I was recently interviewed for The Thirsty Developer podcast.  We talked a bit about home audio but the main conversation dealt with AGT, Silverlight, and the topic of visual tools in general. 

The next AGT article should be out this weekend or next week.

I wanted to write up some thoughts based on attending yesterday's MSDN Dev Con in Chicago.  Since I knew this was coming, I purposely did not do much reading about the technologies announced at PDC.  This was my first exposure to these items. 

Keynote: Ron Jacobs's keynote was of course the typical "Lots of cool stuff you can't have yet".  I'm interested in Windows 7, I'm one of the folks who actually really likes Vista.  While I had hear about VS 2010 being rewritten in WPF this was the first time I had actually seen it, in this case showing some kind of comment view provider.  This will be huge.

A lap around Oslo: I've been following Dan Rigsby's blog for a while and I got a chance to meet him before the show. 

Here's what I learned from his talk: Oslo is the capital of Norway, and Microsoft wants to buy it.

Just kidding, Dan!

Now that I have a super-basic understanding of Oslo I have a couple of concerns.  The first regards Dan's comment about creating a DSL that some kind of business user could use to create functionality.  It is my firm belief that this won't happen in the next ten years, not because it's technically infeasible, but because Business Analysts, Managers, and the like do not want direct responsibility for systems.  They like a nice, thick neck to get their hands around if something goes wrong and by that I mean us Technical folks can always be blamed for any shortcomings in the implementation of any Grand Vision.  Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I cannot imagine this direct accountability happening any time soon.

My second concern is a smaller technical issue.  Dan showed an example of a DSL specific to WCF services.  This seemed well enough for expressing WCF specific ideas (endpoints, URL patterns, etc.) but I wonder if there is or will be a mechanism for using generic code from another CLR language.  For example, I may have a business logic or data access component already written in C#, and my WCF service is just a thin layer on top of it to expose it as a service.  Enquiring minds want to know.

Business Apps in Silverlight: I heard before the conference that this talk would involve a brief look at some new features in Silverlight 3 so I had to check it out.

The future stuff was billed as ideas taken from the Artist Formerly Known as Alexandria.  Overall, I'm sorry to say I was disappointed in what I saw and here's why:

• A demo was shown whereby a server side business operation exposed via WPF was automatically linked to a generated Silverlight class in the client.  This was nice, since I have nothing but issues with the automatically generated endpoint configuration for WCF <--> Silverlight.
• Data Source: MSFT is bringing the notion of an ASP.Net Data Source into Silverlight/XAML.  All in all, I wasn't sure I liked the magical nature of this, but it's optional.
• Navigation: my ears perked up when the speakers said they were going to bring a notion of Navigation into Silverlight.  My problem with what was shown was that it was NOT NavigationWindow and Page, but something new: Frame and so forth.  Why not use WPF concepts?  I have heard many times that the intention is to bring more parity between Silverlight and WPF.  The ability to deep-link to the application using the URL query string is good at least.
• An ASP.Net-ish Login control was shown as well as some declarative security you can place on functionality.  It wasn't clear if this would ONLY work with ASP.Net Membership and Role providers on the server, or if the client side mechanism would be extensible via a provider model as well.

Overall, I'd like to see Silverlight going in more of a WPF direction than an ASP.Net direction and I'm worried about what I'm seeing.  The vibe I got from this talk was that Silverlight is going to "Work real well with ASP.Net" or "Something you can do instead of Web Pages, if you want".  There was no mention of bringing Commanding or other awesome (fundamental) WPF features into Silverlight.  I hope that I'm wrong.

F#: I first looked at F# something like two years ago and got frustrated and dropped it.  Having done some functional style stuff in C# and LINQ of late, I've been meaning to pick it up.  Aaron Erickson gets big points from me for using the term "Hand Waving".  His presentation, however, I felt wasn't basic enough for an intro to F#.  If the goal was to tell the audience why they might want to look into F# then mission accomplished.  If his goal was to show us how to do some basic things, not so much.  What do the |> or -> operators mean in F#, things like that.  By this time of the day, my 100% lack of sleep the night before was seriously weighing on me, so these things may have actually been explained.

I do plan on getting the book he described as the Most Basic learning F# book he showed, if I can remember what it was called.

