Cruising the Web late last night, I ran across "10 things you can do to advance your career as a developer", summarized below:

1. Build a PC
2. Participate in an online forum and help others
3. Man the help desk
4. Perform field service
5. Perform DBA functions
6. Perform all phases of the project lifecycle
7. Recognize and learn the latest technologies
8. Be an independent contractor
9. Lead a project, supervise, or manage
10. Seek additional education

I agreed with some of them, I disagreed with others, and in general felt like they were a little too high-level to be of real use. For example, "Seek additional education" seems entirely too vague: In what? How much? How often? And "Recognize and learn the latest technologies" is something like offering advice to the Olympic fencing silver medalist and saying, "You should have tried harder".

So, in the great spirit of "Not Invented Here", I present my own list; as usual, I welcome comment and argument. And, also as usual, caveats apply, since not everybody will be in precisely the same place and be looking for the same things. In general, though, whether you're looking to kick-start your career or just "kick it up a notch", I believe this list will help, because these ideas have been of help to me at some point or another in my own career.

10: Build a PC.

Yes, even developers have to know about hardware. More importantly, a developer at a small organization or team will find himself in a position where he has to take on some system administrator roles, and sometimes that means grabbing a screwdriver, getting a little dusty and dirty, and swapping hardware around. Having said this, though, once you've done it once or twice, leave it alone—the hardware game is an ever-shifting and ever-changing game (much like software is, surprise surprise), and it's been my experience that most of us only really have the time to pursue one or the other.

By the way, "PC" there is something of a generic term—build a Linux box, build a Windows box, or "build" a Mac OS box (meaning, buy a Mac Pro and trick it out a little—add more memory, add another hard drive, and so on), they all get you comfortable with snapping parts together, and discovering just how ridiculously simple the whole thing really is.

And for the record, once you've done it, go ahead and go back to buying pre-built systems or laptops—I've never found building a PC to be any cheaper than buying one pre-built. Particularly for PC systems, I prefer to use smaller local vendors where I can customize and trick out the box. If you're a Mac, that's not really an option unless you're into the "Hackintosh" thing, which is quite possibly the logical equivalent to "Build a PC". Having never done it myself, though, I can't say how useful that is as an educational action.

9: Pick a destination

Do you want to run a team of your own? Become an independent contractor? Teach programming classes? Speak at conferences? Move up into higher management and get out of the programming game altogether? Everybody's got a different idea of what they consider to be the "ideal" career, but it's amazing how many people don't really think about what they want their career path to be.

A wise man once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I disagree: The journey of a thousand miles begins with the damn map. You have to know where you want to go, and a rough idea of how to get there, before you can really start with that single step. Otherwise, you're just wandering, which in itself isn't a bad thing, but isn't going to get you to a destination except by random chance. (Sometimes that's not a bad result, but at least then you're openly admitting that you're leaving your career in the hands of chance. If you're OK with that, skip to the next item. If you're not, read on.)

Lay out explicitly (as in, write it down someplace) what kind of job you're wanting to grow into, and then lay out a couple of scenarios that move you closer towards that goal. Can you grow within the company you're in? (Have others been able to?) Do you need to quit and strike out on your own? Do you want to lead a team of your own? (Are there new projects coming in to the company that you could put yourself forward as a potential tech lead?) And so on.

Once you've identified the destination, now you can start thinking about steps to get there.

If you want to become a speaker, put your name forward to give some presentations at the local technology user group, or volunteer to hold a "brown bag" session at the company. Sign up with Toastmasters to hone your speaking technique. Watch other speakers give technical talks, and see what they do that you don't, and vice versa.

If you want to be a tech lead, start by quietly assisting other members of the team get their work done. Help them debug thorny problems. Answer questions they have. Offer yourself up as a resource for dealing with hard problems.

If you want to slowly move up the management chain, look to get into the project management side of things. Offer to be a point of contact for the users. Learn the business better. Sit down next to one of your users and watch their interaction with the existing software, and try to see the system from their point of view.

And so on.

8: Be a bell curve

Frequently, at conferences, attendees ask me how I got to know so much on so many things. In some ways, I'm reminded of the story of a world-famous concert pianist giving a concert at Carnegie Hall—when a gushing fan said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like that", the pianist responded quietly, "I did". But as much as I'd like to leave you with the impression that I've dedicated my entire life to knowing everything I could about this industry, that would be something of a lie. The truth is, I don't know anywhere near as much as I'd like, and I'm always poking my head into new areas. Thank God for my ADD, that's all I can say on that one.

For the rest of you, though, that's not feasible, and not really practical, particularly since I have an advantage that the "working" programmer doesn't—I have set aside weeks or months in which to do nothing more than study a new technology or language.

Back in the early days of my career, though, when I was holding down the 9-to-5, I was a Windows/C++ programmer. I was working with the Borland C++ compiler and its associated framework, the ObjectWindows Library (OWL), extending and maintaining applications written in it. One contracting client wanted me to work with Microsoft MFC instead of OWL. Another one was storing data into a relational database using ODBC. And so on. Slowly, over time, I built up a "bell curve"-looking collection of skills that sort of "hovered" around the central position of C++/Windows.

Then, one day, a buddy of mine mentioned the team on which he was a project manager was looking for new blood. They were doing web applications, something with which I had zero experience—this was completely outside of my bell curve. HTML, HTTP, Cold Fusion, NetDynamics (an early Java app server), this was way out of my range, though at least NetDynamics was a little similar, since it was basically a server-side application framework, and I had some experience with app frameworks from my C++ days. So, resting on my C++ experience, I started flirting with Java, and so on.

Before long, my "bell curve" had been readjusted to have Java more or less at its center, and I found that experience in C++ still worked out here—what I knew about ODBC turned out to be incredibly useful in understanding JDBC, what I knew about DLLs from Windows turned out to be helpful in understanding Java's dynamic loading model, and of course syntactically Java looked a lot like C++ even though it behaved a little bit differently under the hood. (One article author suggested that Java was closer to Smalltalk than C++, and that prompted me to briefly flirt with Smalltalk before I concluded said author was out of his frakking mind.)

All of this happened over roughly a three-year period, by the way.

The point here is that you won't be able to assimilate the entire industry in a single sitting, so pick something that's relatively close to what you already know, and use your experience as a springboard to learn something that's new, yet possibly-if-not-probably useful to your current job. You don't have to be a deep expert in it, and the further away it is from what you do, the less you really need to know about it (hence the bell curve metaphor), but you're still exposing yourself to new ideas and new concepts and new tools/technologies that still could be applicable to what you do on a daily basis. Over time the "center" of your bell curve may drift away from what you've done to include new things, and that's OK.

7: Learn one new thing every year

In the last tip, I told you to branch out slowly from what you know. In this tip, I'm telling you to go throw a dart at something entirely unfamiliar to you and learn it. Yes, I realize this sounds contradictory. It's because those who stick to only what they know end up missing the radical shifts of direction that the industry hits every half-decade or so until it's mainstream and commonplace and "everybody's doing it".

In their amazing book "The Pragmatic Programmer", Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt suggest that you learn one new programming language every year. I'm going to amend that somewhat—not because there aren't enough languages in the world to keep you on that pace for the rest of your life—far from it, if that's what you want, go learn Ruby, F#, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Icon, Io, Erlang, Haskell and Smalltalk, then come back to me for the list for 2020—but because languages aren't the only thing that we as developers need to explore. There's a lot of movement going on in areas beyond languages, and you don't want to be the last kid on the block to know they're happening.

Consider this list: object databases (db4o) and/or the "NoSQL" movement (MongoDB). Dependency injection and composable architectures (Spring, MEF). A dynamic language (Ruby, Python, ECMAScript). A functional language (F#, Scala, Haskell). A Lisp (Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, Nu). A mobile platform (iPhone, Android). "Space"-based architecture (Gigaspaces, Terracotta). Rich UI platforms (Flash/Flex, Silverlight). Browser enhancements (AJAX, jQuery, HTML 5) and how they're different from the rich UI platforms. And this is without adding any of the "obvious" stuff, like Cloud, to the list.

(I'm not convinced Cloud is something worth learning this year, anyway.)

You get through that list, you're operating outside of your comfort zone, and chances are, your boss' comfort zone, which puts you into the enviable position of being somebody who can advise him around those technologies. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU MUST KNOW THEM DEEPLY. Just having a passing familiarity with them can be enough. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU SHOULD PROPOSE USING THEM ON THE NEXT PROJECT. In fact, sometimes the most compelling evidence that you really know where and when they should be used is when you suggest stealing ideas from the thing, rather than trying to force-fit the thing onto the project as a whole.

6: Practice, practice, practice

Speaking of the concert pianist, somebody once asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall. HIs answer: "Practice, my boy, practice."

The same is true here. You're not going to get to be a better developer without practice. Volunteer some time—even if it's just an hour a week—on an open-source project, or start one of your own. Heck, it doesn't even have to be an "open source" project—just create some requirements of your own, solve a problem that a family member is having, or rewrite the project you're on as an interesting side-project. Do the Nike thing and "Just do it". Write some Scala code. Write some F# code. Once you're past "hello world", write the Scala code to use db4o as a persistent storage. Wire it up behind Tapestry. Or write straight servlets in Scala. And so on.

