"The Big Picture: Opportunity And Optimism Abound"

"Anyway, landed in San Francisco right on time and rushed to a company that I haven't heard from in a while, Borland. It's doing some exciting things around application-life-cycle management and software-development optimization. I wasn't aware of the benefits of having a managed process for software development, but it seems that a lot of IT organizations are looking at Borland to help them save money and get their arms around massive projects. Who knew? What excitement within the walls of that company. Either Borland's employees are that optimistic or they've replaced the water with Red Bull." - Michael Friedenberg

I don't know about Red Bull but if you know me you know I'd take a protein shake!

In this article Richard Grimes (DDJ magazine contributor) makes some interesting points about the .NET framework. I don't know that I agree with them but it's good to get a grasp on the issues from many different points of view. In particular, I was interested in the comments relating to VB.NET and ASP.NET.

While browsing through my bloglines today I happened upon what Who needs an enemy when you can divide and conquer yourself? I think the described scenario is highly plausible if it hasn't already happened.

While you're there also take a look at this article by the same author. I really like the way Marcus thinks. I've been burning CD after CD (haven't moved to DVD yet, yeah I know you can't say anything to me that Mark Edington hasn't already said regarding this issue) of digital photos for archival purposes all the time wondering whether or not my daughter who is now 16 months will be able to find a machine that will read them when she reaches my current age? Will that machine even have a drive of some sort? Perhaps I should buy a bunch of today's hardware and put it in safe storage so she can start a business 30 years from now reading all these "ancient" CD's.

Seriously, take a look at Marcus' website he's got some great material. I love this sentence "Thus, a company increases its density of morons, by losing non-morons and creating an environment where only morons will be happy to work." which is from this article.

Scoble recently posted a link to this article discussing a revolt amongst Microsoft MVP's clamoring for another non .NET release of VB. In fact, they've gone so far as to post an online petition. Now, imagine if Borland had done something similar with Delphi. I think it's safe to say I'd probably be working at some other company by now, fortunately, that's not the case. With Delphi 2005 Borland has provided a single IDE that targets Win32 and .NET with the same language and the same framework.

I wonder where that company that had VB to Delphi conversion tools is today?? :)

At any rate, if you're a VB developer and you're looking for a tools vendor that continues to support their Win32 customer base and their source code welcome to Delphi. Hey did you know that we even have a VB keybinding?

When update 2 of Delphi 2005 comes out one of the additional features of HTML Error Insight (the squiggly error underlining in the code editor) will include detection of duplicate tag ID's. This feature will allow the developer detect and correct duplicate tag ID's without having to run the application and wait for the ASP.NET runtime to flag the error for you. There have been numerous other improvements to HTML Error Insight for Update 2 but I think this is probably the most useful one and thought it was worth mentioning.

Now that Danny has explained, with this post the real story behind Borland's Delphi.NET Compact Framework (CF) support I'll throw my hat into the ring regarding the ASP.NET designer support.  Basically, it's the exact same story as CF in that it doesn't exist outside of VS.NET and if you want an ASP.NET designer you'll need to write it from scratch.  Well we've done exactly that with Delphi.NET and C#Builder, in other words we implemented Danny's option number 3 (refer to the link to Danny's post above).  As Danny mentioned this is the most flexible option but, as he said, it does come at a high cost.

As ASP.NET 2.0 takes shape, in some ways, we've been in a bit of a holding pattern watching and studying the level of support that the new designer provides.  Had there been designer support in the framework that we could have leveraged perhaps we'd have been able to spend our time working on additional supporting features rather than cautiously planning and implementing just the features we feel will truly make it into the final release.  Additionally, Microsoft has all but removed .NET 1.1 designer compatibility from .NET 2.0 by not only deprecating old methods but at the same time making them  stubs so they don't even do what they used to do; two steps forward and one giant step back.  I agree with Danny when he says that he doesn't think all this occurred because malious intent on Microsoft's behalf but I think third parties like Borland could argue that it's perhaps not the best way to get other's to support your framework which we're really working hard to do.

Let's imagine for a second that the ASP.NET and CF designers had been implemented like the WinForms designer.  Had that been the case I think it would be reasonable to assume that third parties could have spent their time finding ways to make developing for the .NET Framework that much more compelling rather than reinventing an already existing wheel.

