Greg Blogging On .NET

Rant on HD-DVD losing the format war

As many of you know I am a fan of the Xbox 360, Media Center, etc. and have given presentations combining the two technologies in the past. I am an avid media geek, and the HD-DVD format wars has been near and dear to me. I felt I needed an outlet to express my thoughts and concerns on the matter, so here I go.

By now most of you following the "Format wars" (Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD) have heard that HD DVD has lost.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/19/official-HD-DVD-dead-and-buried-format-war-is-over/

I personally was hoping HD DVD would be the "winner", or at least continue to be relevant as a format.  Unfortunately, many retailers (Best Buy, Wal-mart, etc) have announced that they will no longer sell HD DVD.  In addition, Toshiba just announced they are going to cut their losses on HD DVD and move on to the next thing. 

On the surface, one might think "yay, this is great news! the format war is over!" and they'd be right in a certain sense. I just wish I would not have been an early adopter of the HD DVD- I got the drive for Christmas this year, and not 2 weeks later there was the announcement from Warner Brothers that they were defecting from the HD DVD format and going Blu-Ray exclusive.  I believe that was the turning point for the format wars.

However, being a big fan of Microsoft technology, and particularly the Xbox 360, I am very disappointed by MSFT's response.  Maybe they are too busy thinking about a forced takeover of Yahoo right now :) But I really don't think Microsoft yet realizes what it means. They are sticking to the mantra that "games sell consoles, not high definition discs":

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/business/news/e3i759fab371cec787336690de1202691ab

http://www.macworld.com/article/132151/2008/02/xbox360.html

Of course there is some truth to that, but how do you explain PS3 sales shooting through the roof? Could the 60% increase in sales at Amazon be related, or is this just coincidence? Maybe PS3 all the sudden was releasing some great games?  A halo 3 equivalent perhaps? I may be off base here, but I am guessing the increase in sales may have at least SOMETHING to do with the recent HD-DVD announcement.

http://news.punchjump.com/article.php?id=5584

When I read the Toshiba press release about canning HD DVD, the first thing that entered my mind was "now I need to buy a Blu-Ray player". I am an early adopter. I want to enjoy HD content on my HDTV's.  I will never buy another "standard" DVD knowing that things are coming out on in the HD format. Why should I? There is such a drastic difference.   The only logical thing for me to do is buy a Blu-Ray player.  And if I buy one, what are my choices?

Anyone following Blu-Ray players will know that the PS3 is one of the few (if not only) players that is "future proof". This is due to the ever changing Blu-Ray standard. People who early-adopted non-PS3 players supported only the earlier "versions" (aka profiles) of Blu-Ray, and are now stuck with paper weights (welcome to the club!).

http://www.about-electronics.eu/2008/01/21/ps3-only-future-proof-blu-ray-player/

So... again what are my choices?  If I am smart, my ONLY current choice is a PS3 if I want to protect my investment. This is where Microsoft is not seeing clearly.  The PS3 is a Trojan horse to get Blu-Ray into the home, and as a result, a way to get game consoles in the home. If I buy a PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, I'm also going to be tempted to buy some PS3 games.  What does this ultimately mean for the console wars?  It means that high definition discs DO sell consoles.

If Microsoft wants to maintain the lead in the console market, I think they are going to have to take some drastic measures, and VERY soon. First of all, it may not be enough just to announce a new add-on device. By the time Microsoft comes to market, PS3's will have gained significant ground and the argument of "we have the best games" may not hold as much water.  Microsoft is probably going to need to offer incentive.  Personally I'd like to see a free Blu-Ray drive for anyone who can prove they purchased an HD-DVD drive.  That is about the only thing that would prevent me from buying a PS3 at this point. And the drive would need to be rolled out by the time all the HD-DVD discs are liquidated (I'm guessing a 2-3 months time frame).