5: Turn off the TV

Speaking of marketing slogans, if you're like most Americans, surveys have shown that you watch about four hours of TV a day, or 28 hours of TV a week. In that same amount of time (28 hours over 1 week), you could read the entire set of poems by Maya Angelou, one F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, all poems by T.S.Eliot, 2 plays by Thornton Wilder, or all 150 Psalms of the Bible. An average reader, reading just one hour a day, can finish an "average-sized" book (let's assume about the size of a novel) in a week, which translates to 52 books a year.

Let's assume a technical book is going to take slightly longer, since it's a bit deeper in concept and requires you to spend some time experimenting and typing in code; let's assume that reading and going through the exercises of an average technical book will require 4 weeks (a month) instead of just one week. That's 12 new tools/languages/frameworks/ideas you'd be learning per year.

All because you stopped watching David Caruso turn to the camera, whip his sunglasses off and say something stupid. (I guess it's not his fault; CSI:Miami is a crap show. The other two are actually not bad, but Miami just makes me retch.)

After all, when's the last time that David Caruso or the rest of that show did anything that was even remotely realistic from a computer perspective? (I always laugh out loud every time they run a database search against some national database on a completely non-indexable criteria—like a partial license plate number—and it comes back in seconds. What the hell database are THEY using? I want it!) Soon as you hear The Who break into that riff, flip off the TV (or set it to mute) and pick up the book on the nightstand and boost your career. (And hopefully sink Caruso's.)

Or, if you just can't give up your weekly dose of Caruso, then put the book in the bathroom. Think about it—how much time do you spend in there a week?

And this gets even better when you get a Kindle or other e-reader that accepts PDFs, or the book you're interested in is natively supported in the e-readers' format. Now you have it with you for lunch, waiting at dinner for your food to arrive, or while you're sitting guard on your 10-year-old so he doesn't sneak out of his room after his bedtime to play more XBox.

4: Have a life

Speaking of XBox, don't slave your life to work. Pursue other things. Scientists have repeatedly discovered that exercise helps keep the mind in shape, so take a couple of hours a week (buh-bye, American Idol) and go get some exercise. Pick up a new sport you've never played before, or just go work out at the gym. (This year I'm doing Hopkido and fencing.) Read some nontechnical books. (I recommend anything by Malcolm Gladwell as a starting point.) Spend time with your family, if you have one—mine spends at least six or seven hours a week playing "family games" like Settlers of Catan, Dominion, To Court The King, Munchkin, and other non-traditional games, usually over lunch or dinner. I also belong to an informal "Game Night club" in Redmond consisting of several Microsoft employees and their families, as well as outsiders. And so on. Heck, go to a local bar and watch the game, and you'll meet some really interesting people. And some boring people, too, but you don't have to talk to them during the next game if you don't want.

This isn't just about maintaining a healthy work-life balance—it's also about having interests that other people can latch on to, qualities that will make you more "human" and more interesting as a person, and make you more attractive and "connectable" and stand out better in their mind when they hear that somebody they know is looking for a software developer. This will also help you connect better with your users, because like it or not, they do not get your puns involving Klingon. (Besides, the geek stereotype is SO 90's, and it's time we let the world know that.)

Besides, you never know when having some depth in other areas—philosophy, music, art, physics, sports, whatever—will help you create an analogy that will explain some thorny computer science concept to a non-technical person and get past a communication roadblock.

3: Practice on a cadaver

Long before they scrub up for their first surgery on a human, medical students practice on dead bodies. It's grisly, it's not something we really want to think about, but when you're the one going under the general anesthesia, would you rather see the surgeon flipping through the "How-To" manual, "just to refresh himself"?

Diagnosing and debugging a software system can be a hugely puzzling trial, largely because there are so many possible "moving parts" that are creating the problem. Compound that with certain bugs that only appear when multiple users are interacting at the same time, and you've got a recipe for disaster when a production bug suddenly threatens to jeopardize the company's online revenue stream. Do you really want to be sitting in the production center, flipping through "How-To"'s and FAQs online while your boss looks on and your CEO is counting every minute by the thousands of dollars?

Take a tip from the med student: long before the thing goes into production, introduce a bug, deploy the code into a virtual machine, then hand it over to a buddy and let him try to track it down. Have him do the same for you. Or if you can't find a buddy to help you, do it to yourself (but try not to cheat or let your knowledge of where the bug is color your reactions). How do you know the bug is there? Once you know it's there, how do you determine what kind of bug it is? Where do you start looking for it? How would you track it down without attaching a debugger or otherwise disrupting the system's operations? (Remember, we can't always just attach an IDE and step through the code on a production server.) How do you patch the running system? And so on.

Remember, you can either learn these things under controlled circumstances, learn them while you're in the "hot seat", so to speak, or not learn them at all and see how long the company keeps you around.

2: Administer the system

Take off your developer hat for a while—a week, a month, a quarter, whatever—and be one of those thankless folks who have to keep the system running. Wear the pager that goes off at 3AM when a server goes down. Stay all night doing one of those "server upgrades" that have to be done in the middle of the night because the system can't be upgraded while users are using it. Answer the phones or chat requests of those hapless users who can't figure out why they can't find the record they just entered into the system, and after a half-hour of thinking it must be a bug, ask them if they remembered to check the "Save this record" checkbox on the UI (which had to be there because the developers were told it had to be there) before submitting the form. Try adding a user. Try removing a user. Try changing the user's password. Learn what a real joy having seven different properties/XML/configuration files scattered all over the system really is.

Once you've done that, particularly on a system that you built and tossed over the fence into production and thought that was the end of it, you'll understand just why it's so important to keep the system administrators in mind when you're building a system for production. And why it's critical to be able to have a system that tells you when it's down, instead of having to go hunting up the answer when a VP tells you it is (usually because he's just gotten an outage message from a customer or client).

1: Cultivate a peer group

Yes, you can join an online forum, ask questions, answer questions, and learn that way, but that's a poor substitute for physical human contact once in a while. Like it or not, various sociological and psychological studies confirm that a "connection" is really still best made when eyeballs meet flesh. (The "disassociative" nature of email is what makes it so easy to be rude or flamboyant or downright violent in email when we would never say such things in person.) Go to conferences, join a user group, even start one of your own if you can't find one. Yes, the online avenues are still open to you—read blogs, join mailing lists or newsgroups—but don't lose sight of human-to-human contact.

While we're at it, don't create a peer group of people that all look to you for answers—as flattering as that feels, and as much as we do learn by providing answers, frequently we rise (or fall) to the level of our peers—have at least one peer group that's overwhelmingly smarter than you, and as scary as it might be, venture to offer an answer or two to that group when a question comes up. You don't have to be right—in fact, it's often vastly more educational to be wrong. Just maintain an attitude that says "I have no ego wrapped up in being right or wrong", and take the entire experience as a learning opportunity.

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"), and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics. Just for convenience, here's a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah. Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted, 2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot" jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today, pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?) But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares? They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo, you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building. Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness 2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm. Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted 14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still.... No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted 18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No, wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything, isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's, and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots, they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security, after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion, proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

Phil Haack wrote a thoughtful, insightful and absolutely correct response to my earlier blog post. But he's still missing the point.

The short version: Phil's right when he says, "Agile is less about managing the complexity of an application itself and more about managing the complexity of building an application." Agile is by far the best approach to take when building complex software.

But that's not where I'm going with this.

As a starting point in the discussion, I'd like to call attention to one of Phil's sidebars: I find it curious (and indicative of the larger point) his earlier comment about "I have to wonder, why is that little school district in western Pennsylvania engaging in custom software development in the first place?" At what point does standing a small Access database up qualify as "custom software development"? And I take huge issue with Phil's comment immediately thereafter: "" That's totally untrue, Phil—you are, in fact, creating custom educational curricula, for your children at home. Not for popular usage, not for commercial use, but clearly you're educating your children at home, because you'd be a pretty crappy parent if you didn't. You also practice an informal form of medicine ("Let me kiss the boo-boo"), psychology ("Now, come on, share the truck"), culinary arts ("Would you like mac and cheese tonight?"), acting ("Aaar! I'm the Tickle Monster!") and a vastly larger array of "professional" skills that any of the "professionals" will do vastly better than you.

In other words, you're not a professional actor/chef/shrink/doctor, you're an amateur one, and you want tools that let you practice your amateur "professions" as you wish, without requiring the skills and trappings (and overhead) of a professional in the same arena.

Consider this, Phil: your child decides it's time to have a puppy. (We all know the kids are the ones who make these choices, not us, right?) So, being the conscientious parent that you are, you decide to build a doghouse for the new puppy to use to sleep outdoors (forgetting, as all parents do, that the puppy will actually end up sleeping in the bed with your child, but that's another discussion for another day). So immediately you head on down to Home Depot, grab some lumber, some nails, maybe a hammer and a screwdriver, some paint, and head on home.

Whoa, there, turbo. Aren't you forgetting a few things? For starters, you need to get the concrete for the foundation, rebar to support the concrete in the event of a bad earthquake, drywall, fire extinguishers, sirens for the emergency exit doors... And of course, you'll need a foreman to coordinate all the work, to make sure the foundation is poured before the carpenters show up to put up the trusses, which in turn has to happen before the drywall can go up...

We in this industry have a jealous and irrational attitude towards the amateur software developer. This was even apparent in the Twitter comments that accompanied the conversation around my blog post: "@tedneward treating the disease would mean... have the client have all their ideas correct from the start" (from @kelps). In other words, "bad client! No biscuit!"?

