eckyptang

I'm talking supported builds, not signed builds. You know with the pile of pre-paid support credits that we get with our partnership agreement which are supposed to result in solutions. Every support call requires a week long argument with the lowest grade of software support who phone me up and ask if they can close the call every day without escalating it. I'm aware of the support options you mention, which basically result in "yes, just limp along with the dependency injection problems with ActionFilters in MVC3 for 6 months" or fork and fix it yourself. We chose the latter, but it's expensive so we might as well forfeit the partner agreement, use Open Source software and pay someone to maintain our forks and contribute patches to the products.

We've looked at NDjango, but it's based on F# and as we well know, unless a product is a mainstream MS platform then it's liable to go out of the window on a whim or is shrouded constantly with uncertainty (choke silverlight, original workflow foundation, XNA? etc).

Sorry if this is rather critical and slightly ranty, but I'm slightly pissed off with maintaining this mess.

Not related to the site, but now there is an audience... regarding asp.net mvc:

Can we have support and out of band releases for asp.net mvc without having to go through connect or partner support, which are both to be honest, utter shit?

Also can you get the API right and leave it right so we don't have to piss around for a week with our container and testing environment.

And finally, can you give us something better than razor which has a parser that isn't made of broken twigs and has proper separation of content and programming language (its horrid sorry). Jinja2/django/golang templates FTW.

Oh and sort out SQL 2012 licensing. It's going to cost us £768,000 to upgrade out kit from 2008 to 2012. Postgres migration is an order of magnitude cheaper.

I'm coming from a large asp.net mvc project and its not pleasant, sorry. Welcome to Microsoft centric development!

Content on the web site is pretty good though.

Not for a minute. The releases are pretty much shelved after v.next. To add to that, the support you do get is crappy, even as a gold partner. ASP.Net MVC is awfully designed and rather buggy as well from experience.

I've been using it on a huge project (145 controllers)since CTP2. I wouldn't use it again.

we're currently investigating werkzeug, python, sqlalchemy and postgresql as a replacement for a new project, particularly also because we got shafted by SQL 2012 per core licensing.

Stay away - you have been warned.

That does it. I'm defending my airspace with anti-drone drones (until they are illegal).

IE4 ran on Solaris and HP/UX.

Agree about using data but the main problem is trust autonomy which allows them to develop incompatible systems. For example every damn A&E department in the country has a different software platform or configuration. There should just be one!

Oh that and NHS management, who should just be put up against a wall and shot. If you divide it across all trusts, each directorate member has pissed about 20 million of cash out of the window on stuff that hasn't delivered.

I was in a hospital the other day with my wife. I watched a senior consultant try and find a printer in AD (because the one on his desk was broken). This was to print a request form. It was very hard for him. The form exists because they have two systems with a paper integration path between them. There is some ceremony involved as well, because there is a quota on how many outstanding forms they can be processing. There is also a restriction on when the appointment can be made resulting in a weird set of rules which are virtually impossible to deal with effectively. The staff are completely depressed at having to deal with this every day.

Instead of wasting more money on this shitty PR exercise, perhaps they should fire Kelsey and all quango-esque departments and middle management who bought this, fire the outsourced idiots who built pieces of crap like this and hire a software team (google style!!!) to build new software and infrastructure across the entire NHS from scratch on Open Source software.

The amount of money the NHS pisses up the wall on contractors and management could build a country-wide system from scratch which solves all of these issues. I mean firing five management consultants could hire people to build an open source active directory replacement which would save millions in license costs (OpenLDAP doesn't cut it so don't go there). Another five management consultants would create a standard desktop operating system country-wide based on a COTS Linux distribution. Another 20 management consultants would replace a big chunk of the 105-or-so disjoint software platforms.

In the mean time, they could surely afford some training for their staff, to fix a few printers and to clean up poor integration paths like this. Then we might get to see our consultants rather than watch them argue with Active Directory.

Note: I've worked for the NHS before - it's an IT disaster, bar Guys & St Thomas trust which actually have a clue stick.