I hear a lot of talk about Microsoft hoping to make digital distribution the next big thing, and to compete against the physical formats.  I download a lot of videos through Xbox Live, but it doesn't compare to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.  There are two big reasons why: the download is compressed video, and I can't "keep it". It appeals to a different market. When I download something, it's because I needed a quick fix and didn't want to go to the video store.  I never really own a download, and it can't sit on my shelf. Once I download it, I have a window of which I can watch it.  This really doesn't work out well for my family- especially my kids. They like to watch the same thing over and over again for months at a time. I'm certainly not going to pay a rental price each time I want to re-download the same video. Ok, so maybe Microsoft could let me "buy" the download. Not a good option either, because now I am going to have to over pay for a hard drive to keep all my videos on, with no way of archiving them off.   In order for downloads to work, they need to be full-fidelity and archiveable without DRM hassles- I don't see that happening any time soon.

Hopefully someone is listening, or at the very least Microsoft comes up with a better strategy. If not, prepare to watch market share erode. 

One other final comment that makes me feel a little better abut my investment in the HD-DVD add-on- it's always good to end on a positive note. Toshiba seemed to indicate it is going to review support for HD-DVD drives in notebook PC's.  It sounds like the format MAY not go entirely the way of the dodo bird, at least for those of us wanting to use it on PC's.  For those of you not aware, it is entirely possible to burn an HD-DVD today with a traditional (red-laser) DVD burner and watch it on any HD-DVD player. I've been doing that with my home video collection. There are software packages out there (such as Ulead Media Studio 11) that will let you burn these DVD's- giving you about 30-45 minutes of content in high def (playable only in an HD-DVD player).  I'm a little nervous about continuing to burn in this format- what happens when my player is done for? How will I replace it?  However, if Toshiba commits to keeping the PC players alive that may not be a concern and it could still be an area for growth.

Last night's NWNUG meeting

I was pleased with the format of last night's user group meeting. We had a smallish crowd, but considering the weather and that we had rescheduled the meeting it wasn't too shabby. We even had at least one person drive a good distance to make the meeting- glad you made it out Michael!

I spoke on Real World Agile development, and Jason presented on some new features of SQL 2008.  My goal was to make my portion of the presentation interactive.  My temptation is to do "normal presenter mode", but fortunately about half way through the presentation I realized it was me doing most of the talking.  So I probed the group and we had some pretty good interaction.   The majority of the group had at least heard of agile (though a few had not), but only a few had actually used it.  I found that kind of interesting.  If I end up taking this presentation on the road I plan on conducting a little more market research to determine what other dev teams are using, and why.  Anyway, the agile approach that I reviewed was based on my own personal experiences at several clients and former employers- it is most closely aligned with "Scrum". I basically walked through the agile process, how I came to use it, and the benefits of it. 

I've learned that there are a lot of nay-sayers to agile projects, especially if you use the term "agile" in front of someone used to waterfall, and especially people who are PMP certified. In past places I've worked, I hear things like "agile = chaos" ... "cowboy coding" ... "no planning".  In some cases they are right- if agile is not implemented properly, or you have too junior of people on the team, etc. you can get into some sticky situations.  I've learned to avoid some of the negative connotation by speaking about agile using other descriptions, like "Sprint Cycles" or "Quick Hits".  These terms seem a little more business friendly, and PMP's eventually understand that the process is still structured and planned, it's just set up to do more frequent releases.

If you think your user group or event might be interested in a real world agile talk, please let me know!

Jason's talk was also really great- he showcased some awesome new features of SQL 2008. I was particularly interested in the intellisense available in the query window- that will certainly save when typing queries, functions, etc.  Another cool feature that stuck out was user defined table types. You will now be able to pass a table as a parameter into stored procedure. This will save you from having to do multiple inserts / updates / etc.  I can remember in the past trying to pass in delimited strings with a limit of 4000, which was a real pain. Or, inserting a bunch of stuff into a temp table and running a proc against that table.  Jason also showed us some the new UPSERT functionality- which is also really slick.  You can very easily synchronize your table up with a data feed.  Last but not least was the new spatial functionality of SQL Server.  Since I am geocacher, I thought this one was also interesting, though I zoned out a little toward the end when he started talking about trig. :)

Come on out... NWNUG meeting tonight

If you can make it, please come out to the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting-

http://www.nwnug.com

Jason Follas and I will be tag-teaming it up and presenting. Jason is talking about new things in SQL Server 2008 that he found interesting from the developer perspective. I am going to be presenting on Real World Agile development.  I'm sure it will be fun! We're playing around with the user group session format and going for something a little more interactive- this will be a good chance to test it out.

