The past couple of months I’ve had reason (more than usual) to sit back and think about all the different frameworks and patterns available out there. One specific example of this is the following:

Imagine that you would want to build a web service whose role it is to impersonate a SharePoint list. This list is then supposed to be consumed by an Outlook clients calendar tool. The data you want to fill this calendar with is stored in a database containing approximately two tables. The reason I got in touch with this was that I was asked to solve some problems regarding the switch from regular time to daylight savings time and calendar items tagged as all day events. Upon hearing about this existing system I thought something along the lines of “How hard could this be? It’s just a bunch of tables and a web service contract to fulfill.”. Well, as it turns out – the joke’s on me.

I’m not kidding when I say that the code base in the repository for this project consists of ~200 files! Factories, Repositories, Providers, Containers and god knows what! When you open a project and within the time frame of about five minutes can’t figure out where approximately to begin solving a specific problem there has to be a problem with how the code is organized. And I don’t see myself as an under qualified developer. What I ended up doing was setting a breakpoint in Global.asax at the start of a request and then step my way from there. And the funny thing is that all the database access code was hand written. NHibernate (or any other OR-mapper for that matter) hadn’t crossed the mind of the previous developer (or at least wasn’t implemented).

Grossly over engineered. That’s what comes to mind when I look back at this.

A couple of days ago I was recommended the following article: Joel On Software – Why I hate frameworks. Read it! It’s quite a funny read and I can definitely relate to this problem. I also think that this specific issue should be more widely discussed. Somehow it seems that the software development world has moved away from solving real problems to solving problems related to the problem solving. Not quite sure how that adds immediate value for the customer. Also not quite sure how it relates to working agile. If we extrapolate the current situation just a liiittle bit more we’d end up with architects and developers adding a bunch of frameworks to their project and organizing them according to some new patterns (which are bound to appear) they’ll expect the code to write itself!

And I haven’t even mentioned the frameworks managing the other frameworks.

Now that I’m in between assignments I thought I’d take the opportunity to install Windows 7 on my work laptop (a HP 8510w) in order to get better performance in my virtual machines. Several colleagues have already installed Windows 7 on their laptops of the same model, so I figured I’d take the plunge.

A colleague recommended that I should use a USB drive to install from as this would save me a lot of time and since I had read about the tool that Microsoft har released for this I figured that I would give it a go. Turns out that I had to download the tool from a CNET server because the tool has been pulled by Microsoft due to a license problem. Went ahead and prepared my 4 GB USB stick with the ISO and rebooted.

After having clicked the “Install Now” button all I get is a dialog telling me that I’m missing a CD/DVD device driver and tells me that I should browse for a location containing the drivers needed. That is misses a working driver is, in my view, utter bullshit. Why? Because when I browse for the drivers (which I don’t have by the way, because who needs drivers for a CD/DVD drive nowadays?) I can browse my hard drive (so it’s not a problem with not having a working hard drive to install to), a CD inserted into the CD drive, and the contents of the USB stick containing the Windows 7 installation.

Googleing the problem shows a bunch of people having this problem due to faulty burns of their DVDs, but this doesn’t apply to me since I’m using a USB stick to install (but I did re-prepare the USB stick three times just to be sure). The few people I’ve found that have had this problem haven’t had it with earlier versions of Windows 7 (betas and release candidates) and some of them seem to have cured the problem by changing the SATA configuration in their BIOSes (i.e. changing from SATA mode to IDE mode). One Microsoft site even suggests that the controller in the computer is not compatible with the AHCI driver provided by Microsoft. How the heck could it not be compatible when it’s been working without a problem in Windows Vista? Actually I thought about changing SATA settings in the BIOS, but I didn’t find any settings which solved this problem.

Tomorrow I’ll try to install from a DVD which is known to have worked for a bunch of my colleagues and see what happens then. But somehow I don’t really beleive in success. After having re-prepared the USB stick three times the corruption problem is most likely not what’s causing this, so it’s more likely that i’ve got a weird hardware revision of the laptop which screws this up.

Things like this want me to get a MacBook Pro and just forget about problems like these! Atleast there’s a greater chance to get Windows working virtually…

Today I’m going to do something that is against my standards. I’m going to deploy stuff to a production environment on a friday.

Generally it’s a bad idea to deploy things in to production on fridays and some readers might wonder why. Well, do you like working weekends? Thought so. If something can go wrong with the package you’re deploying it most certainly will go wrong if you’re deploying it on a friday – it’s like asking for it!

Ah well, sometimes you just can’t choose. As I like to say: The money always wins. And by that I mean that the people in charge of the money always tend to win, and if they want the deploy on a friday they get the deploy on a friday.

If you’re in the same business as me – try to stay away from deploys on fridays if possible, but don’t break your back over it. Because that’ll be you dying, not them. =)