After the conference several of us went to Fogo de Chao where I had a tremendous amount of excellent meats with bell peppers and some Malbec.

The AGT (Argentum Tela) series of articles is an effort to do two things. Usually an idea is presented only in its finished form. The first goal is to do some Reality Blogging, to show an idea evolve over time without pulling any punches. The second goal, and the example vehicle for the evolution aspect, is an extensible Design Surface for Silverlight similar to what we have in Visual Studio 2008. This type of application has all sorts of interesting uses. My example is a Home Theater layout tool. Read the entire saga: http://www.damonpayne.com/2008/09/14/RunTimeIsDesignTimeForAGT0.aspx

Gestures, Commands, Transactions, and Undo

There's so many sexy things coming up, it was difficult to postpone them further.  There's two more important categories of plumbing that needed to be built.  We'll cover the design of one category and its pieces in this article followed by two dedicated implementation articles.  The other functionality, Document Types and Serialization, will be next.

I would like to be able to use the keyboard for some gestures on the design surface: for example the arrow keys should move the selection and I should be able to delete items from the surface with the delete or use CTRL-Z for undo.

Additionally, I would like to support some kind of undo.  The plumbing needed for undo will allow for other cool interactions later...

Implementing Undo using Transactions and Commands

Undo can be an incredibly hairy thing.  In my opinion, going back to a working system and suddenly trying to add undo can be a very good test of how well designed the system is.  Those following along should take careful note of the degree to which the changes we see are additive (feels like we're just adding another feature) versus things that are refactoring (changing code that was already working to support this new feature).

Now to reveal a personal bias: I seldom find a use for "Redo" as it is sometimes implemented.  For example in MS-Word you can apply some formatting to text.  You can then use "redo" to apply the same formatting to some other text.  I'm really only interested in in redo as an Undo-for-Undo. So Move something, undo, no wait I really wanted to do that, redo.

This is something that's important to get right so let's list the primary goals:

1. The changes made to items on the surface are easily captured to be undone or redone.  This should be true for both surface interactions and property editing.
2. The number of undo levels should not be artificially limited. In some cases an undo won't "work" because the state of the system has changed -  we don't want Units of Undo to have to know about other Units of Undo.
3. There should be a centralized means of manipulating, creating, or querying currently known Units of Undo.
4. Interactions should be able to be grouped together where it makes sense to do so.  For example, moving an IDesignableControl around on the surface may in fact be 200 small changes, but we really only care about the starting position and the final position when the move interaction is over.

Item #4 in particular is important to me.  Visual Studio sometimes has some odd behaviors where what is perceived as a single Gesture by the user actually requires several Undo operations to erase.  For example, I might paste some code in or use a shortcut Chord and the first undo changes the formatting of the created code and the second undo actually gets rid of the code.

Gestures and Commands

Would it be best to try to mimic the Commanding system from WPF, even partially?  I debated this point long and hard: is it worth some research, some effort, some potential confusion due to subtle differences?

I played around on several different occasions and I did come up with some things that I liked better than the other "Commanding in Silverlight" code I've seen out there but for now I didn't want to use it.  Specifically, the ability to map keyboard gestures to a command from XAML was problematic.  Still, Silverlight does contain the ICommand interface, and I tend to like the Command Pattern for encapsulating units of work, so by this time I had most of a design in mind:

Controls that need to affect the change of something living on the Design Surface will go through some kind of Change Service.  This is similar, but not exactly like, how Visual Studio does this today.  Using this design I will allow interested parties to be privy to (but not cancel) all the changes going on in case this is needed for some custom logic.  The IDesignerChangeService will also be the gateway to creating and undoing transactions.  This bears some disucssion.

The IDesignerTransactionService and IDesignerChangeService are both public and overridable or replaceable, but they work in tandem.  In any circumstance I can immediately think of, client code will want to deal strictly with the change service.  The process will look like this:

Note that it will be up to the Client who is initiating the change to determine if gestures need to be grouped together into a transaction or not.  No one else would know!  We'll explore more about how we accomplish this in the forthcoming implementation article.  The stimuli shown here are not going to map directly to real method calls, but this gives you a good idea of what's going to happen as objects are edited.