Codemash continued

Day 1 of codemash was stellar and here are a few more highlights. 

- Dustin Campbell's F# talk.  It was at the end of the day, and probably my favorite session so far. F# is not a brand new topic, but it has been getting a lot of attention lately because it is a functional programming language, and things are just going that way (see my previous entry).  Dustin presented what could have been a very esoteric, academic talk and boiled it down to something very understandable and pragmatic.  I heard many other positive comments on the presentation- even Scott Hanselmen was in attendance, and rumor has it there may be a podcast coming soon :)

- Meeting with others in the community and getting pumped up.  It was great to see so many familiar faces, and meet several new ones. It seems like there is some great momentum being generated here at codemash to keep the community going and growing.  I'm also glad to "fresh blood" in the user group community.  Looking forward to growing NWNUG this year with Jason Follas. Got a few speakers lined up for the UG as well. 

- Quick Solutions set up Rockband for Xbox.  Kudos to them for having the best booth by far! I got to play the game a few times and even got to jam with Scott Hanselmen and some other .NET legends (not even realizing who I was playing with). I think we played the "Wheezer" song at least 5 times (apparently the only one he knew?). It was a ton of fun. I think I'm going to have to get that game :)

- Brian Prince's Agile talk.  I really enjoyed sitting through this and he gave me a few good ideas for fine tuning some of the agile processes tha twe are implementing with clients.  I like his suggestion of trying to implement one new process element a time, getting in the habit of doing that process, and rinse /repeat until you are satisfied.

 - Kalahari water park.  I skipped out on the morning key note and was the first one in the water park. It was a TON of fun. I was here last year, and they have basically doubled in size.  I went down this new water slide that is very similar in concept to a toilet bowl.  You go down the slide and spin around in a big bowl area for a bit, and then drop about 4 feet into a pool.  It was fantastic and very refreshing.  Afterwards I spent a little time in the hot tub and went to a few sessions.

At this point there are a few sessions left in the day. I am going to hit up a few, and then its off to the raffle. I'm hoping to win something again this year (won the Xbox 360 last time!). 

CodeMash 2008... in full force

I arrived at Kalahari, in Sandusky, OH Weds night (Jan 9th) for CodeMash 2008.  I was pretty amazed to see all the attendees for the pre-conference that went from 7-9.  We've got quite a crowd this year- close to 350 from what I've heard. 

This morning kicked off with Neal Ford- entitled "Software Engineering & Polyglot Programming".  Neal did a great job and there seemed to be a lot of energy in the crowd.  My interest was piqued when mentioned multi-processor programming, and how functional languages (such as F#) will really help developers avoid some of the difficulties of traditional OO languages.  The majority of the time he spent talking about Java, but there were a lot of parallels for the C# crowd.

Another highlight in the talk was the push for moving to new functional languages.  Something that has always bothered me about functional languages (ruby, groovy, etc) is that there isn't just a whole lot of enterprise rollout right now.  Nealspecifically addressed this and compared it to building bridges at the turn of the century.  Many nay-sayers genereated a lot of FUD about reinforced concrete bridges- but today that is how bridges are built.  The best way to introduce new technology and combat the nay-sayers, similar to bridge building, is to test and show.  The math may not prove it out, but the testing will- and testing is a key component to building any kind of software. Kudos to Neal for presenting this thought process. I think it was a great way to kick of CodeMash- there are a variety of "new" dynamic and functional programming languages that will be presented. I'm looking forward to digging in to a few of them after the conference. 