Why is it that we, IT professionals, consider anything that involves doing something other than simply putting content into an application to be "custom software development"? Why can't end-users create tools of their own to solve their own problems at a scale appropriate to their local problem?

Phil offers a few examples of why end-users creating their own tools is a Bad Idea:

I remember one rescue operation for a company drowning in the complexity of a “simple” Access application they used to run their business. It was simple until they started adding new business processes they needed to track. It was simple until they started emailing copies around and were unsure which was the “master copy”. Not to mention all the data integrity issues and difficulty in changing the monolithic procedural application code.

I also remember helping a teachers union who started off with a simple attendance tracker style app (to use an example Ted mentions) and just scaled it up to an atrociously complex Access database with stranded data and manual processes where they printed excel spreadsheets to paper, then manually entered it into another application.

And you know what?

This is not a bad state of affairs.

Oh, of course, we, the IT professionals, will immediately pounce on all the things wrong with their attempts to extend the once-simple application/solution in ways beyond its capabilities, and we will scoff at their solutions, but you know what? That just speaks to our insecurities, not the effort expended. You think Wolfgang Puck isn't going to throw back his head and roar at my lame attempts at culinary experimentation? You think Frank Lloyd Wright wouldn't cringe in horror at my cobbled-together doghouse? And I'll bet Maya Angelou will be so shocked at the ugliness of my poetry that she'll post it somewhere on the "So You Think You're A Poet" website.

Does that mean I need to abandon my efforts to all of these things?

The agilists' community reaction to my post would seem to imply so. "If you aren't a professional, don't even attempt this?" Really? Is that the message we're preaching these days?

End users have just as much a desire and right to be amateur software developers as we do at being amateur cooks, photographers, poets, construction foremen, and musicians. And what do you do when you want to add an addition to your house instead of just building a doghouse? Or when you want to cook for several hundred people instead of just your family?

You hire a professional, and let them do the project professionally.

Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them, and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles, "Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

Given that both of those "articles" are summaries from presentations I've done at conferences past, I'm a touch skeptical. In fact, it feels like those summaries were scraped from conferences I've done in the past, and I certainly don't remember ever giving Sys-Con (or any other conference) the right to reprint my presentation as an article.

Then it turns out that apparently I'm not the only one suffering this problem. Go. Read that article, then come back. I promise, I'll wait.

(Seriously, go read it.)

Wow. Just... wow. If even half of what Aral's story is true (and I'm inclined to believe at least part of it, given that he's done some pretty meticulous documentation of at least his side of the story), then this is beyond outrageous, and squarely into "completely unethical".

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I've not heard back from Sys-Con about any of this, so if I get any sort of response I'll be sure to update this blog post. But...

Calling anyone a "homosexual son of a bitch", "terrorist" or "fag" is so unbelievably offensive it staggers the mind. Normally, I'd be a bit hesitant to just give either party the benefit of the doubt on that one, given just how ludicrous the accusation sounds, but Aral includes screen shots of the articles, which in of itself lends an air of credibility to the accusation—either Aral is the world's worst Turkish translator, or Sys-Con's translation into Turkish is a bit on the "edgy" side, or Sys-Con really did call him that. Which implies that whichever way this goes, doesn't look good for one of the two parties. But even if we leave that to one side....

Sys-Con is playing with fire by collecting my content and claiming me as an author. Sys-Con never contacted me about becoming a part of their "Ulitzer" website. They never asked me for permission to reprint my articles, though, I'll admit, I can't find where the articles actually exist, nor links to the articles, so maybe they didn't, actually, reprint the article, but just link to them... except I can't find the links to the articles or the presentations, either. They never asked me for an updated bio or photo, and in fact, they pretty clearly grabbed both bio, photo and "summaries" from an old location, because that bio lists me as a DevelopMentor instructor (which I haven't been for two years or so), and as living in Sacramento, CA (which I haven't been for about three years or so). Let me be very clear about this: I do not write for Sys-Con Media. I never have. They have never asked permission to reuse any of the content I have produced. I am appalled at being included in such a fashion.

Note that I'm not opposed to being linked to, mind you—if I put material on my blog, I generally expect (and hope) that people will link to it, and I don't demand permission or even notification when it happens. But to claim that I've written material for an entity does mean I expect to at least be asked if it's OK to use my likeness, name, or material. No such request was ever made of me, so far as I can remember or find (through my own email archives, which stretch back to 2001).

And I can say that I've thought about this issue before, from the other side of the story—back when I was editor at TheServerSide.NET, we began a "blogger's program" that would take interesting blog posts from around the Internet and "collect" them in some fashion for TSS.NET readers. Originally, the thought was to simply reproduce the content directly on our site, and I hated that idea, for the same reasons as I dislike it when somebody does it to me. Regardless of the licensing model the blog entries are published under, to me, a publication or media firm owes the author at least the right of refusal, and a chance to be notified when their material is reused. (In the end, we chose to ask authors if we could reproduce their material in the program, and we never (to my knowledge) had an author refuse.) It doesn't take a real rocket scientist's brain to figure out that asking permission is never a bad thing to do if you want to maintain good will with your sources of material.

This is an open and public request to Sys-Con media: either contact me about using my name, likeness and material on your website, or remove it. (I have emailed their editorial and asked them to acknowledge receipt of my request.)

In the meantime, I will be making every effort to make sure that other content-producers I know are aware of Sys-Con's practices, so they can act as they see fit.

If you are a reader, and find this distasteful as well, then I suggest you follow some of the suggestions mentioned in Aral's blog post:

• Tell everyone you know about what Sys-Con is doing (but don't link to them so as not to give them Google Juice). If tweeting, leave out the http:// bit so that your URL is not automatically made into a link.
• Sys-Con feeds upon the work of authors and speakers to live. If all authors had their content removed from Sys-Con and Ulitzer, they would not have pages to put ads on. So go through their list of authors and notify the ones you know. If they are unaware that they're listed there, they will most likely want themselves removed. Update: I've created a single list of all Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors. More information and the full list are in this post. The original list of authors is at http://www.ulitzer.com/?q=authors. You can ask for your Ulitzer/Sys-Con author page to be removed by emailing editorial@sys-con.com.
• Contact their advertisers and tell them what you think of their association with Sys-Con.
• If you know any speakers speaking at Sys-Con events, make sure they know the kind of company they are associating themselves with. Do the same with anyone you know who is thinking of attending one of their events. Raise awareness about their events at your place of work.
• Make sure Google knows that Sys-Con/Ulitzer is spamming Google with tons of duplicate content. Report them on Google's spam page for posting duplicate content. According to their terms and conditions, Google should stop indexing Sys-Con/Ulitzer. See this comment for a template you can use when reporting them.
• Make sure Google News knows that they are syndicating libelous articles from Sys-Con. Use the Google News Report an Issue form to report the following articles: http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1017038, http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1028923, http://www.sys-con.com/node/1035252, http://air.ulitzer.com/node/1038383, http://openwebdeveloper.sys-con.com/node/1039556, and http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1047589

Meanwhile, I'm going to be talking about this to everybody I know at Microsoft, desperately seeking to find out which department engaged the advertising with Sys-Con, and looking to convince them that they don't need this kind of press or association. Ditto for the contacts (far fewer in number) I have with IBM, and any other Sys-Con advertiser I find.

Google made the announcement on Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

Don't get me wrong—on a number of levels, the operating system needs a little shaking up. Windows7 looks good, granted, Mac OS is a strong contender, and both are clearly popular with the consuming public, but innovation in the operating system seems pretty limited right now, to eye candy graphical window-opening/window-closing effects, different window decorations (title bars and minimize/maximize buttons), and areas along the edges of the screen to store icons. At no point has any of the last three or four OS releases from any of the major vendors—Microsoft, Apple, or the various Linux distros—really introduced anything novel, just infinite variations on a theme. Filesystems are still hierarchical, users still install and manage applications, and so on. In fact, arguably the most interesting development in operating systems has been the iPhone, and most of its innovations center around two things: the two-finger interface, and the complete mental reboot of what user interface looks and acts like.

Seriously, that's the best we can do?

I see a lot of room for improvements in the operating system experience; for starters, let's do away with the "browser" and just call Firefox, IE and Chrome what they're (far too slowly) evolving into: a generic application host. Get that story right—the acquisition of applications onto the device, the updating of those applications when new versions are available, the offline application experience, and so on—and the operating system and the browser will mesh into a seamless whole. But we're not there yet, not by a long ways, and the first competitor to create such an environment will have a huge advantage over its rivals. Arguably Apple got there first with the iPhone and AppStore, and yet the iPhone still needs iTunes running on a computer to make the experience seamless, and iTunes is definitely not what I call a seamless user experience.

(Besides, the iPhone is hamstrung on a number of levels—I would absolutely despise trying to write this blog post on it, for example.)

Despite the clear window of opportunity for an innovative operating system to step in and make some serious waves in the industry, Google producing an OS really doesn't make sense to me, for a number of reasons.