I do like the way WPF creates some ways of specifying commonly used UI commands.  I can also see how the ability to customize the mapping from gestures to specific ICommand implementations would be useful.  Towards these goals, I am going to build some infrastructure modeled after what's in WPF.

These classes all exist in WPF.  My goal here is that I will mimic the WPF functionality as closely as possible and provide a public interface to InputBindingCollection.  With this, an application that wishes to customize the keyboard behavior of the design surface can simply replace the default ICommand for a gesture.

AGContrib

Over the course of the AGT project and several other efforts, I've written (or at least started) some useful things for Silverlight that may have usefulness beyond the AGT effort.  I'm going to be moving these things into a new project: DamonPayne.AGContrib.  For the sake of my time, this will be a part of the AGT solution for now, until I get time to move it into it's own CodePlex project.

The first denizen of the AGContrib project will be the Input Binding framework as shown above.

I should most likely move some other handy code from the DamonPayne.AG.IoC project into AGContrib as well.  When I get some more time in the coming weeks, I will also be evaluating Unity 1.2 for Silverlight, possibly deprecating my own custom container in favor of it.

Conclusion and Next Steps

It's been a while since I've done an AGT article that's entirely design without code.  I'm trying to keep the articles reasonably bite-sized.  I've checked in the most recent design documents, CodePlex change set 10098.  In the next article I'll implement the all the undo functionality.

Key Democrats criticized President-elect Obama's economic stimulus plan today.  John Kerry called it "A return to trickledown economics."  This development is fascinating for a number of reasons.

First and maybe least important - the unified Democratic party, the combination of Congressional seats, State Governors, and the Executive office all under Democratic control so feared by the Republicans doesn't appear very unified after all.  The infighting has started before inauguration.

Second, and slightly more interesting, is the fact that these particular tax cuts and so forth are absolutely not the platform that Obama ran on.  Is he and out-and-out liar, or is he only now recognizing certain aspects of reality regarding the true costs of big government programs?

Third, we must thoughtfully consider John Kerry's use of trickledown economics as a bad word in the context of recent history.

I won't (yet) try to argue that Trickledown, or Reaganomics, or Supply-side economics is the best system for raising the standards of living of the entire nation.  For now let's just examine the popular opinion as to the results of Reaganonmics.  It was called Voodoo Economics.  It has been claimed that it didn't work, that it could never work, that it was a laughable disaster.  Walking down the street, one would be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks of Supply Side Economics in a positive context.

Now let's just break this theory and it's opponent down into simple bite-sized notions.  Supply Side Economics states just what its name implies: that the economy does best over all by encouraging Production through whatever means.  Typically more freedom and less taxes is considered to be means of encouraging Production of goods and services.  Damon opens a factory in order to produce Glow in the Dark Towels.  The opening and operation of this factory including borrowing money, dealing with suppliers, marketing and advertising firms, hiring workers, buying land, contracting with builders, and so forth, will be a positive impact on voluntary business dealings between individuals.

In the other corner we have the Keynesian view, the view that Consumption and not Production is the best driver of the economy.  This encouragement to spend boils down to market distortions and wealth redistribution, but these are not bad as far as the pro-Keynes camp is concerned.  If the masses are unable or unwilling to consume, then the government must step in for them: spending everything it has and then borrowing more and printing money to keep on spending.    If the government can spend enough, we can float across tough times until individuals are willing to start spending again.  There are a lot more middle class spenders than factory owners, the thinking goes, and together their habits represent a much stronger force on the economy.  For now leave be the question of what the government should spend this funny money on.

Now we come to my point.  The original pre-crisis Obama plans involved some tax increases on the wealthy and a great deal of government spending on "building of infrastructure and green jobs".  Obama supporters praised these ideas, and the irony seems to have been lost on nearly everyone.

The notion of creating jobs and increasing prosperity by building infrastructure and creating goods and services is a Supply Side concept.  Contrast this with the idea of just giving every middle class American $1,000 on the condition that they spend it.  The idea that Production, not Consumption, will rescue the economy, is stolen directly from the so-called conservative side of the fence.  Why is Production the answer when the government is the producer, but not when private owners are the producers?  The answer is simple: because the Profit Motive has been removed.  The ethics of altruism tell us that it's moral to open factories and produce energy "for the benefit of everyone" but a private business engaging in the exact same activities and competing with others for profit is immoral, barely to be tolerated by a "progressive" state.