Heartland Area User Group Summit Event

I had the opportunity this past Friday of attending the Heartland Area User Group Summit.  It was great to get to see some fellow UG leaders, MVP's, and friends- a few of whom I haven't seen since Codemash this past January! <tangent>Speaking of Codemash, don't forget to register. It is going to be an AWESOME event and you can't beat the price.  Though I didn't submit an abstract this year, we may try and do some informal things in the vendor area (my new Employer, Perficient, will have a booth).  Please stop by and say hello if you are planning on attending! </tangent> So back to the UG summit.. It was great- Jason Follas and I drove up together, and I got to catch up with Brian Prince, Darrel Hawley, John Hopkins, Josh Holmes, Bill Wagner, Martin Shoemaker, Jay Wren and others (sorry if I forgot to mention you).  Also got to meet some new faces- and it's good to see the caliber of people stepping up to the plate to help make community a success. I think this year will be very exciting- we as a community have some cool stuff planned.  I think events like Day of .NET, CodeMash, etc. are really helping the community and buzz around what we are so passionate about- developing with Microsoft technology. 

Back in the saddle...

It's been quite a while since I've made the time to blog, and for that I apologize!  I've been quite busy this year- CodeMash in January, on the road a lot, had a child in April, and made a career change in Oct. Boy does time fly!

So what have I been up to...  During most of 2007, I spent a lot of time internally managing many of the software development projects, including a pilot implementation of MOSS (SharePoint) and projects from an SOA proof of concept to implementing BI.  In October I decided it was finally time to move on (after 5 1/2 years) and started in a new role as a technical architect and engagement manager with Perficient.  I am very happy with this move, and especially excited to be working with a fellow MVP, co-user group leader and friend- Jason Follas. 

Community wise, I just presented at the last Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting on the topic of "Developing with Windows XNA for the Xbox 360".  It was more of a high-level presentation that covered many of the basics. I walked through a great example called "Cops and Robbers", created by George Clingerman, an XNA MVP. George did a great job illustrating good design and a straight forward approach to development using XNA.  You can check it out by going to his site- http://www.xnadevelopment.com/tutorials/copsandrobbers/copsandrobbers.shtml .  Additionally, the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group (which I founded and co-lead with Jason) is growing and we are planning on taking things to the next level in 2008. 

Northwest Ohio .NET User Group (2/20 meeting) summary

We had a great meeting at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group last night. I was pleasently surprised by a larger-than-expected crowd.  We had our "launch event" so I'm guessing some of the extras were due to that.  Our launch event consisted of me presenting a quick session on IIS 7 and its virtues.  Looking forward to using IIS 7- lots of good benefits and Vista allows users to get ready for deploying web apps on Longhorn Server.  I jokingly mentioned that since IIS 7 on vista no longer has the 10 connections limitations that developers could run IIs 7 apps in production. I really was kidding- please don't run apps in production from Vista!! Development only! :)   In all seriousness, the new management console, web.config options for web site configuration, ease of extensibility and creating custom ISAPI filters is way cool.  I particularly liked the demo that came on the launch presentation CD that showed how to automagically append copyright notices to every image that came through the pipeline with a few lines of C# code.

We also had Ken Kutz and Reuben Ahmed speak on code generation and agile development methodologies.  They've done some really cool stuff with DotNetNuke. Simply create a database schema, and point the code generator tool at it.  It will generate a DNN friendly module that can be plugged right in. On a related note, Jason Follas mentioned a similar tool called CodeSmith.  I have heard of it but never used it, but just downloaded it and will be playing around with it.  Jason says he uses it regularly for developing the data tiers. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

ASP.NET Ajax

In case you haven't heard yet, ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 has been released! This is fully supported by Microsoft.  It's great to see the culmination of effort by the ASP.NET team. 

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/01/23/asp-net-ajax-1-0-released.aspx

The great news about ASP.NET Ajax library is that it caters to "both" kinds of developers- Client Centric, as well as Server Centric.

Client centric developers can very easily plug in to the javascript library.  For those of you who have been writing Javascript and remember technologies like remote scripting, the web service behavior, etc. you can now tap into a very powerful library that is cross browser compatible and abstracts usage of making remote rpc calls.