• Challenging your opponent on your opponent's turf is never a good idea. A maxim of battle says that one should only battle on favorable terrain, yet Google's deliberately choosing to "cross the line", as it were, into territory that is clearly foreign to them. They have no expertise in marketing it, selling it, researching it, or developing it, while their competitors in this—Microsoft, Apple being the principal two—have been doing it for decades. Literally. I realize that Google has a number of smart people working for them, but it seems pretty presumptuous and arrogant to think they can get this story better, particularly in any kind of short term.
• This is a difficult problem to tackle. Microsoft's known it for decades, Apple is discovering it all over again, and Linuxers have either wallowed in it as a sign of prowess or just accepted the problem as intractable—it's really hard to get an operating system to recognize the billions of different devices out there. Apple solved it by jealously and zealously chasing anyone who ever tried to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware. Linux consumers found themselves recompiling kernels or in some cases, having to build device drivers themselves. Microsoft just suffered through it. For a new OS, the only path possible in the beginning is to support the 20% of the devices that 80% of the people use, and hope that nobody else tries a device that isn't on that list and blogs to tell about it. Unfortunately, the chosen target market (consumer netbooks) works against them here in a big way. With developers, it's pretty easy to say, "Sorry, guys, you know how it is, give us a few years, or contribute the patch yourself!"; with consumers, if their BuyMart-bargain-bin web cam doesn't work, it's Google's fault and they'll be up in the acne-spackled BuyMart counter boy's face about it. This will not persuade BuyMart to stock the Chrome-installed netbook for much longer.
• Is this really the company that swore to "do no evil"? Google's announcement is vague on so many levels, it's almost a FUD play, or else they're trying to blatantly cash in on their "geek cred" to convince investors and analysts that they've finally found a new source of revenue to supplement AdWords. (Well, modulo the fact that this new OS will be open-source, which means it's not really a revenue play, but I'm sure they've got that figured out somehow, too.) Seriously, this doesn't make sense: if you're doing an open-source OS, then where is the source? Where is the transparency? Where is my ability to contribute despite my status as a non-Google developer? What part of this project is open-source in any sense of the term?
• Netbooks? I realize that netbooks are the new hotness to a lot of people, a compromise between a phone/PDA and a laptop, and that the price point of the netbook means that for the first time, consumers can get into computing for under $250 (rivalling the price of game consoles) that addresses their fundamental needs—email, web surfing and maybe an application or two—but the timing here is just too late. Google's announcement says that "netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010". Which means that the major competitors (mostly Windows) will have twelve months to convince netbook consumers that Windows (and Windows7, in particular) is the right choice to run the netbook, and Google will be starting from some distance behind the 8-ball. Chrome needs to be available now if they're going to avoid a long and entrenched battle starting from a position of weakness.
• It's a distraction from their strength. Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying. "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong", but this represents Google's third or fourth effort into a space that really isn't leveraging their core strength (their ability to scale). Even if the money and resources spent on Chrome (and Android, for that matter) have zero effect on the budgeting and resourcing for Google App Engine and other server plays, the message and story that Google presents to the world is now as disjoint and multifaceted (and therefore harder to grasp) as Microsoft's.
• Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it almost a decade ago when another company announced a plan to unify the browser and the desktop? In that case, the world either yawned, rejected it outright ("I don't want to browse my desktop, damnit" was how one friend of mine put it), or sued them over it. Even if Google doesn't run afoul of the DOJ directly, Microsoft is going to love pointing to Chrome OS as clear indication of non-monopoly status the next time DOJ comes calling. If Google does manage somehow to annoy the DOJ antitrust personalities, well... let IBM and Microsoft tell you all about how much fun it is to try to innovate and bring products to market with lawyers looking over your shoulders.
• Haven't we seen this before? Not too long ago, another vendor tried to go after the "you don't need an operating system" story... except they called it "The Network Is the Computer". All you Java developers, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have their hand raised, ask what happened to that vendor from any of the people with their hand in the air. Or ask an Oracle DBA.
• Haven't we seen this before? Even more recently, another vendor made a play for the netbook+cloud story. All those who've heard of Cloud OS, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have your hand raised.... well, I wish I could tell you to go talk to the people with their hand raised, except I don't think anybody does.

This whole idea just feels badly-planned and not well thought-out. Let's see how it executes, so let's meet back here in a year and compare notes, but in the meantime, I'm not hanging up my Java or .NET tools any time soon.

Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues to its logical conclusion. Have a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

From Scott Hanselman's blog:

Are you in King County/Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue Washington and surrounding areas? Are you a huge nerd? Perhaps a geek? No? Maybe a dork, dweeb or wonk. Maybe you're in town for an SDR (Software Design Review) visiting BillG. Quite possibly you're just a normal person.

Regardless, why not join us for some Mall Food at the Crossroads Bellevue Mall Food Court on Monday, January 19th around 6:30pm?

...

NOTE: RSVP by leaving a comment here and show up on January 19th at 6:30pm! Feel free to bring friends, kids or family. Bring a Ruby or Java person!

Any of the SeaJUG want to attend? (Anybody know of a Ruby JUG in the Eastside area, by the way?) I'm game....

I'm getting *hammered* by the Google "Windows7 VMware" hits, which I can only assume is from people looking for hints and advice on installing Windows7 into a VMWare image, and I feel compelled to point out that there's already a pre-built VMWare VM available from the "Virtual Appliance" pages at VMware.com; currently, it resides here. Note that you will need to BitTorrent it down, I haven't found a straight HTTP download link from that (off-vmware.com) site.

I wish I knew the full legalities of making said VM available; I only hope that the guys who are doing it have checked, but if you're at all concerned about such things, trust me, it's pretty painless to install Win7 into your own VM of your own making.

A friend of mine and fellow NFJS speaker, Ken Sipe, blogged about his experiences with Windows 7, and unfortunately, they're not positive. In fact, they're downright painful to read.

And he hasn't even begun the installation process yet:

First I went to the public beta site... and selected the 64-bit version in english and got this [screen shot]. WTF?? Repeated attempts resulted in the same. An oops page with a pre-canned search. Where did I go wrong? Well as you can tell, I'm on my Mac. So I pulled out fusion to launch Windows XP for round 2 of the attempt.

I thought this is just wrong, but determined to get a look, I switch to windows and my suspicions were confirmed when I got one page further. I got the download page with a couple of large buttons on the bottm of the page and one read "Download Now". Hey, that's what I want... I want to download now. I clicked the button and... nothing. Click... Nothing... No way... they didn't. Round 2 was in XP, but with firefox.

Round 3 as you would expect is XP with IE. That combination was successful and I'm now 29% into my download.

BTW... In the process of testing a few more times in writing up this blog, the round 1 mac failure was fixed to the point where you will get download page (nice response time msft), however the download button fails.

Why is it necessary to be like this? Why is it so hard to put up a link to a download which is platform neutral? Wouldn't Microsoft want to attract customers from other platforms? Does it always have to be all or nothing?

Ken, for whatever it's worth, I ran into exactly the same roadblocks you did, in almost precisely the same sequence you did. The only saving grace for me, personally, was that after Firefox (on the Mac instead of inside the VM) couldn't download the image, I thought that maybe Microsoft wanted to use their custom "File Transfer Manager" utility (that allows for multiple connections, suspends and restarts, etc) to do the download, so I fired up the VM that has that utility installed, and surfed to the MSDN Subscriber Download page instead of the public download page.

Now, I could go into spin/defense mode and try to point out that the vast majority of the people interested in working with Windows 7 are, in all likelihood, going to be that same community of users that use IE, and that Microsoft is only really beholden to those folks, or that Microsoft knows that the beta images will scream through the Internet over BitTorrent streams anyway, or that Microsoft wants to make sure that it's available to those IE users first, or .... But that would all be a pretty slippery slope, and quite frankly, I don't really believe in any of those arguments, anyway.

Why does Microsoft do this? Honestly, in the spirit of "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity or ignorance" (one of another NFJS speaker's favorite quote), I think the causation here is pretty simple to explain: I doubt anybody at Microsoft tested it with any other browser beyond IE. I could be wrong, of course, but I'm guessing that the conversation went something like this:

Manager: "Dilbert!"

Dilbert-the-website-dev: "Yes, boss?"

Manager: "Steve Ballmer, you remember him? He wants a public web page for downloading the Windows 7 beta, and he wants it yesterday. Make it happen!"

Dilbert: "Yes, boss. But what about--"

Manager: "No buts! This is TOP PRIORITY. Make it happen!"

Stupid? Yep. An attempt to exclude anybody except those on IE from downloading it? I doubt it.

Stay strong, Ken. It really does get better after this. Really.

This is more a continuation of my earlier Windows7 post, but I've installed the new Windows7 beta into a VMWare Fusion VM with zero difficulties, and I just finished putting VS2008 (and the SP1 patch) on it, then the latest F# CTP on top of that, and so far it all looks pretty smooth. Put in the DDK and the SDK, and I've got a nice Windows7 development image to play with.

I've had a few people ask me if I've still had problems with the mouse, but to be honest I installed it without the driver installed in the VMWare Tools install, so as soon as I copy off the .vmdk and .vmss files to a quiet little corner of the hard drive as backup, I'll try installing the mouse driver to see if it works, and report back here soon.

An open message to the Visual Studio installation team: One thing I'd like to see changed for VS2010--instead of giving me a "cmd.exe" environment for using VS from the command-line, can you at least give me a PowerShell .ps1 shell link to go alongside it? And why does the VS2008 SP1 patch require me to put Visual Studio in the CD tray to reference the vs_setup.msi about halfway through?

Update: Mouse driver works flawlessly. Dunno if it was a bug they fixed, or just random good VM karma, but the entire VMWare Tools package now works perfectly, as far as I can tell. Note: I haven't heard any sound out of it, but sometimes the sound driver in Fusion cuts out for reasons beyond my understanding, and after a reboot, sound is back without a problem. Besides, sound is not as important to me in a work VM as mouse or network, anyway, so....

