Dotmad.net

I have read Phil Haack’s post a week ago, and I have been thinking about it since then.
Phil wrote:
“But when you think about it, games and operating system kernels make up a very small percentage of all software being written today. In terms of public interest and buzz, building software for the web appears to be the only software development that really matters.”
In other words, let’s ignore all those pesky developers working server side, web services, winforms applications.
They don’t matter because they don’t develop software for the web.

Oooookay.
Sorry, I can’t agree with a single word in that statement.
I think the problem starts with Phil’s definition of “Alpha Geeks”.
Let’s use for a minute his view that an Alpha Geek must be ALT developer:

1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles (sic) and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principals (e.g. Resharper.)

But ALT developer doesn’t necessarily use OSS tools, he may just be taking ideas from OSS tools to implement in MS environment.
I think I can call Anders Hejlsberg (invented C#) “Alpha Geek”, and he had nothing to do with web software. He may be considered ALT developer, since he took current (Java) ideas and formed a new language based on them.
In fact, based on that definition, I can claim the entire P&P team in MS are ALT.Net developers, since they keep taking new concepts from outside the conventional MS world and using them.
So ALT developer <> web developer.

But I think Phil’s entire view of “Alpha Geek” is wrong - it has nothing to do with ALT devs.
Let’s view the biology definition of “Alpha” (from Wikipedia):
In social animals, the alpha male or alpha female is the individual in the community whom the others follow and defer to.
In other words, “Alpha Geeks” are leaders of the geeks community.
Being a community leader has nothing with web development.
Scott Hanselman records a great podcast. Joel Spolskyis a talented writer. Jeff Atwood writes about the people writing software.
Each one has thousands of readers, and the reason they are popular has nothing to do with web development.

Both this post and the KB article seem useful.

TechSmith release a VSTS plugin of their SnagIt screen capture utility:

1. Perform a screen capture with SnagIt. If desired, annotate with SnagIt’s built-in editor to clarify your points.
2. Output to Team System
3. Your screen capture is automatically attached to the work item you’ve selected in the file format of your choice. Add comments if you want, save and submit.

A single license costs 40$, and the price goes lower if you buy more copies.

Sounds to me like a good alternative to the usual sequence of pressing Alt+PrntScrn, opening mspaint.exe, pasting the screen-shot, saving it, and attaching it to the desired work item.

Update: Dudu Shmaya wrote a Cropper plugin - and it’s free!

I’m trying to write several utilities to query web sites, so I decided on using the WebBrowser.DocumentText property to get the page content.
As it turns out, unlike Microsoft’s documentation, the DocumentCompleted event is raised several times for most sites. It was triggered 8 times for this blog.
If this page is an example, the first load is enough regarding content, so I’m using the Interlocked class to perform the event’s code only the first time the event was triggered.

Update: Turns out there is a solution to the problem.

I have been reading another post war (I bet Oren really enjoys them) between Oren Eini and Chris Holmes.
It started with Oren dissing Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices team, followed up with Chris’s post and Oren’s reply.

I find it difficult to understand Oren. Sometimes he’d rather write his own code from scratch (Rhino mocks), but he keeps preaching the use of known OSS solutions, such as Rails, NHibernate, or the Castle project.
But it’s really strange to hear someone like that, always trying new tools, complaining CAB is too complex to explain, or that it contains too many features.
Is Rails or Castle the “simplest solution possible“? It seems to me that for an Asp.Net developer the simplest solution is keep coding the way he knows, and avoid learning Rails, as well as dealing with the performance issues.

Can I write my own mini-implementation of CAB? probably.
Can I write my own mini-implementation of O/R mapping? probably again.
Is it the smart thing to do? I doubt it.