Obama has gone from government spending on infrastructure, which appears to me to be a smoke and mirror operation to reap the benefits of supply side production without calling it such, to an even more blatant supply side tactic: namely lowering taxes across the board and even on the wealthy. 

Whatever else he may be, Obama appears to me to be an intelligent and educated man.  He knows that big government welfare state policies can only be afforded by a wealthy nation and only then to the degree that they do not make the creation of wealth too difficult, too inconvenient, too undesirable.  At some point, he knows, the disincentive to produce is too great and the lifestyle enjoyed by Soviet Russia is the result.  He recognizes that when the chips are down, when there's no more wealth to "share", when printing even more money can't work, that only one thing will work.  He looks at American history and economic reality and sees that only by giving the freedom to engage in production and trade can creativity and hard work be unleashed, wealth quickly created.  Only by lengthening the leash given to this nation of smart and hard-working Americans will people take responsibility for their own actions and ultimately create enough wealth he can use to accomplish his redistribution goals later.

Obama supporters thought he would be a great redistributor, cashing in on our general prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s.  The .com bust, the Federal Reserve, and George Bush have beaten him to the trough though. 

It must trouble them to see him backing off his altruistic plans, but reality is the final arbiter in any clash of ideals.

Next week, January 13th, is the MSDN Dev Con in Chicago.  I will be going, as will some other Milwaukee area folks.  I am looking into the parking situation and organizing a carpool, but I am also organizing a trip to Fogo de Chao afterwards.  I'll probably be taking the car seats out of the DamonMobile and driving, so leave me a comment or an email if you'd like a ride.

I'll be bouncing around, not sticking to any particular track, and doing some socializing since I know some of the speakers. 

So here I am in 2009 starting off the year horribly sick and unemployed in a terrible economy.  Still, I have very high hopes that I can make some good things happen for me and my family this year.

Last year I posted some goals, and I only hit 40% of them.  This year the 2009 goals are much more personal and private.  Still, it's pretty interesting looking at the posts from January 2008 to see how myself and the world have changed in a year.  Here are some thoughts on year old topics:

Warner Goes Blu-Ray exclusive:  Even a broken clock is right sometimes, and I'm still glad BD won the day.  A year later, HD optical media is still where I said it would be; the infrastructure is not there yet for downloads to rule the universe.  Since I will most likely end 2009 with 1.5mb DSL (come on, U-verse...) I don't see this changing in 2009.

Program Control: Man, I continue to be somewhat disappointed in the entire Windows Mobile/Compact Framework universe.  I will not shed a tear if I never do mobile development again.  I have a post coming out regarding what I think (whatever that's worth) MSFT could do to use its strengths to Win in the post iPhone world.

Task Parallel Library: I went on do do a LOT more parallel programming in 2008, my favorite being getting xUnit.Net to run my unit tests in parallel.  I have a lot more stuff coming this year, including a re-working of the tree-based scheme.

New Office: Hard to believe, but Wednesday was my last day in the aforementioned new office.

I think 2009 is going to be a great year.  I don't think it's too pessimistic to think that in terms of the economy there are areas where we might not have hit bottom yet, but in general I think America is still free enough to pull ourselves out of this.  A lot of people are excited about the new president, who seems to be settling into Reality and his economic team has promised to lower taxes across the board which is what we need; definitely not the platform he was elected on though.  Markets are driven heavily by Expectations, and a lot of folks expect great things from this guy, so at the least I'm glad to see some positive energy out there.

It's had to believe it's been more than two weeks since I last posted, especially since there's so much going on in DamonLand.

Professional

Today was my last day at CarSpot, a place I'll really miss.  I've been consulting most of my career and mostly had shorter assignments - always ready to ride off into the sunset and tackle the next challenge.  My time with CarSpot both as a consultant and full-time employee represents my longest and most serious commitment to any business venture.   I grew a lot during these years, and I met a lot of great folks I hope to keep in contact with.  I've never seen such a large group of people all of whom were loving their job and work environment and so loathe to split the team up.  I met some fabulous folks at our parent company, AutoTrader.com, and I hope they stay in touch too.  I owe several of them a tour of my wine collection and some hearing loss in my home theater.

