Bob On Development

One of my favorite authors and bloggers is Bob Lewis — as evidenced by the fact that he is on my very short blogroll, off to the right of this post. He has had some things to say recently about off-shoring, a topic which I have tackled as part of the larger issue of what I call the cheapening of software development. I chose to focus on freelance exchanges on the web, but the truth is, by far the primary reason that prices have been driven so low in these exchanges is because of offshore labor in countries with very low cost of living.

In his post, Bob uncharacteristically makes some statements about job losses due to offshoring that I can only agree with as far as they go, which isn’t terribly far.

I won’t re-pave this oft-visited topic, but want to mention a few interesting twists I encountered and solved moving a number of IIS sites from Windows 2000 Server to Windows 2003 Server.

An eloquent open letter has been sent by David Starr to Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, in which David urges Microsoft to “do MonoRail justice and don’t kill it without doing something as good or better”.

I have a rather uneasy relationship with DotNetNuke, upon which my client’s membership-only web site is built. I just don’t care for DNN, but there is no one reason why. Just lots of little ones. As an example, last week I had a hair-pulling experience with DNN that has lessons for would-be framework developers.

In my investigation of rails-style development I’ve come up against a meme that has been circulating out there forever. “Real Developers”, it’s said, take to MVC / rails environments like ducks to water. It’s only the baby noobs who known nothing but ASP.NET who find themselves lost — because they aren’t deeply intimate with the HTTP protocol itself.

Microsoft Visual Studio and out-of-the-box ASP.NET has long taken a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach to web site construction which is quite different from the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach most famously used in the popular Ruby On Rails platform.

It used to be conventional wisdom that if you have a site that is only of interest to users in, say, the U.S. or North America, you can limit your attack surface by blocking all IPs outside that area of interest.

I had a WinForms DataGrid about 10 rows high whose DataSource was a DataTable of perhaps a hundred rows — yet, the vertical scrollbar was initially disabled until I sorted or resized a column.

If this one bites you, there are some solutions.

I am doing some work on a three year old WinForms app with its data store in SQL Server and noticed that there is not a single table relation defined in the whole DB. When I asked about this the response was that it was “by design”.

I maintain several SQL Servers. For better or worse, all but one of them is still SQL Server 2000. One of them is set up to do a daily DB backup and an hourly transaction backup and has been happily performing these for months. For no particular reason I can determine one of the backup jobs has started failing with the following error:

Executed as user: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM. sqlmaint.exe failed.
[SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 22029). The step failed.