It amazes me how insular and inward-facing the software industry is. And how the "agile" movement is reaping the benefits of a very simple characteristic.

For example, consider Jeff Palermo's essay on "The Myth of Self-Organizing Teams". Now, nothing against Jeff, or his post, per se, but it amazes me how our industry believes that they are somehow inventing new concepts, such as, in this case the "self-organizing team". Team dynamics have been a subject of study for decades, and anyone with a background in psychology, business, or sales has probably already been through much of the material on it. The best teams are those that find their own sense of identity, that grow from within, but still accept some leadership from the outside--the classic example here being the championship sports team. Most often, that sense of identity is born of a string of successes, which is why teams without a winning tradition have such a hard time creating the esprit de corps that so often defines the difference between success and failure.

(Editor's note: Here's a free lesson to all of you out there who want to help your team grow its own sense of identity: give them a chance to win a few successes, and they'll start coming together pretty quickly. It's not always that easy, but it works more often than not.)

How many software development managers--much less technical leads or project managers--have actually gone and looked through the management aisle at the local bookstore?

Tom and Mary Poppendieck have been spending years now talking about "lean" software development, which itself (at a casual glance) seems to be a refinement of the concepts Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers were pursuing close to two decades ago. "Total quality management" was a concept introduced in those days, the idea that anyone on the production line was empowered to stop the line if they found something that wasn't right. (My father was one of those "lean" manufacturing advocates back in the 80's, in fact, and has some great stories he can tell to its successes, and failures.)

How many software development managers or project leads give their developers the chance to say, "No, it's not right yet, we can't ship", and back them on it? Wouldn't you, as a developer, feel far more involved in the project if you knew you had that power--and that responsibility?

Or consider the "agile" notion of customer involvement, the classic XP "On-Site Customer" principle. Sales people have known for years, even decades (if not centuries), that if you involve the customer in the process, they are much more likely to feel an ownership stake sooner than if they just take what's on the lot or the shelf. Skilled salespeople have done the "let's walk through what you might buy, if you were buying, of course" trick countless numbers of times, and ended up with a sale where the customer didn't even intend to buy.

How many software development managers or project leads have read a book on basic salesmanship? And yet, isn't that notion of extracting what the customer wants endemic to both software development and basic sales (of anything)?

What is it about the software industry that just collectively refuses to accept that there might be lots of interesting research on topics that aren't technical yet still something that we can use? Why do we feel so compelled to trumpet our own "innovations" to ourselves, when in fact, they've been long-known in dozens of other contexts? When will we wake up and realize that we can learn a lot more if we cross-train in other areas... like, for example, getting your MBA?

Having created a Window7 VMWare image (which I then later cloned and installed the Windows7 SDK into, successfully, wahoo!), I turned to the Visual Studio 2010 bits they provided on the hard drive. Not surprisingly, though a bit frustratingly, they didn't give us an install image that I could put into a VMWare image of my own creation, but instead gave us a VPC with everything pre-installed in it.

I know that Microsoft prefers to promote its own products, and that it's probably a bit much to ask them to provide both a VMWare image and a VirtualPC image for these kind of pre-alpha things, but it's a bit of a pain considering that Virtual PC doesn't run anymore on the Mac, that I'm aware of. Please, Microsoft, a lot of .NET devs are carrying around MacBookPro machines these days, and if you're really focused on trying to get bits in the hands of developers, it would be quite the bold move to provide a VMWare image right next to the VPC image. Particularly since over half the drive was unused.

So... I don't want to have to carry around a PC (though I do at the moment) just to run VirtualPC just to be able to explore VS 2010, but fortunately VMWare provides a Converter application that can take a VPC image and flip it over to a VMWare image. Sounds like a plan. I fire up the Converter, point it at the VPC, and after the world's... slowest... wizard... takes... my... settings... and... begins... I discover that it will take upwards of 3 hours to convert. Dear God.

I decided to go to bed at that point.

When I woke up, the image had been converted successfully, but I wasn't quite finished yet. First of all, fire it up to make sure it runs, which it does without a problem, but at 640x480 in black-and-white mode (no, seriously, it's not much more than that). Install the VMWare Tools, reboot, and...

... the mouse cursor disappears. WTF?!?

Turns out this has been a nagging problem with several versions of VMWare over the years, and I vaguely remember running into the problem the last time I tried to create a Windows Server 2003/2008 image, too. Ugh. Hunting around the Web doesn't reveal an easy solution, but a couple of things do show up a few times: disconnect the CD-ROM, change the mouse pointer acceleration, delete the VMWare Mouse driver and let Windows rediscover the standard PS/2 mouse driver, or change the display hardware acceleration.

Not being really interested in debugging the problem (I know, my chance at making everybody's life better is now forever lost), I decided to take a bit of a shotgun approach to the problem. I explicitly deleted the VMWare Mouse driver, fiddled with the display settings (including resizing it to a more respectable 1400x1050), turned display hardware acceleration down, couldn't find mouse hardware acceleration settings, allowed it to reboot, and...

... yay. I have a mouse pointer again.

Now I have a VS2010 image on my Drive-o'-Virtual-Machines, and with it I plan on exploring the VS2010/C# 4.0/C++ 10/VB 10 bits some more. I fire up Visual Studio 2010, intending to poke around C# 4.0's new "dynamic" keyword and see if and how it builds on top of the DLR (as a few people have suggested in comments in prior posts). VS comes up pretty quickly (not bad for a pre-alpha), the new interface seems snappy, and I create the ubiquitous "ConsoleApplicationX" C# app.

Wait a minute...

Something niggled at the back of my head, and I went back to File | New Project, and ... something's missing.

There's no "Visual F#" tab. There's an item in the "Project types:" box on the left for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, WiX, Modeling Projects, Database Projects, Other Project Types, and Test Projects, but no Visual F#. (And no, it doesn't show up under "Other Project Types" either, I checked.) Considering that my understanding was that F# was going to ship with VS 2010, I'm a little puzzled as to its absence. Hopefully this is just a temporary oversight.

In the meantime, I'm off to play with "dynamic" a bit more and see what comes out of it. But guys, please, let's see some F# love out of the box? Surely, if you can ship WiX with it, shipping F# can't be hard?

The full list is here. It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some pretty big names.

In homage to Ms. Sally Fields, of so many years ago... "You like me, you really like me". Having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog is second on my list of "fun things to happen to me at a conference", right behind having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog, except for that one entry, where I said something totally ridiculous (and here's why) ....

What I find most fascinating about the list was the means by which it was constructed--the various calculations behind page rank, technorati rating, and so on. Very cool stuff.

Perhaps it's trite to say it, but it's still true: readers are what make writing blogs worthwhile. Thanks to all of you.

If you've peeked at my blog site in the last twenty minutes or so, you've probably noticed some churn in the template in the upper-left corner; by now, it's been finalized, and it reads "JOB REFERRALS".

WTHeck? Has Ted finally sold out? Sort of, not really. At least, I don't think so.

Here's the deal: the company behind those ads, Entice Labs, contacted me to see if I was interested in hosting some job ads on my blog, given that I seem to generate a moderate amount of traffic. I figured it was worthwhile to at least talk to them, and the more I did, the more I liked what I heard--the ads are focused specifically at developers of particular types (I chose a criteria string of "Software Developers", subcategorized by "Java, .NET, .NET (Visual Basic), .NET (C#), C++, Flex, Ruby on Rails, C, SQL, JavaScript, HTML" though I'm not sure whether "HTML" will bring in too many web-designer jobs), and visitors to my blog don't have to click through the ads to get to the content, which was important to me. And, besides, given the current economic climate, if I can help somebody find a new job, I'd like to.

Now for the full disclaimer: I will be getting money back from these job ads, though how much, to be honest with you, I'm not sure. I'm really not doing this for the money, so I make this statement now: I will take 50% of whatever I make through this program and donate it to a charitable organization. The other 50% I will use to offset travel and expenses to user groups and/or CodeCamps and/or for-free conferences put on throughout the country. (Email me if you know of one that you're organizing or attending and would like to see me speak at, and I'll tell you if there's any room in the budget left for it. )

Anyway, I figured if the ads got too obnoxious, I could always remove them; it's an experiment of sorts. Tell me what you think.

Not too long ago, Don wrote:

The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.

No.

That may be true for somebody who works for a large commercial or open source vendor, whose team is building something that fits into one of those three categories and wants to see that language/tool/OS succeed.

That is not where most of us live. If you do, certainly, you are welcome to your opinion, but please accept with good grace that your agenda is not the same as my own.

Most of us in the practitioner space are using languages, tools and OSes to solve customer problems, and making the decision to use a particular language, tool or OS a personal one generally gets us into trouble--how many developers do you know that identify themselves so closely with that decision that they include it in their personal metadata?

"Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm a Java programmer."

Or, "Oh, good God, you're running Windows? What are you, some kind of Micro$oft lover or something?"

Or, "Linux? You really are a geek, aren't you? Recompiled your kernel lately (snicker, snicker)?"

Sorry, but all of those make me want to hurl. Of these kinds of statements are technical zealotry and flame wars built. When programmers embed their choice so deeply into their psyche that it becomes the tagline by which they identify themselves, it becomes an "ego" thing instead of a "tool" thing.