I suppose it's necessary to ponder the reasons why Microsoft decided to leave these two key designers out of the framework?  Danny already discussed the case for the CF framework so I'll take on the ASP.NET case.  This is an interesting situation because Microsoft has actually implemented two ASP.NET designers themselves: VS.NET and Web Matrix.   Why is that Web Matrix was developed within the ASP.NET team separate from VS.NET?  Did the ASP.NET team not like the implementation of the VS.NET designer?  Was it too different from the way previous versions of ASP worked (code behind vs. inline)?  Was this a way for the framework guys to “twist the arm“ of the VS.NET guys into implementing certain features wanted by producing a competing (ok, perhaps that's a stretch) free product?  Or are these arguments conspiracy related and did the ASP.NET guys just want a free tool to further their platform?  Perhaps we only have to look as far as VS.NET 2005 which includes support for inline pages and the VS Express versions which are free.  Considering that Web Matrix has staggnated with the “reloaded“ version and the last “call for feedback“ on Web Matrix was made in 2002 I sort of doubt we're going to see another update of Web Matrix any time soon.  Ok, so maybe the ASP.NET and VS.NET guys have worked out their differences (if there were any).  It will be interesting to see what happens to Web Matrix when the .NET 2.0 framework hits the streets.  Will Microsoft still prominently display Web Matrix on www.asp.net when it's woefully out of date?

There are also the questions of designer implementation.  In VS.NET, prior to 2005, the ASP.NET designer was based on the MSHTML control which had some obvious pluses but some considerable minuses as well, for example, the the well known formatting issues (which btw, Microsoft recently stated at VS Live took 3 developers 18 months to solve).  In VS.NET 2005 use of (at least the publicly available version and no I have no idea if they are using an internal version of MSHTML or perhaps the Front Page designer or even a completely new designer) of the MSHTML control is no longer part of the designer.  In light of the recent IE7 announcement I wonder if any of the MSHTML editing issues will be addressed since they may not be important now their own designer has parted ways?

There is also the argument that if the WinForms designer had never been released all this would be moot.  Right?  That's hard to say but it wouldn't be hard to believe other vendors would have joined the party if these other designers were available today.  Take SharpDevelop for example, without the WinForms designer it might have been little more than a code editor/debugger then again, maybe not, but the forms designer does make it a lot more appealling.

Where to from here?

Fortunately, since Borland has already made the “more expensive“ decision regarding the ASP.NET designer it will be less work for us to move to 2.0 than it would have been otherwise.  In fact, we've already made some good progress.  Additionally, since we own the designer we've had the ability to extend it with things like the Tag Editor and in the 2.0 timeframe we'll have the same opportunity.  Hopefully, we won't have to make the “more expensive“ decision regarding some of these other designers.

In the long run, perhaps it will boil down to whether or not Microsoft is interested in an active third party tools market with companies really extending the reach of the platform rather than reinventing the various designers required to even play in the same sandbox.  Just as Firefox has pushed Microsoft to update its admittedly lagging web browser, competition in the tools space can equally push Microsoft's own tools and thus their platform, which in the end is their real win.  Let's hope some of the people responsible for the WinForms designer decisions can influence some of these other critical areas of the .NET world within Microsoft.  Avalon anyone?

I know this is a bit late considering the Delphi 1.0 anniversary was Feb 14 but I was thinking the other day about those days and remember something that made me laugh. I was working in QA at the time and we were putting in lots (and I mean lots) of long days, nights and weekends. Toward the latter part of the project the FPS game Descent came out. I think at first it was just the shareware version but I don't really remember. I do however remember the battles that ensued long after every other Borland employee had left the building and the only people remaining were members of the Delphi team.

It was perfect.

There was a hint of tension in the air when the company network traffic all but dried up for the day and we were left with ample bandwidth to chew up killing each other hundreds of times. Then it would happen. Someone would start a game and people would scramble back to their offices/cubes to join in before hitting the 8 player limit. At that time, QA was located in cubes on the second floor of the B mod and R&D was on the third here in SV. The games were wild, people were yelling and it could last for hours. I remember nights when we left the building after midnight. It was crazy but a much needed stress reliever . In the beginning everyone started at about at the same skill level but as the weeks wore on some rose to the top while others were relagated to status of "shield factory" (in Descent, when you finally destroyed another players ship their remaining shield was released for anyone to grab). I'll never forget Ramin Halviatti (our QA manager at the time) clearing off a huge section of his desk to use as a mouse runway to navigate his ship on. I really don't think mice were intended to be used the way he played the game but then again he'd previously done hardware QA so this was really no surprise.

The Delphi 1.0 QA team was a closely knit group of people who worked hard and played equally as hard and the interesting thing was we did both together. That was a special time and one I won't soon forget.