In this corner, Microsoft Developer Evangelist and author, G. Andrew Duthie. In the other corner, C# MVP, ASP Insider and Open Space Technology facilitator, Alan Stevens. This week, G. Andrew Duthie and Alan Stevens bring their recent “Real Software Development vs Microsoft Bubble Development” Twitter debate to Herding Code. It’s all the open and honest, fun-loving, snarky banter without the 140 character limit.
- Kevin kicks off the show by announcing our two fighters. Ding. Ding.
- Alan throws the first punch – He likes Herding Code because it’s about real software development rather than development in the Microsoft bubble. It’s about the tool users rather than the tool builders and it’s about honest feedback.
- Andrew jabs back – He likes the stories from the trenches but he feels more credit must be given to the folks at Microsoft who are doing the right thing. In other words, don’t always assume the worst and snark about it.
- Scott K keeps both fighters on their toes – First taking jabs at Alan because some DevDiv developers dogfood Microsoft’s stuff (e.g. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0) and then lands a sucker punch on Andrew noting Entity Framework is developing in the dark. Who could have seen that punch coming?
- The fight continues with talk about general disgust in drag and drop demos, the role of the Developer Evangelist, Microsoft’s goals and constraints, and the need for candid feedback.
- If you missed the Twitter exchange, you will definitely want to listen in as The Alan Stevens vs G. Andrew Duthie Debate continues this week on Herding Code.
Show Links:
Note: Ward Bell transcribed a part of the discussion on drag’n'drop demos here.
Download / Listen:
Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues
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Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!
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16 Comments Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues!
» HA, I love the summary for our… Twitteresque
July 1st, 2009 at 6:31 am
[...] I love the summary for our latest episode. http://herdingcode.com/?p=191 var disqus_url = 'http://www.lazycoder.com/prologue/?p=6332 '; var disqus_title = 'HA, I [...]
G. Andrew Duthie
July 1st, 2009 at 7:02 am
Wanted to say thanks to the guys for having me on, and thanks to Alan for being such a good sport and being mostly kind to me, despite our differences on certain subjects.
And I agree with Scott…what a great summary. I just hope the debate lives up to the description. :-)
Twitted by MaggieLongshore
July 1st, 2009 at 7:08 am
[...] This post was Twitted by MaggieLongshore [...]
Darren Kopp
July 1st, 2009 at 8:15 am
I think someone won’t be happy until there is resharper or code rush for notepad++…….
Darren Kopp
July 1st, 2009 at 8:21 am
Oh yeah, I forgot to say that I’m a fan of the new VS2010. And I don’t find VS to be a slow performer and/or memory hog when it’s vanilla, it’s the add ins like resharper and code rush that really really make the IDE slow. But they make me more productive so it’s give or take.
Alan Stevens
July 1st, 2009 at 11:46 am
Great summary and great link list for people unfamiliar with our references. I’m sure the conversation is a bit “inside baseball” to some listeners, but I got a lot out of it.
Thanks for having us on the show. Andrew is a great guy even though he’s wrong most of the time. ;-)
++Alan
Tune Up Your PC » Post Topic » Herding Code: Drag n Drop Debating?
July 1st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
[...] Alan and me and asked if we’d like to be on the show and hash things out there. The result is this podcast. Enjoy! In this corner, Microsoft Developer Evangelist and author, G. Andrew Duthie. In the other [...]
.net DEvHammer : Herding Code: Drag n Drop Debating?
July 1st, 2009 at 5:44 pm
[...] Alan and me and asked if we’d like to be on the show and hash things out there. The result is this podcast. [...]
The Technology Post for July 1st, 2009 - Jason N. Gaylord's Blog
July 1st, 2009 at 8:56 pm
[...] General – The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues! – Tweeted by Jon Galloway [...]
Daily Links for Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:36 am
[...] Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues! | Herding Code [...]
Gabe Sumner
July 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Great discussion! At times I sided with both Alan and Andrew.
It’s not hard to illustrate the horrors that can result from uninformed drag & drop. However, I love that drag & drop (and RAD development in general) can help people get started and be productive. All of us learn along the way and drag & drop can help reduce the initial learning curve.
Sometimes I think what Alan is ultimately proposing is akin to teaching a 1-year old to walk by tossing them on a treadmill running at 10mph.
This being said, I understand the hunger from seasoned developers for demos with a bit more meat.
Ken Jackson
July 5th, 2009 at 11:42 am
I thought this was an odd, but good show. I must admit that I thought that some of Alan’s points, while well-intentioned, were wrong.
For example, I think drag and drop demos and controls serve several important goals. As I’m sure you all remember there was a time that in order to use a new feature you needed to write hundreds of lines of code. For example I recently had to do some video driver work with DirectShow and to do this one simple thing I had to jump through about five different API groups and it required about 300 lines of COM code. I would love to see a simple one line way of doing this (and frankly, it should be doable in a line).
The drag and drop demo is about showing that we’ve introduced this functionality and its easy to get at. Now this leads to Alan’s other gripe about the code being bad. In some cases it might be, but I will argue that almost all code is pretty bad, regardless of how it was generated! I think it’s easy to point to drag and drop being the problem, but I think if the code wasn’t drag and dropped I suspect that you’d likely find that the code would be no better written from scratch in vi.
Lastly, I found it somewhat odd that .NET developers are the ones complaining about the abstraction presented by drag and drop. To me that’s like getting a diet coke after ordering two Big Macs, large fries, large chocolate shake, and an apple pie. The issue is way larger than the coke.
As someone who has spent a good chunk of his life writing x86, 68k, PPC, and x64 assembly code the drag and drop adds so little to the abstraction space. The fact that most developers can’t tell you the cost of a foreach loop or the cost of a stackwalk scares me more than the use of drag and drop.
And lastly I would end that I’ve seen some solid LOB apps written drag and drop. They were written in a week and in many cases do their job for several years, until they need to be dumped or largely rewritten to deal with drastically changed requirements. To me it seems hard to justify throwing away this productivity because some bad developers write bad code more quickly with these tools.
Use PowerShell » Dear Devs, Give Us The Tools. K Thx
July 6th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
[...] July 6th, 2009 No comments yet. » I just finished listening to the latest Herding Code podcast (#52) where the hosts (K. Scott Allen, Kevin Dente, Scott Koon, and Jon Galloway) talked with Alan [...]
Eric Schneider
July 8th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I do think VS has gotten progressively worse over the last few releases. The Win Forms GUI designers are horrible and worked great in 2003. The IDE crashes more, in some cases I get into this loop where every time I open my project VS crashes. I feel they should spend more time fixing or improving things than worrying about creating new frameworks.
All I every see from MS lately is .NET 3.5> and most business application I maintain are still using <= .NET 2.0.
Guest Blogger Project Tips | Internet Marketing
July 13th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
[...] Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate … [...]
Ben Griswold
July 25th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
@Guest Blogger Project Tips – “Wordsmith” is your middle name.
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