How about that? You stuck around! It was the Waylon Jennings, Good Ol’ Boys, Dukes of Hazzard, freeze frame cliffhanger at the end of Part 1 which hooked you, wasn’t it? Undoubtedly you have been on the edge of your seat for days, just waiting to see how the show turns out. Well, wait no further. Here’s the commercial free, dramatic conclusion to the longest Presentation Patterns discussion ever.
When we last left our heroes, Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block were in the thick of their discussion. Jeremy had just finished explaining the role of the Screen Conductor and Ward was ready to start flushing out implementation strategies. That is, implementation strategies which might work across most solutions.
But thankfully, Glenn starts by stepping back a bit and asking how the presentation patterns discussion fits in the context of mainstream development.
Will the guys provide a single answer to the age-old question, “Which came first the View or the ViewModel?” Is there a one size implementation which fits all solutions? Will this conversation ever end? Find out this week on Herding Code.
Show Links:
Download / Listen:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!
Aug 24
This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 4:32 pmand is filed under discussion, interview, podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
8 Comments Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block (Part 2)
Twitter Trackbacks for Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block (Part 2) [herdingcode.com] on Topsy.com
August 25th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
[...] Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block … herdingcode.com/?p=212 – view page – cached How about that? You stuck around! It was the Waylon Jennings, Good Ol' Boys, Dukes of Hazzard, freeze frame cliffhanger at the end of Part 1 which — From the page [...]
Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward … « Presentation
August 25th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
[...] Original post: Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns wit… [...]
Jose Fajardo
August 25th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I loved this conversation between all the parties, i have the ut most respect for all participants. BUT i walked away demoralized and saddend by what i heard. The main problem with all these frameworks is your trying to make the composition of UI’s a science. Its an art and you need to involved designers (with technical experience) in the decision process.
Not once did i hear from the participants of a willingness to take on designer skills. That is the main problem i believe, you want designers to pick up developer skills well the uncomfortable truth is that in the future the exact opposite will need to happen. Developers need to pick up design skills!!!
I think a follow up podcast with some people from the design world needs to happen.
admin
August 25th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Jose – I had that feeling while I was editing the show. This was a good discussion of the software architecture side of things, but leaves out the design side. I think a follow-up show is definitely in order.
Glenn Block
August 26th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Jose
I agree we certainly didn’t cover the designer angle to any length, I mean we’re all developers :-). No seriously this was a dev-centric talk for sure. I don’t think we were saying (I know i wasn’t) that we expect designers to be developers or vice versa. What we were talking about is the tradeoffs from the dev perspective.
Glenn
Ed McPadden
August 30th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
This was a great Herding Code episode (along with the last one). It was amazing to get all of these people on the same podcast. I’ve been following Glenn and Jeremy’s blogs for some time and was really glad to hear from Rob and Ward as well. Rob has definitely peaked my interest in Caliburn.
A lot of the discussions here were directly pertinent to work that I am currently doing. I am really looking forward to Jeremy’s book!
I was especially interested in Jeremy’s comments on how MVVM doesn’t always satisfy every solution alone. I really like the MVVM pattern but there are many times that you need something else … for instance using Supervising controller.
I also found it interesting to hear about how Caliburn composites the View Models (from last weeks show). I will definitely need to look into this a bit more. It does sound a bit CAB-ish but I think Rob did a great job at explaining how he uses this and doesn’t use it to navigate way up and down the VM hierarchy. I have found that many times I need the VM to be composited and I only would need to talk one up or down in the VM hierarchy (as Rob said).
All in all great stuff…thanks to everyone for such a informative and thought provoing conversation.
cameron frederick
August 31st, 2009 at 9:38 am
Awesome stuff guys!!! It’s nice to know that my latest hybrid application (which uses a blend of PM & Supervising Controller) is not a bad idea. :-)
Also, on the JQueryish topic for WPF… the closest thing that I’ve seen is Bling. Thoughts on this??
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Inside-Bling-A-C-based-library-to-simplify-WPF-programming/
Ward Bell
September 25th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Re: absence of the designer perspective … I had that sinking feeling that we were not representing that perspective as I would have liked to do. It is important to us and our customers.
I agree that devs can and should pick up visual design skills even if (especially if) these skills don’t come naturally.
One of the great trends in recent software has been the facilitation of visual creativity by the graphically unskilled. Think of what we routinely do today to our photographs … cropping, dodging, color balancing, artifact removing. These skills … even the awareness of them … was way beyond our ken until these products came alont. What would have taken a darkroom expert days to accomplish we plunkers can do in seconds. That doesn’t make us artists … it just means we can achieve results that were previously impossible unless we were artists.
Blend is the developer’s friend for similar reasons.
And I think it is wonderful that Herding Code will do a show where the designer’s voice is heard.
However, speaking for myself, I am as convinced now as I was then that code has no place in the output of the visual design tools.
XAML is not the kind of thing that makes for a good programming language (understatement) and visual designers do not become good programmers by virtue of the tools (anymore than tools make good artists of us programmers).
I see value in bringing visual design tools to developers. I see none in turning visual design tools into programming tools.
If designers want to program, they should learn our tools, our concepts, our practices, our disciplines … just as we developers, if we wish to learn visual design, should learn designer tools, concepts, practices and disciplines.
Note that I am not suggesting we are different species nor am I suggesting that, rare as it is, designers can’t program and programmers can’t design.
I am saying that these are different modalities with distinct demands and that we should not pretend that we can simply tool our way out of these differences.
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
Leave a Reply