The great news for traditional ASP.NET developers, as well as those who despise writing Javascript, is that EVERYONE can now easily harness the power of rich client web applications. The ASP.NET team has really made it painless to add this type of functionality. If you want to be able to do cool things like automatically update a portion of a web browser without visibly posting back the entire page, you can easily add ASP.NET Ajax to your EXISTING web application with the UpdatePanel control.    That is the great news about this- you're not re-writing your application to implement Ajax. In addition, the ASP.NET control toolkit (http://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit/) integrates with the ASP.NET Ajax Library and provides server centric developers with some great out of the box controls, from drop down extenders (pick a state, get back a list of cities from a web services w/o having to preload everything) to adding cool DHTML code (such as draggable panels and animations).    It's shared source and hosted on CodePlex.

Hope you enjoy this release. Now go and make your apps ajax'd!! 

Codemash Summary

Codemash was a really great conference.  Kudos to all the planners- you guys did an awesome job. It totally blew my expectations away!   

I'd say the highlight today was hearing Scott Guthrie. He is by far one of my favorite presenters (I LOVE his tips and tricks sessions) and delivered a great keynote. It was more "down in the weeds" with the new LINQ stuff, which I think as Dustin says, will be the next "darling of .NET". I thought it was very applicable and I'm sure developers from other backgrounds found it interesting.  I was a little bummed I couldn't make his talk on ASP.NET Ajax Tips and Tricks, but I happened to be presenting at the same time on Intro to Ajax.  I was actually pleasantly surprised there was a showing in my session- it was more geared on the abstract/ conceptual and I think that helped.

Oh, and things kept getting better as the day went on! After all the sessions were over, everyone was in a hurry to fill out the codemash conference eval. We filled up the Indigo room and the planners roled out the "swag waggon". It was quite impressive.  I won a hard cover book entitled "Refactoring Databases- Evolutionary Database Design" by Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage.  Scott was speaking at the conference, and I got to eat breakfast with him on the first day. I know this one will be a great addition to the library.  And it gets better! I put my name in the box at the Microsoft booth... And sure enough, Josh Holmes called my name for the Xbox 360!  The one with the hard drive, at that!  Two more of the five individuals that went from my company also won great prizes, including an IPod and a portable DVD player.

What a great way to end the week. 

Apparently...

In order for blog entries to count towards Josh Holmes head shaving, you must be linked to Technocrati. Be sure to register!

Codemash Day 1- Up and Running

Codemash officially started today.  I must say I have been very impressed by just about everything so far.  The venue (Kalahari) is excellent.  Jason Follas, a good friend of mine (and president of NWNUG) said it's like being on the west coast in terms of the facility.  I would have to agree!  I'd been to Kalahari some time ago but never got a chance to go in the conference area.   Great choice, codemash organizers!

We kicked off today with a keynote by Neal Ford.  The conference room was chocked full, and I think everyone that attended got something out of it.  I particularly enjoyed the DSL (Domain Specific Language) stuff he was talking about, and comparing it to what we do day-to-day with various programming languages. I must say the "spirit" here at codemash is unique and this talk kind of typified it.  Typically I go to  a conference where it is platform specific- which is nice, but sometimes it seems like I am hearing the same thing all the time.  Here, many of the attendees and presenters are from all kinds of backgrounds. So far I've made it a point to go to sessions that are language/platform neutral.  I went to a turbogears presentation, briefly hopped in on a MySql talk, and even picked up on some python along the way.  It's amazing to see the similarities in concepts, and that we are all solving problems in similar (and sometimes different) ways.  I think it is a great learning process.  I had a conversation with someone about technology who was more of an open source advocate, and didn't even realize it until about 30 minutes after we started talking about the virtues of Ajax.

So anyway... Codemash is great, and I really hope the community can continue great conferences like this. Hopefully the word will get out and we'll be able to do this again soon.

Oh, and BTW, if you are at codemash and reading this, be sure to blog your own entry. Apparently, Josh Holmes (Microsoft DPE) will be shaving his head if we get enough blogs!  Now if that isn't motivation....