Buu Nguyen's Blog

I’ve come across the latest paper from Ivar Jacobson (yes, one of the “Three Amigos” who invented the RUP and UML) about development processes (Enough of Processes: Let’s Do Practices Part I and Part II) and so much as I admire Mr. Jacobson and his contribution to the software industry, I just do not find anything he wrote in this latest essay new or provoking, especially to those who have been working with agile processes like XP, or Scrum. Read more…

I’ve been interviewing many .NET development developers lately and one of the most surprising things is that many candidates, both junior and senior level, cannot correctly answer questions which I consider very basic. I compile a short list of such questions below, hopefully it maybe helpful for you as interviewees or interviewers. Read more…

Take a look at this Vista simulator, an Silverlight application. Isn’t it cool? (Okay, okay, Flash can do the same thing, but you have to admit that Silverlight is a new baby child, yet it can do really cool stuff like this one.)

The stuff previous known as WPF/E is now officially named Silverlight. Silverlight is supposed to be a direct competitor to Adobe’s Flash and Ajax-based applications.

A little bit disappointed with this official release since in their website, MS while repeatedly promoting the new mantra of Silverlight as a “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media experiences and rich interactive applications” (you will see this mantra appear a few dozen times in Silverlight website), says Silverlight will support “all major browsers on both Mac OS X and on Windows” and MS is “gathering feedback from customers to help determine which platforms should be supported in the future”. Funny, they even need feedbacks to know that without Linux they cannot claim anything as cross-platform.

Another disappointment is that currently the only language supported by Silverlight is JavaScript. Anyway, while the support for .NET languages like C#/VB.NET is highly expected, this item is not really a pain point to me.

Paul Graham said Microsoft is dead (in the sense that it is losing its domination in the information technology world) and one of the reasons provided by Paul is the emergence of Ajax. While it is easy to see that the rise of Ajax-based applications is taking more and more away the land of desktop applications and, hence, the dominating position of MS, I believe that if there is any dead at all, it will be a very slow dead. Let me quickly throw out two reasons.

1. Desktop applications will still long be there. There are just many kinds of applications that I don’t see the point of having them implemented on the web, or even if that is possible. Think about games like Final Fantasy, Half Life. With JavaScript? Forget it. WPF/E or Flash? It’s GBs of data over the internet, baby (and these are MS’ and Adobe’s toys, not “open” toys as Ajax)! Okay, there is even image processing application on the web – but it is nowhere close to the desktop Photoshop in term of functionality and performance. And even if it is close, I need to be able to work offline and save my files since the internet does not go with me all day long.

2. MS will still long be there. Not to mention about the huge cast and market share MS is having, the point is that despite being big, innovations are still happening at MS. Think about cool stuffs like .NET generics, Windows Workflow Foundation, Orcas, Office SharePoint Server 2007, C# 3.0, WPF(/E) (the two techs that I think are part of an attempt to reduce the Ajax’ heat, although MS also has ASP.NET AJAX as a fall-back solution in case WPF(/E) cannot be the big next thing), and a whole more interesting stuffs at MS’ labs around the world, like the Singularity operating system or the C-Omega language (whose many concepts are being brought into C# 3.0). Oh, and I almost forgot, they even have XBox .

So, I don’t think desktop applications cannot be killed, and I don’t think MS cannot be killed. But that will take time, a lot of time. Enough from me, read what Don Dodge at MS thinks about Paul Graham’s article.

Last month, I wrote about autonomy being the number one characteristic of any employee and that the boss should be able to expect his/her staffs to produce satisfactory work all the time as long as they are clear about the objectives. Some people commented back saying that while autonomy is a good thing, such expectation from the boss is unrealistic and the boss should not rely on his staffs’ work product without examining it thoroughly him/herself. And I did express my disagreement in my responses since it is my belief that any project in which the boss cannot expect his staffs to be autonomous, and anybody can assume that s/he can product any mediocre pile of work and there will always be some other people (e.g. the boss) to review his/her works and spot out the problems for him/her then that project is already destined to be doomed. And while I still hold my position on that matter, I realize that I missed one key variable to make my point better argued: competence.
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There are several interesting discussions at The Code Project regarding my article on db4o, I think it may be useful to compile those discussions into a blog entry so that those who missed the comments section at The Code Project can read.
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