What's more, it involves customers and people outside the field in an argument that has nothing to do with them. Think about it for a second; the last time you hired a contractor to add a deck to your house, what's your reaction when they introduce themselves as,

"Hi, I'm Kim, and I'm a Craftsman contractor."

Or, overheard at the job site, "Oh, good God, you're using a Skil? What are you, some kind of nut or something?"

Or, as you look at the tools on their belt, "Nokita? You really are a geek, aren't you? Rebuilt your tools from scratch lately (snicker, snicker)?"

Do you, the customer, really care what kind of tools they use? Or do you care more for the quality of solution they build for you?

It's hard to imagine how the discussion can even come up, it's so ludicrous.

Try this one on, instead:

"Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm a programmer."

I use a variety of languages, tools, and OSes, and my choice of which to use are all geared around a single end goal: not to promote my own social or political agenda, but to make my customer happy.

Sometimes that means using C# on Windows. Sometimes that means using Java on Linux. Sometimes that means Ruby on Mac OS X. Sometimes that means creating a DSL. Sometimes that means using EJB, or Spring, or F#, or Scala, or FXCop, or FindBugs, or log4j, or ... ad infinitum.

Don't get me wrong, I have my opinions, just as contractors (and truck drivers, it turns out) do. And, like most professionals in their field, I'm happy to share those opinions with others in my field, and also with my customers when they ask: I think C# provides a good answer in certain contexts, and that Java provides an equally good answer, but in different contexts. I will be happy to explain my recommendation on which languages, tools and OSes to use, because unlike the contractor, the languages, tools, and OSes I use will be visible to the customer when the software goes into Production, at a variety of levels, and thus, the customer should be involved in that decision. (Sometimes the situation is really one where the customer won't see it, in which case the developer can have full confidence in whatever language/tool/OS they choose... but that's far more often the exception than the rule, and will generally only be true in cases where the developer is providing a complete customer "hands-off" hosting solution.)

I choose to be pro-choice.

Recently I received a press announcement from Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft's PR company, about their latest move in the interoperability space; I reproduce it here in its entirety for your perusal:

Hi Ted,

Microsoft is announcing another action to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT industry of developers, partners, customers and competitors. 

Today Microsoft is posting additional documentation of the XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) formats for advanced user experiences, enabling third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products.  This documentation is publicly available, for no charge, at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113699 . 

It will assist developers building non-Microsoft clients and servers to read and write XAML to process advanced user experiences – with lots of animation, rich 2D and 3D graphic and video. Specifically, non-Microsoft servers can more easily generate XAML files to be handled, for example, by applications running on Windows client machines.  In addition, non-Microsoft clients can be written more easily to interpret XAML files. This action will assist ISVs in creating design tools and file format converters to read and write XAML to create advanced user experiences.

Microsoft is making this documentation available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP), which will allow developers of all types anywhere in the world to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server or tool products without having to take a license or pay a fee to Microsoft.

The following quote is attributable to Tom Robertson, general manager, Interoperability and Standards, Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s posting of the expanded set of XAML format documentation to assist third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products will help promote interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community.  Use of the Open Specification Promise assures developers that they can use any Microsoft patents needed to implement all or part of the XAML formats for free, anywhere in the world, now and in the future.” 

Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can provide you with any additional information. 

Best,

N--

This marks the most recent in a slew of efforts by the Borg of the Pacific Northwest to "promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice", and I know it's left a lot of people feeling decidedly skeptical and... well, let's just call it what it is, paranoid, about the company's plans and ulterior motive behind all these efforts. After all, this is the company that tried to co-opt Java, put Stacker out of business, used their monopoly operating system power to crush Novell, used their monopoly office suite power to crush the Mac, bribe an entire country to vote their way on the new office-file specifications, and I don't know what all else.

I know, I know, all my blog-readers who work at Microsoft are going nuts right now, protesting, claiming that this isn't the same company that they work for now, and so on. Fact is, folks, if you work at Microsoft, you work for a company whose name is not well-received in many quarters, and while some of it is undeserved... some of it is. Microsoft has done some pretty stupid things in its history, and if that reputation doesn't sit well with you now, I can't help but wonder if somewhere in that great Corporate Heaven, Stac Electronics isn't just jumping up and down, foaming at the mouth and screaming, "Ha! Serves you right!"

I don't want to use this blog as a chance for everybody who ever got burned by Microsoft (or thought they got burned by Microsoft, which is much more widespread and just as much more likely to be in their own minds) to trot out "reap and sow" cliches. Instead, I want to revisit one of my favorite topics, that of interoperability, and see exactly what this new shift in Microsoft's attitude towards interoperability really means.

Let's take these one at a time. Note that I have no "Deep Throat" at Microsoft feeding me "the Redmondagon Papers"; this is all based on my own conjecture and perspective.

What does releasing the XAML spec really mean?

Honestly, it means that now non-Microsoft platforms can try to create competitors to Aero and Windows Presentation Foundation, and have the same kind of rich client experiences that Windows users can enjoy.

Honestly, I expect this to go pretty much nowhere.

Realistically speaking, if a non-Microsoft app server wanted to generate XAML, it was a simple matter of generating the appropriate XML, tagging it with an appropriate MIME type in the HTTP header, and serving it up over an HTTP request; I've been giving this demo at conferences for three or four years now, pretty much since the first betas of WPF were stable enough to use. This really isn't rocket science.

But more importantly, XAMl has always been misunderstood: it's not a presentation format, it's an object graph format. XAML simply "wires up" a collection of objects into a tree, and it's the underlying object model that provides the functionality or power or presentation or whatever. It's an easier way of writing "Button b = new Button(...);", nothing more, nothing less. Sure, it would be nice to have some kind of equivalent for the Swing space, but doing so would tie the corresponding XML (XSML?) to the Swing APIs, just as WPF XAML is tied to the WPF API.

Does releasing the XAML specs mean that now Linux and Mac OS will get WPF features?

They've had them for years, in the guise of the OpenGL APIs, and nobody knew what to do with them, except maybe for a sliver of folks building games and interesting "effects". Unless somebody really feels the desire to try and create an adapter layer to map the WPF Button over to an OpenGL button, I really don't see much point.

This is one of the most dangerous points in the discussion: attempting to build an adapter to another platform's API is almost always a failed experiment from the day it's begun, and Microsoft's own attempt to port the MFC APIs over to the Mac OS (back in the pre-OS X days, circa 1995) were just a miserable, abject failure. Not because of any lack of intelligence on Microsoft's part, mind you, but because the two operating systems are just too different. Want to see what I mean? Bring a Mac guy and a Windows guy into the same room, and ask them each where God intended the menu bar to live.

Then creep, quietly, out of the room, before you get caught in the blood frenzy.

Why does Microsoft suddenly care about interoperability?

This is the crown jewel of the lot: why should this company, so famous for going it alone on so many issues, suddenly decide that it's important for them to embrace the other kids on the playground and make nice? Is this back to the "embrace" part of the "embrace and extend and extinguish" cycle that they're so famous for?

Partly.

To understand the point I am about to make, let's set some context.

(In other words, gather 'round, children, it's story time.)

Truth is, there was a time back there in the '90s when I think Microsoft really thought they could take over the world. COM was on the ascendancy, and it was a better platform for building software than anything else out there (at the time), particularly in the area of building rich media applications (remember when embedding a sound clip into your email message embedded inside your spreadsheet was all the rage?). The CORBA initiative was going strong, true, but its great claim to fame was to allow two remote processes to talk to one another--the rest of the CORBA "push" was in standards that either never materialized, or else materialized but turned out to be really hard to build, or use, or deploy, or all of the above. IBM's great competitor--SOM--wasn't even in beta on anything other than OS/2 (another great IBM product). Then, when DCOM shipped, it was seen by some as the final nail in the CORBA coffin; Microsoft clearly was going to "win".

Along came Java.

Java literally took the rug out from underneath the COM platform, almost overnight. It provided a platform with most of the same benefits as the COM/DCOM platform, but without having to memorize the QueryInterface rules or knowing what IUnknown was or how IDispatch was required to work or how static_cast<> and dynamic_cast<> and QueryInterface were all related. ("Would you, should you, static_cast? Not if you want your code to last..." Ah, those were heady days.) Suddenly, "mere mortals" could program on this platform, and feel a strong sense of confidence that their code would work, over time, regardless of whether they remembered to set references to null when they were done with them.

At first, Microsoft was "down with it", because in Java they saw a great marriage: the Java language as the "sweet spot" between C++'s expressive power and VB's layers of abstraction, running on top of the JVM as a "sweet spot" intermingled with the COM platform to provide the easiest, most powerful Windows programming environment yet. Visual J++ was clearly the favored child of the litter.

And then the lawyers got involved, and Sun saw their chance to steal a march on Microsoft, and maybe break the feared operating system monopolist, and maybe even get a few more percentage points for Solaris (because, after all, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" meant that you wouldn't have to run sucky operating systems like Windows and instead could trade up to real operating systems like Solaris, right? Hey, where'd that penguin come from, anyway, and why is he eating all our fish?). Sun refused to let Microsoft's marriage of the JVM (technically the MSVM) and COM take place, and Microsoft, rather than seek to fight it out, instead decided to cede the battle, and look for a battleground of their own choosing, instead. Thus was the thing that would become called ".NET" born.

But this "master plan" would take four or so years to develop, and in the meantime...

