New Blog Site...

I've moved my blog to http://JoyOfExcellence.com/blog/

Playing with MVC

Headline: I hope Microsoft continues to pursue MVC (Model-View-Controller) for web applications.

Details: I've been quite busy the past year in my software development director role but I really need to work more on some of the websites I maintain. Most of them were deployed prior to 2005 and while still working fine, I don't find myself very motivated to go back and work on them. First I'd need to convert from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0 or above. I've usually found that a re-write is less painful!

So, this weekend I finally decided to work on this task and took a look at Microsoft's Model-View-Controller release. I'm only a few hours into it, but really like what I see. I hope this will also help me with URL issues I face from my old sites. It will be interesting to see how fast I can move with this approach. I don't have much time these days, but we'll see.

Likes:

More testable - I'm a big advocate of test driven development. While in truth I use a mix of unit tests and integration tests, I find that Test Driven really improves the overall quality

Simpler URLs - This has always been a problem and while I need to know more, it looks like that will give me a great deal more flexibility without all the overhead of previous solutions

CSS and Performance - The use of CSS (cascading style sheets) should result in better performance than my past sites.

Dislikes

CSS - I know, I just said I like it - or at least it's performance. But it feels so much like "black magic". I don't feel like a disciplined developer when I work with CSS - I feel like someone shooting in the dark as most of the rules are convoluted and lack any real logic.

Flux - I got the latest release (1.0) this weekend and most of the sites and templates out there don't seem to work. I'm sure this will settle down with time, but right now if feels like the time when Atlas was just changing to be Ajax.

Blog – Web Log?

Blog – most people will tell you it means, "Web Log"… I think it means "WE Begin to Lose Our Genius" (assuming we ever had any), so we resort to writing everything down. Not because we particularly think it will be interesting reading for others. But instead, as a means of remembering things. "What was that code snippet?" or "What was that cool web site?" – We don't remember. But we might remember, "I saw that when my office was in the other building, so it must have been between July 2005 and Nov 2005."

At least that's how you will find the information here. Basically information regarding things I want to remember. Quite frequently those involve interactions with others. In the interest of privacy, I will only list their name here if they sent me an e-mail giving me permission to list their names. I respect people's privacy.

Most information on this site has nothing to do with my role as an Enterprise Architect and IT Strategist for Halliburton. If there is any information I feel (or others notify me and feel) is company confidential then I will not post it here. It appears one cannot have multiple "Blogs" or set permissions on the Blog.