end result is a stream of ASCII character that are rendered in a format. That’s it. Sure, there are ActiveX controls and Flash and JavaScript and all that goo, but really we’re just talking about parsing and displaying here. So there’s really not a heck of a lot you can improve on with that model. I mean, other than following some standard about what an HTML tag looks like (to which I use the term “standard” loosely as nobody can really agree on this), there’s not really a way to build a better mouse trap here. The operations are so very basic in structure and the pattern is the same whether you have a cool looking mammal as your mascot or not.

So what’s the war really about? Market share? Nah. That’s just attrition. Microsoft has a Googolplex (no, not Googleplex) of deployed systems out there and every one of the them ships with this thing called Internet Explorer. It’s the default browser, and other than you, me, and a few thousand of us geek boys (and girls) the average 40 year old virgin who plugs in his latest acquisition from Best Buy doesn't know there are other choices. Certainly when you boot up XP you don’t get a “Would you like to use Internet Explorer as your web browser, or go surfing on the net to find another one?”. I know what my grandpappy would say (assuming I could even get him to use this new-fangled gadget called a computer). “Surf for something I already have? Poppycock.”

The masses out there with their out-of-the-box-stock Dell PC have no clue how to find things on the net, let alone install an application that they download. Yes, there are internet and computer savvy people, and those that use computers in their daily lives (whether they like it or not) but the vast majority just doesn’t know there are choices. Or where to find them. Or how to use them. So you really can’t ask Firefox, Opera, or Bob’s Budget Web Browser to try to take the lions share of these peoples lives with something that isn’t any different on the surface to them. A browser is a browser is a browser. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it they’ll tell you.

I think the true war (if there is even one) is the functionality the application provides. Like I said, it doesn’t take a computer scientist to write code to stream down a bunch of bytes from a connection and display it in a format most people agree on. What really makes the shell of the application we call a web browser useful is in the extensibility it provides. For guys like us. The geeks. The ones that build things to make other peoples lives better.

I’ve looked at both sides of the coin and Firefox is the clear winner here. Just starting to look at how to build a tool bar button for IE takes you into dozens of registry hives, GUIDs, class IDs, etc. and that’s not even getting to the point where  you have to build a COM object and optionally some scripts to make this actually thing do anything. And that’s just a button. Imagine anything more than that? There’s also menu bars, and explorer bars, and custom download managers, and each one of them requires at least this much (if not more) investment in learning. There’s lots of documentation on IE and building extensions so you can start in the MSDN library like here, however it falls short and for the guy who wants to build something useful for someone and it becomes too much of an investment in time. I don’t want to read an entire manual on Plumbing just to stop a dripping tap, but that’s what IE extensions feel like.

Then I took a look at Firefox and how to build their extensions. It was well documented and had a great page to get started here (with a download of the Hello World extension if you just wanted to skip to the good part). I found that to be pretty straight forward and simple. A single page describing what I had to do and an example I could follow and download. IE on the other hand? 12 or so pages of topics, with dozens of links to all kinds of snippets and the documentation overall was less than stellar. For example, to add an entry to the standard context menu there’s a few instructions (again registry changes) but when you read it, it refers to things like scripts and assemblies as if I know where that came from. So where are those and how do I build them (or deploy them, or pass values to them, etc.). Like I said, pretty skimpy. Firefox extensions use standards like JavaScript and CSS and binds it together with a simple text file (a manifest). Einstien said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Easy ways that everyone knows about to get things done. Standards good, screwing around in the registry… bad. Some naysayers will claim “Well COM is a standard too you know” and of course those guys could just rattle off COM interfaces in their sleep. Uhhh, yeah. Okay. Grant you, to setup the development environment to write a Firefox extension requires a bit of work. On the IE side, everything is there if you have Visual Studio already installed. So I’ll hand it to IE for that, however this is something that is either a) automated or b) only done once. So really does it matter in the grand scheme of things?

Finally after your built your uber-widget, there’s deployment. Write an MSI and package up COM stuff, write some custom code to create all those registry entries (or perhaps if your installer supports it, add them yourself or run a .reg file) however none of this is very safe and almost any IE add-in I’ve installed required me to reboot the computer. Yeah, you heard me. The computer. The big box that makes things go. Not the browser, but the entire operating system. Has to do with that wonderful “COM” thing that IE needs. If we could build native .NET addins by creating oh, say, a single .NET assembly and xcopy deploy it to a folder that would be a step forward and what I would consider a real improvement to IE. Or even let the user download it and maybe create a bootstrapper to install it for you via the browser. I mean, if we’re going to compare apples to apples here and Firefox to IE, then why can’t IE deploy extensions like Firefox does? I go to the Firefox addon site, see something new like a CSS validator, or an addon that lets me download videos I’m watching in my browser, and I click on “Install Now” and poof, Bob’s yer uncle (okay, sometimes you *do* have to restart the browser). What’s preventing us from doing this in IE with IE extensions?