It's somewhat hard to get business of any kind done during this time of year with all the vacations and such going on; but I expect next week to be fairly busy. I'll be co-working from various locations in downtown Milwaukee, Brookfield, and Delafield next week if anyone is interested in meeting up.  Watch Twitter.

As for what I'm doing next, I will only say at this point that my Round 1 and 2 meetings are mostly done and that I have several things I'm excited about.

The Argentum Tela design surface project is going well, the currently working article [19] is about Undo/Redo support and Commands in Silverlight and is somewhat complicated but also a lot of fun. 

I'm also working on an entry for the Silverlight Write and Win contest.  I was going to just write some new articles and submit AGT in its current state but I thought that was kinda cheap and would require slight re-work to fit the contest rules.  My submission will be in the vein of Visual Tools though and I think it's pretty slick.  We'll see what the judges think.

I also have some other things to keep me busy, potentially related to my next steps: some heavy Entity Framework development coupled with a bunch of Dependency Injection refactoring, a purpose for HandWaver.com, coming up to speed on SharePoint, and other refactoring of side-project code and article writing.

Personal

We had an awesome christmas.  On christmas eve I shoveled snow for hours on end, on christmas day I cooked boeuff ala mode (French style pot roast in red wine sauce) which is at minimum a four hour task.  My daughter, who is incredibly awesome and creative (especially considering she's 5), got her daddy a true chef's hat as a gift.  Pictures of this will be coming as soon as my kitchen is presentable enough to take photographs in.

It's New Year's Eve and I'm sick as hell and so is my son.  This has ultimately resulted in us staying in tonight, I'm about to make a nice dinner for my wife and I to be followed by Champagne and some Kabinet style Riesling - I expect I'll be crashing right after the ball drops.  I love Champagne.  I often use Champagne, considered by many to be a special-occasion-only drink, to celebrate (wait for it) my love of Champagne.

Despite having a brand new house I find myself running around caulking little cracks here and there to keep the house warm.  It has snowed an outrageous amount this winter, and since I have been too stubborn to buy a snow thrower as of yet I've lost a non-trivial amount of weight through shoveling it all.  My neighbors, who totally rock, occasionally have pity on me and help me out when things get really rough.

Jen and I met seven years ago tonight!  My totally awesome Queen among Wives and I now have two kids and we're looking forward to a great 2009.  We consider New Year's Eve to be our real anniversary despite getting married on June 9th.  We met at a dinner party I threw involving me cooking and serving Champagne.  Some things never change!

So, this weekend involved a road trip to Missouri for some family business - namely seeing my grandfather while he's still see-able.  A fringe benefit of making this trip was that my mother had received an iPhone from my uncle (confused yet?) and she didn't want to pay for the data plan.  So, guess who has an iPhone now?

I bleed Microsoft red.  I chuckle at the fantastic claims of Mac addicts.  Still, I've seen the iPhone in action and it seemed to be a nice little device. 

Inflammatory statement #1: Unlike many of the Microsoft-hating Mac-worshipers and Java fiends, I still have a solid core of objective thought and rational epistemology.  By this I mean merely to say that I'm not going to forego what may be a really nice gadget just because Apple makes it.

First Impressions

Obviously the thing is sexy.  It's curvy; it's sleek; it's reassuringly heavy for such a small and fragile looking item.  The sexiness is the first clue that this is a different thing made for different people than, say, my AT&T Tilt.  I can't remove or replace the battery.  I don't see a place to add a storage card.  I can't insert my SIM card without surgical tools.  Apple does not make products for "Tweakers".  This is meant to be a "finished product"; future be damned.  Still, towards this goal it's clear the device isn't cheap.  It's got 16gb of internal storage and feels like it's well made. 

From initially playing around, it seems easy enough to find settings and launch programs.  Like Windows Mobile, it takes some getting used to not needing to "close" a program, just hit the Square button to return home and move on to the next thing.  While I maintain I'm objective in terms of technology, I can't claim to be objective in terms of Gadget Discoverability.  I have used far too many gadgets for far too long and written too much software to have a good sense of how usable the Average Dude would find the iPhone, but I expect it's very usable.

