Archive for February, 2009
Realizing your worth as a developer…
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under General
At my previous employer I wasn’t always sure what the management where thinking, or exactly how much they valued my contribution. I received an award or two for sure, but somehow the other promises they made were never realized and effectively made me decide to leave them. At the moment I am still getting phone calls from them asking me how certain things work, bleh. That being said, I got some good news today from my current employer about a component I developed and that it is working perfectly. I am so happy about that, because I feel that at last I am contributing to the profitability of the company. Its important as a developer to know that your efforts are appreciated, firstly, and secondly that your efforts are making a difference and contributes to the success of the company in financial terms.
Today I also thought about the way Microsoft extends its product reach through developers and how, to me at least, it seems like a strategy for them to market to developers. Why? Because developers tend to influence people, and they tend to be decision makers and consultants. People will generally follow the advice of a developer and in many cases this will mean that if a developer recommends a technology solution, that solution will be adopted. Strange how that works different to other scenarios where the user buys the technology for themselves. Still not clear? Well lets take your average home user that buys a brand new PC versus the user that buys that PC in a business context because it was a recommendation from a developer or a group of developers. I’m not saying developers are always right, but they do tend to carry some influence.
What does code-reuse mean?
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under Application Development
So what does code-reuse mean in terms of Object Oriented Programming? Well, it doesn’t refer to copying and pasting code from one application to another, but rather to the creation of components that can be re-used through class instantiation. In other words lets say you create some code that performs a specific task, and within another application the need exists to re-use that functionality, you would instantiate a class and invoke the functionality within the class that you want to re-use it. Make sense?
I have also pondered about namespaces, and my theory is that if you use namespaces wisely you only have to declare a namespace in one class and let other classes inherit from the class that uses that namespace. Thus lets say you connect to a SQL Server 2005 database, and you intend to use the System.Data.SqlClient namespace, you could use that namespace once in a class and let any other classes inherit from the class that contains the System.Data.SqlClient namespace. Thus you only use the namespace once. Thats my thinking anyway.
A strategy for using AJAX on ur website
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET MVC
I have been thinking a lot recently about the use (or abuse) of AJAX on a website and it made me think of a strategy to try and adopt. Like all technological things it makes sense to understand the overall business goal first and then to proceed to the next step. It also makes sense not to focus too much effort in one area and neglect others. For instance, too much AJAX and JavaScript will create bigger and bigger .js files, which require more and more maintenance to try and keep small. On the other hand you cannot, not use AJAX, on or in your web applications these days. So whats the best strategy? Well I think you need to understand your business goals, and make sure that what you want to achieve can be achieved. Consistency is often something to strive for in this context, because being consistent is often far tougher than making one or two good impressions. The User Interface (UI) must be consistent throughout any application, rather than be too elaborate.
So to come back to my strategy for using AJAX in web applications, I think an approach I am going to try is to divide navigation into two classes:
*Website navigation
*Page level navigation
Website navigation will generally allow for “postbacks” whereas page level navigation will allow for actions that are very specific for that page. The MVC framework provides a structure that supports this strategy. Your views act as your “postbacks” and the actual views themselves are where the activity takes place. Postbacks in this instance refers to the flicker effect you get when you click on links, whereas AJAX allow for a smoother effect.
The other bit of strategy I would like to think about is processing the results from datasources through AJAX. At the moment I am developing web applications where the web services return HTML strings, and the JavaScript simple ends up displaying it. I feel that this approach is messy and does not allow for a clear and contextualised view of your system. There must be an approach that creates good quality AJAX that can interact with server side code. I am looking for an approach that will make it easier to develop and implement my classes. I love the classical object design approach because I like things organised that way.