Another creation by Colin Furze here: the flame throwing scooter, which incidentally got him arrested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UNr1XClnec

I wish I had the time to do pointless and dangerous things like this.

They do.

I tend not to write oodles of test cases up front in favour of simple scenario based tests applied later on. I add pre/post/invariant-condition checks in the code as I write it. It is tested incrementally by hand.

The condition checks prevent the what if's and tell you why something broke. The scenario tests ensure that it does what is asked of it.

I rarely get bugs raised against my code (7 this year out of about 112,000 lines of c# written). Not bad!

Obligatory XKCD about the trackpoint:

http://xkcd.com/243/

Happy birthday - typed on my T61 :)

It is also true when testing is included and pylint are used, which is the issue.

I can write a 500 line C# program and it works reliably first time with no crashes, type inference errors or framework exceptions thrown. The only errors will be algorithmic or functional (i.e. based on requirements).

The same is not true with python.

I have the same experience with both. Go figure.

100% sure. I've seen the source code for trident via shared source a few years ago.

Its well written and fairly modular. It has COM/IDL bindings but the core is very clean. I'd say it was better written than chrome.

It also used to run on Unix!

And this and VBA is why office is so irreplaceable. I wrote a report generation tool in 1999 with word 97. It picked a report definition off a file share, assembled documents from fragments on disk (up to 50 pages a pop with tables, graphs etc) and emailed them or printed them. 2000 documents an hour on a single Pentium pro 200 with 128mb of ram on NT. It took 2 days to write and was used until 2009 by 9000 users

This was just word, com and nothing else. Even the application host was an instance of word.

I doubt it could have been done with anything else then or now.

IE (well trident) isn't tied to Win32. Office I'm not sure but I understand they've rewritten swathes of it for 2013.

What makes you think there are any win32 APIs left? RT talks to NT.

You are correct :)

I cannot writing my own read!

Better solution: tell them you're an ex OpenReach engineer - they let you right through to second line straight away. Repeat the story until you get what you want.

It's BT - they own the phone network as well so it's free.

Thats the trick I use, or pretend you are old and on a bad line. The latter gives them the impression that you're easy money.

We get these in the UK all the time. Usually either try and hold them on the line as long as possible (if bored) or tell them to "fuck off" straight away.

Well you kind of justified my point:

The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).

Apple however made it successful through marketing.

And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)

+1 for idiocracy. There is so much of society crammed into that film it's unreal. Warning: it's by mike judge of Beavis and butthead fame so you have to look past the fart jokes.

"ow my balls" is definitely a reference to wasting time on YouTube...

More than that in most cases:

http://www.ppa.co.uk/about/activities/environment/ppa-enviro...

About 6-8 cups a day. 2 of which were Starbucks medium americano and the rest were french pressed from various brands. Pretty strong stuff as well.

I'd agree about the caffeine sensitivity - I don't think it agrees with me at all.

This is unfortunately normal in most public and corporate bodies. They are afraid that if they talk then information will filter across and they'll lose their remit or hold over the solution at hand.

It's silly really.

The iPod and iPhone were not leaps and bounds ahead. That is a common misconception which is powered by the marketing hype. There were other products out there which were far superior. Archos produced better music players and Nokia produced far better phones under the Symbian banner.

The differentiator was the marketing hype.

They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on them. That is still marketing.

Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.

Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.

Marketing here is purely spin.

Sorry I should be more clear: "stepping up the game" is their marketing innovation of delivering something then announcing it rather than the industry norm of doing it the other way round and people being bored by the time it is released.

Unfortunately they have nothing to throw out now - it's all minor improvements on something they've already sold.

None of their most "innovative products" are remarkable - it's all hype.

I agree there. It's one of the things I liked about the 710 (the hardware buttons). It is also extremely cheap here in the UK now (£89!) so screw getting tied to a contract with it.

In the interest of backing up my statement and sticking to my guns:

Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT industry with many rising competitors. That is it.

That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.

Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.

They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing everyone on the way down.

My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products and ripped off other people's work persistently.

The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.

I'm fed up with reading all the tripe about him.