... in the meantime, EJB and Servlets and later J2EE and "app servers" and Spring and all those wonderful things that came with them, they were eating Microsoft's lunch. Comparing J2EE (even with EJB in the mix!) with the complexities of writing unmanaged COM code on top of COM+ is simply no comparison--again, the power of the managed platform simply proved to be too hard to turn away without compelling reason, and the COM/DCOM/COM+ story simply didn't have that compelling reason. Microsoft watched their "inevitable victory" sail into the sunset without them, just as the Department of Justice came up to them and shackled them with the first of many, many papers about "anti-competitive practices".

In many respects, the positions got reversed--Sun inherited a huge share (an unhealthy dose, in fact) of Microsoft's arrogance, and for a long time there, thought they were suddenly destiny's child, that Java (meaning Sun, of course) would be the one to "win", and thus would Sun's assurance of world dominance thus be assured.

Except it didn't play out that way.

Sun found that by embracing standards over implementations, they spent long hours thrashing out specifications, only to provide instant credibility to other vendors' products while their own languished. Weblogic stole the EJB early adopter window. A number of small vendors provided servlet implementations before Tomcat was born... which, although written by Sun employees, was an open-source project and yielded no financial benefit. JMS... well, JMS was always the redheaded stepchild of the J2EE family, at least until vendors like Sonic and Fiorano rescued it for the common Java programmer. (Those who'd been using IBM MQSeries all the while never really could see why you'd want to program against JMS APIs instead of IBM's own.) In each and every case, Sun found their product to be the third or fourth entry into the race, usually years after the others had started, and as a result....

Meanwhile, back in Redmond....

Microsoft comes to the game with .NET in 2003. (The early betas don't count because many people openly wonder if Microsoft is really serious about this ".NET" thing in the first place. After all, remember Microsoft Bob?) And despite .NET's obvious advantage of being formulated nearly a decade after Java's initial release, thus able to apply hindsight to fix or improve the obvious blemishes in the Java environment, Microsoft finds that they're playing catch-up in the all-too-important enterprise space. Microsoft's tools and products have always been seen as "second-class citizens" to the "big boys" in the enterprise space, particularly at the ends of the "high scale" continuum, and the lack of an obvious "app server" in the .NET arena only serves to underscore and reinforce that opinion among many large firms.

More importantly, Microsoft doesn't ever want to get blindsided by the Java experience again. They want to make sure that they are never in a position where it looks like their tools are vastly out-of-date, underfeatured, underpowered, and underused. They need to remain somewhere near the bleeding edge, but not so close that their customers are the ones doing the bleeding.

(We pause for the inevitable Vista joke.)

To Microsoft, Java is that near-death experience that pulls many adrenaline (and other) junkies back from the brink they so callously teetered on before. They need some kind of forward progress, some kind of advancement in the game, so that their customers and their would-be customers feel like Microsoft is on top of it at all times.

Result: Somewhere in the 2000-2003 timeframe, Microsoft looks around, sees the landscape, and realizes it needs to make itself relevant to a largely J2EE-based universe, and fast.

At first, Microsoft sees a play through the establishment of some standards between the big vendors, around this new "XML" thing, a largely portable data format, and so they throw themselves heart and soul into that space. Doing so will allow them to show existing J2EE-based shops that the power of the .NET platform lies in complementing the existing infrastructure, not replacing it. (Microsoft is smart enough to realize that preaching the software equivalent of hellfire-and-brimstone, known as "rip-and-replace", will not cater well to this congregation.)

(Rubyists could have learned a valuable lesson here, but either weren't paying attention, didn't realize the value of the lesson, or else just chose not to.)

But this play doesn't turn out the way they expect: the WS-* standards become top-heavy, and start to resemble the very thing Microsoft sought to smash fifteen years earlier: CORBA. The number of WS- specifications available through the W3C (and OASIS, and WS-I and whatever other industry consortiums are formed) is exceeded only by the number of Cos- specifications available from the OMG. The complexities therein leave many Java--and .NET--programmers confused, bewildered, and hopelessly lost when trying to get all but the most simple services to work. Thus does the community turn to alternatives--JSON, simple sockets, REST, whatever--to try and find something that works, even if it only addresses a subset of the problems they will eventually face.

Meanwhile...

Open source grows ever more important, and Microsoft-the-company realizes they have to either kill it or join it. It's hard to kill something that has no body (unlike their previous competitors), so joining it is the only viable option. Unlike many other software product companies, however, Microsoft has too large an established software base to just "flip the switch", and has far too deeply entrenched a corporate community to take any kind of radical action without a well-thought plan. (Wall Street, a place few programmers ever bother to consider, much less visit, would not take kindly to Microsoft essentially giving away their core product without something in its place to generate revenue, and regardless of how many programmers would like to imagine a world with a bankrupt Microsoft, this would be bad for business for everybody.)

And thus do we come to the present.

Microsoft needs a play that is Wall Street friendly, programmer friendly, and corporate friendly. They are slowly flirting more and more deeply with open source, yet still firmly committed to turning a profit (something a few of these other open-source-based companies should probably learn to do at some point--just maneuvering to the point of being bought out by a larger fish, like Oracle, is not really a long-term competitive strategy, just so you know).

Microsoft wants--arguably, needs--to keep Office relevant in a world where software isn't always paid for, so they need a play that keeps Office ubiquitous and out in the forefront of developer mindshare. If they can't get you to buy Office, then at least let's get you to use tools that keep the Office file formats ubiquitous. If (and this is a big "if") the Office formats turn out to be technically superior to their competition, then Microsoft succeeds. If not, they find a new play.

In the short, Microsoft needs an interoperability story, and they need a real interoperability play, because their reputation is damaged from the many "embrace, extend, extinguish" plays they've made in the past. The era of a large vendor "winning" is clearly well behind us (if it was ever, in fact, more than just a marketing VP's wet dream), and if Microsoft is going to make sure that they're never in a vulnerable come-from-behind position again, they need to make sure that they can work well with all the other new technologies out there, whether up-and-coming or well-established or even fading-fast. They need to have an interoperability story that developers can believe in, which means some kind of open-source-friendly play, and one that carries serious "street cred" for actually working.

What's the lesson that I, a developer, take away from this?

If you are a Java developer, get past your old prejudices and accept that .NET is a viable platform. The Java developer who refuses to learn how to write C# code on the grounds that "Micro$oft is a company that just puts out crap" or that "M$FT sux" is going to be a Java developer whose value to the business is reduced compared to those with less virulent politics. Thanks to tools like VMWare and Virtual PC, you don't have to give up your Mac or your Linux environment to write .NET code and prove that you can offer value to those projects that need to talk to .NET. Look into more than just the WS-* or REST stacks for communication, as well; explore some of the interoperability options I've been ranting about for four years, a la IKVM, Jace, Hessian, even CORBA.

If you are a Ruby developer, get over yourself and your "we're more agile and more powerful" meme. Ruby is a tool, nothing more, and one whose shine is fast coming off. IT organizations are discovering the myriad problems with the original Ruby runtime, and are unwilling to risk enterprise apps on a runtime that has zero monitoring and zero manageability play. Yes, you can certainly do lots of things yourself to make your Ruby apps more manageable and more monitorable--but that's all time you have to spend building it, or figuring out how to hook it into the existing IT infrastructure, and when all that time gets added up, it's not going to look all that different from a Java or .NET app's timecycle arc. If you don't have an answer to the question, "How will we make this work with the existing infrastructure we've got?", then you have a problem, and no amount of chanting "Obi-Dave Thomas-Kenobi, you and dynamic typing are my only hope" will save you.

If you are a .NET developer, it's high time you accepted that the Java folks are about five years ahead of you on this "managed code" arc, and that they suffered through a lot of hard lessons before arriving at the decisions they came to. Don't be stupid, learn from their mistakes. Why do Java programmers chant "dependency injection" with holy fervor? Why do Java programmers put so much stress on unit testing? What has Microsoft not given you with the latest release of Visual Studio that Java developers think you're an idiot for not demanding in the next release? Yes, C# has some interesting new features in it that Java-the-language doesn't have... but why are the Java guys getting all misty-eyed over Groovy? What do they know that you don't?

If you are a developer outside of these areas, you're swimming in dangerous waters, because while I'm sure you're not having any problems finding a job, chances are your next job is going to require you to talk to one of those three environments. Better have your integration/interoperability story worked out, whether its Phalanger for the PHP developer who needs to talk to .NET (and damn if PHP script driving a WinForms app isn't an interesting idea in of itself... and a useful way to bridge yourself into an entirely new area of employment), or its figuring out how to apply your mad Haskell skillz to F# or Scala, you need to have a good idea of what those languages are (and aren't) and how your knowledge of functional concepts can catapult you to the head of the class the next time a massively-scalable system needs to be built.

If you are a Microsoft employee, don't blow this. Don't make this into another "embrace, extend, extinguish" cycle. Accept that your company made some bone-headed maneuvers in the past, and rather than try to defend them, accept that your reputation outside of the Redmond Reality-Distortion Bubble is not what it looks like from the inside. As hard as this will be to do sometimes, just stop and listen to what others are saying about the company and the paranoia that creeps up every time Microsoft moves into an area of interest. Take the extra moment to hear the concerns, not just the words.

And if you are a Google employee, tatoo this on your forehead: Reputation Matters. The first time anybody at your company does something even remotely "evil", you will be branded as "the next Microsoft" and all of these problems will be yours to share and enjoy, as well.