Since this was "gently used" before landing in my hands, the first thing I did was look into some kind of Ultimate Cold Boot so I didn't have to manually remove my uncle's bizarre mix of Dragonball Z soundtracks and bad 80s metal or contacts and text messages.  To my delight there is in fact a "Totally erase everything" button, which I did.

Setting Up

I have become very dependant upon Outlook synchronization for my Tilt (and 3 smartphones before that) so I did make sure there was some way to sync Outlook contacts & calendar to this thing before accepting it.  This is done through iTunes.

Huh? iTunes?

Yes, Outlook synchronization on vista is accomplished via iTunes.  I'm not sure why this would be.  Is iTunes the only foothold Apple has on Windows?  Are they trying to trick me into using iTunes?  Do they assume anyone with an iPhone must be using Vista only because of some dire need and they're trying to supply a pleasant all-in-phone experience?  I'm not sure.  What I am sure of is this is where my double-standard detector started going apeshit.  This "Duh, you need to have iTunes to move contacts to your phone" type of thing is precisely the sort of behavior that Microsoft has routinely been crucified for no matter what explanation is offered.  I chuckled to myself, chose not to go to the iTunes store on launch, and plugged in the iPhone.

I was greeting with an appropriate settings screen asking me when and what and how much I wanted to move from Outlook to the iPhone.  I expected as much based on Active Sync Mobile Device Center and chose not to move anything yet until I'd felt my way around.  I also see that I need to download a new iPhone software version which is not surprising since my family elders previously owned this gadget.  I was shocked and amazed at how long it took me to grab this and maybe I'm mentally fried from the long car ride today but it wasn't easy to see where I could find the download status of this 250MB update.  I've managed to have two glasses of wine and write this entire article up to this point while waiting for something to happen.   I just downloaded 67MB of iTunes and I'd say this was about 10x slower byte for byte.

I now have a progress bar on the iPhone.  It's moving as slow as paint drying but I've done phone updates before so this comes as no surprise.

On to the past

While I wait on the update, some more early impressions. 

From my hotel in SmallTown, USA I was able to get on WiFi and mess around with this thing even though I had not yet moved a SIM card to it.  Based on the commercials, two things immediately struck me.  First, even on 10MB WiFi, the thing is not remotely as fast as you see on TV.  This, in fact, resulted in a huge "truth in advertising" lawsuit in the UK when a magazine showed that what takes 20 seconds on TV in fact takes nearly 3 minutes with a 3G iPhone.  Here in America, though, Apple can do no wrong so I doubt any such challenges are coming.  The second thing I noticed was that I expected nearly everything to respond with screen orientation changes when I tilted the thing, but found only Safari gratifies this and only after thinking about it for a while. 

Speaking of Safari, this is one of the places where this device shines.  While there's certainly no reason for me to run Safari on my desktop, the rendering and scaling of web content on the iPhone is top notch so far.  I just re-did my blog skin with a lot of painful CSS work to appease both Firefox 2 and IE7, and was very pleased to see DamonPayne.com show up perfectly on the iPhone.  The previous owner did not have DamonPayne.com bookmarked (WTF? Does he live under a rock?)  so getting there involved some typing.  As someone who's used and evaluated eleventeen-brazilian mobile devices in the past ten years I was pleasantly surprised at the near-usability of the on-screen keyboard.  Tactile-response is still king in my book but the iPhone keyboard was tolerable.

Back to Freedom Zero

My iPhone has finally updated itself and, though I have been playing with the damned thing for two days with no SIM card in it, I am now met with a screen which won't let me do anything until I insert a SIM card.  Jeff Atwood's Freedom Zero post is appropriate here.  It's getting late and I need my beloved Tilt for meetings tomorrow, so I'll try quitting the Tilt cold-turkey tomorrow afternoon and see what happens.

My wife is drooling over my Tilt (she has various Medical software for WinMobile) and my Zune so I need to make this transition happen stat.  I haven't told her she's not getting the Zune because I'll use iTunes when it's the last way to listen to music on planet earth.  One thing at a time.