Oh yeah. COM. Registry access. Goo. Got it.

I look at the Firefox addon site. There are tons-o-addons. True, you might filter out 60 or 70% of them and call them crap but then there’s some real gems there. Useful things that make people productive while browsing web pages, which is all the web browser does. If I can be more productive like being able to snag news clippings or validate my CSS on a page (without having to launch other tools/windows) then more time for me to play Xbox games (or whatever it is you’d rather be doing).

So this is my take on the real browser war. It’s in the extensions and not the snazzy features you might add to the base system. C’mon. Tabbed browsing? If that’s really got you picking one tool over another, you might want to re-evaluate your priorities. I look at the “new” features of IE7. Tabbed browsing; RSS feeds; better performance; blah; blah; blah. Nothing exciting here, move along folks. If IE (Microsoft) built up a community of addons like Firefox has, you’d see a real battle going on. Instead we have an underdog that’s superior in some ways with a lot of potential, and the front runner that is not enabling people to be more productive but rather adding flash and flair to something that really can’t be improved upon, retrieving and rendering content. Communities are not Sea Monkeys and don’t grow up instantly. There’s no Field of Dreams approach you can take here. However if you give them the tools, the can build it for you. Just look at what Firefox Addons site has done for Firefox. True, the browser might be a little leaner than IE (or others) but the sweet spot is the aftermarket and what’s happening right now everyday.

What’s really the golden ticket is the stuff beneath the layers. You know, like an onion. Peel back IE and you get Goo. Peel back Firefox you get a world of possibilities that’s expanding every day.

Just a little tip as I finally crossed over to the dark side and installed the latest version of IE7. When you’re viewing a SharePoint 2007 site (WSS or MOSS, doesn’t matter) you’ll get a warning message from IE saying that an ActiveX control is causing problems on the site. This control is named “name.dll” and is the person smart tag that shows presence information. Just add your site to the trusted site list and the error goes away.

The message doesn’t come up in IE6 (unless maybe you have ActiveX controls disabled or some kind of uber-high security setting) so it might be new for those visiting 2007 sites with IE7 (it was for me).

And while I’m on the presence information bandwagon, here’s a couple of blog entries that discuss how to use it in your own Web Parts:

• Adding Presence Information to your Web Apps (Patrick Tisseghem)
• How to add presence/pawn to SharePoint contacts list (mondonovan)
• How to add Presence to your custom web parts (Mark Stokes)

Thanks to Dustin for the tip!

P.S. I’m also taking the plunge on a scratch desktop now and finally trying out Vista. It’ll be a few days until that gets installed as I go back to juggling all the cats I have in the air right now.

Or as someone in the audience called it, SorePoint (but then, they haven’t done it 2007 style yet).

Last nights presentation to the .NET Calgary User Group went well. We had about 40 or so people come out and get some free pizza and swag and spend 3 hours with me rambling on about SharePoint 2007 (yes I know, there is no product called SharePoint 2007). I gave a brief overview of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) but the focus of the presentation was on Windows SharePoint Service 3.0.

We covered the basics, some architecture changes from 2.0, and got into Web Parts, Content Types, Features, Site Columns, Event Receivers, and touched briefly on Master Pages and various other goodies. The first hour was mostly talking and doing some basic stuff in the UI. The second half was mostly code and writing and deploying new features. I still had two code projects I didn’t get to, so I’ll leave that for a future session. All in all, lots to take in and lots of think about.

I used a few tools during the demo and made reference to a couple of web sites for more information so here’s the links:

• Infotech Canada’s Feature Explorer
• Todd Baginski’s Feature Manager
• A brief introduction to Content Types
• Using a Content Type in a List Definition

There were a lot of great questions and some things I’m following up (like sequence of events when receivers are triggered) as well as a way to enumerate through what receivers are attached to what list/library/feature instances (which might result in a feature of itself). Stay tuned for lots more 2007 goodness in the coming weeks.

Note to self (and anyone else listening). I had to recently rebuild my system (and I was smart enough to Ghost it so I don’t spend another day rebuilding it again, Thanks Jenn!) and of course had to re-install a million programs. I use BlogJet as my tool to post to the site and in setting it up, the current version doesn’t support Community Server correctly. The default location that comes up is “/MetaBlog.ashx” but it should be “/blogs/MetaBlog.ashx” to work. Just something to keep in mind when using BlogJet and Community Server.

Tonight I'm giving a fairly long session (two sessions actually) on SharePoint 2007 development for the .NET Calgary User Group. This is the soup to nuts presentation on SharePoint development. No powerpoints, just code. If you're in Calgary and want to catch it, you can find more information here on the user group site.

As this is a public presentation, I will be wearing pants.

See you there!