So I took the plunge and installed Leopard onto my MacBook Pro tonight, and as of right now, I'm not a happy camper.

The installation started off well enough--pop in the DVD, bring up the installer, double-click, answer a few form fields, then wait as it verifies the DVD, reboots into the CD-launched installer again, answer a few form fields, then sit and read my latest copy of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine while the installation completes. Roughly an hour or so later, it's done, and I have a bright and shiny new Leopard installation on my Mac. Yay.

Software Update tells me there are a few things that need updating--sure, that makes sense, since I think the latest version of Leopard is actually now 10.5.2, so go ahead.

Bad move.

Ever since that update, any attempt to join my home wireless network fails miserably. AirPort can clearly see the network--it discovers the SSID without a problem--but joining it yields no love. The error that shows up in the console log is always this pair:

airportd Error: Apple80211Associated() failed -6

_emUIServer Error: airport MIG failed = -6 ((null) port = 60027)

I've tried several things suggested in the Apple forums, from changing the order of connected systems to put the Airport on the top, to clearing out my list of remembered SSIDs, to turning the AirPort off and back on again, to downloading the TimeMachine upgrade and installing it, even to blowing out the PRAM on boot. Nothing doing.

Tomorrow we make a trip to the Apple Genius Bar to see what those geniuses have to say, but I'm not optimistic. I will update this blog and apologize profusely if I'm wrong, of course, but given the number of unsuccessful support calls that people are lamenting, I'm guessing this will be one of those "Well, if you want to ship it back to the factory, sir, ...." responses, which is NOT an option.

Well... OK, it is an option, given that I do most everything in VMWare images, sure, but the thought of going back to my T42p (with only 1.5GB of RAM on it, compared to the full 4GB on my MBP) is not endearing to me, particularly because Vista has a problem with releasing the USB hard drives that I store most of the VMWare images on....

Somebody please tell me they have an easy fix for this, one which Googling has not yet revealed....

Update: So I took my MBP into the Apple Store... and, naturally, the wireless on the MBP picks up the Apple Store's network just fine. Grrr. Regardless, I had them do an "archive and install" of 10.5.1 onto the machine, and when I got home... perfect! Sees and connects to my home wireless without a hitch. So I'd suggest for those who recently moved up to 10.5.2, try dropping back to 10.5.1 and see if that solves the problem.

Meanwhile, I'll be holding off of doing the 10.5.2 update for a while, I think. Of course, that also means I can't do the iPhone SDK, I think, so I may try the update once more just to see if it'll take this time, and if it doesn't, then off to the Apple Store again for the 10.5.1 re-install again. But at least this time, I'd know what the viable solution is. (I hope....)

Apparently, I'm drawing enough of an audience through this blog that various folks have started to send me press releases and notifications and requests for... well, I dunno exactly, but I'm assuming some blogging love of some kind. I'm always a little leery about that particular subject, because it always has this dangerous potential to turn the blog into a less-credible marketing device, but people at conferences have suggested that they really are interested in what I think about various products and tools, so perhaps it's time to amend my stance on this.

With that in mind, if you are a vendor and have a product that you'd like me to take a look at and (possibly) offer up a review here, here's the basic rules:

1. No guarantees. Sending me something will in no way guarantee that I will review your product, for several reasons, two of which being (a) I get really busy sometimes, and (b) I may have no interest whatsoever in your product and I refuse to pretend to do so. (Readers can usually tell when the reviewer isn't all that excited about the subject, I've found.)
2. If you're not going to send me a "real" version (meaning not the time-locked or feature-crippled demo), don't bother. I have no idea when I will get around to a review, and I have no desire to review something that isn't "the real deal". I will in turn promise that the licensed version you send me (if necessary) will not be used for any purpose other than my own research and exploration (signing contract if necessary to give you that "fresh-from-the-lawyer's-office" warm and fuzzy feeling).
3. I say what I think, pro and con. I will not edit my review to suit your marketing purpose, and if you ask me to do so I will simply note in the review that you have asked me to do so. I retain full editorial control over what I say about your product.
4. Having established #1, I will try to be as fair as I can about your product, and point out things that I liked and things that I didn't. (Of course, if I hated it from top to bottom, I may end up with the only positive thing being "It didn't set the atmosphere on fire when I started the app", but hey, that's something positive, right?)
5. Also in the spirit of #1, if you send me mail answering questions or complaints in my review, I will of course amend the review with your comments. You are always welcome to post comments to the blog entry itself, too. Unless you insult my grandmother, then I will have to get all DELETE-key on you.

The reason I'm posting this here is twofold: one, so my faithful audience of four blog readers will know the rules under which I'm looking at these products and (hopefully) realize that I'm not financially vested in any of these products, and two, so the various vendor folks can read this and know what the rules are up front before even asking.

I know it sounds a little cheeky to lay this out. The image I get in my head is that of the kid at Christmas declaring to his grandparents as they walk through the door, presents in hand, "Make sure it's not a scratchy sweater, I hate scratchy sweaters. And G.I. Joe was only popular when my Dad was a kid. And if you give me another lunchbox I will scream until you buy me something cool, like a new GameBoy." Ugh. But I value the trust that people seem to have in me, and so I risk the perception of cheekiness for this tiny window in time in order to (hopefully) establish full disclosure over the reviews that come to pass (which, by the way, will always have the category "review" applied to them, so you know which is an official review and which is just me exploring, like the LLVM and Parrot posts of recent time).

We now return you to the regularly-scheduled blog.

A couple of people have asked me over the last few weeks, so it's probably worth saying out loud:

No, I don't work for a large company, so yes, I'm available for consulting and research projects. If you've got one of those burning questions like, "How would our company/project/department/whatever make use of JRuby-and-Rails, and what would the impact to the rest of the system be", or "Could using F# help us write applications faster", or "How would we best integrate Groovy into our application", or "How does the new Adobe Flex/AIR move help us build richer client apps", or "How do we improve the performance of our Java/.NET app", or other questions along those lines, drop me a line and let's talk. Not only will I cook up a prototype describing the answer, but I'll meet with your management and explain the consequences of the research, both pro and con, for them to evaluate.

Shameless call for consulting complete, now back to the regularly-scheduled programming.

After pulling down the Solaris Developer Express 9/07 VMWare image, that it would make just too much sense to install Mercurial, grab the OpenJDK sources, and get the OpenJDK build going on that VMWare image and re-release the image back to the world, so those who wanted to build the OpenJDK and have an out-of-the-box ready-to-go experience could do so. (I'd love to do the same for Windows, but there's obvious licensing problems there.) Then, because the VMWare image would already have the Sun Studio 12 and NetBeans IDEs on it, one would have a complete debugging and profiling platform for spelunking the OpenJDK code base.

Thus far,though, I'm running into a significant snag, in that SDX doesn't want to run Sun Studio out of the box: it complains that it can't find CC on the PATH (which is on the PATH, as near as I can tell). Putting it on the PATH and re-launching the IDE (as suggested in the error message) has no effect, nor does modifying my .profile and logging-out-and-back-in-again.

To make matters more interesting, when kicking off Make, it throws a Java exception claiming "out of free space", which shouldn't be the case at all, since the drive the project lives on has a couple of gigs free. I've posted the errors to the Sun Studio 12 forums (after noticing that somebody else posted the exact same problems back in October, with no replies, which is discouraging), but was hoping one of the folks who listen in on the blog has some suggestions to try to fix this. Note that when using "dmake" (Solaris' native make, it seems) from the command-line, it works flawlessly. Help?

Update: Stepen Tilkov comments, "My apologies for pointing out the ridiculously obvious, but you *did* 'export' that PATH, didn't you?" Never apologize for pointing out the ridiculously obvious, Stephen, because not only is it the right answer half the time, the other half of the time, it's not obvious to the guy who needs help, either because he got lazy and forgot to check it (which I'm guilty of a lot), or because they genuinely didn't know it. In this case, though, I don't think that's the case; it appears to be there when I open a Terminal window. That said, though, I have only a vague idea of the scope and lifetime of environment variables under X (compared to within a terminal session), so there's a distinct possibility I'm not getting it set in the GNOME environment around me when I log in. Any good resources to figure that out?

Overall, the SDX environment looks pretty clean, though I can't say I'm comfortable with all the places that Solaris likes to install stuff; why, for example, do they want to put Sun Studio into /opt? It just seems strange to do so, though I guess it's no stranger than Mac OS X's /Applications directory.

Speaking of which.... From the "Why didn't I think of this before now?" Department: Given that the JDK source base is now completely unfettered and free, what holds up the Mac JDK 6 release? I can somewhat understand if Apple doesn't want to pursue the Mac (I said understand, not empathize or agree with, mind you), but why doesn't Sun take the necessary steps to bring a Mac port up to snuff? Or, alternatively, where is the Mac-toting Java-loving crowd? Granted, getting AWT and Swing up to snuff on the Mac might not be a trivial exercise, I'll grant you that, but a large part of the JDK beyond those elements could be ported over without too much difficulty, it would seem to me, particularly given that the JDK compiles with gcc on the Linux platform, and Mac OS has gcc as well. What am I missing here? (Oh, and if you thought of this before me, kudos-and-why-the-hell-didn't-you-say-something-earlier? It's a really good idea, it seems, at least in theory.)

Personally, I think Apple should get off its lazy ass and get Java6 done already. That, or authorize a third party to do it. Java5 is soooo 2006.