Leaning Into Windows : General

Entity Framework Petition

Kathleen — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:44:43 GMT

I feel I need to respond to the “Vote of No Confidence” on the Entity Framework.

I have little interest in petitions. They are by nature backwards looking. To get a group of people to sign onto something they have to either understand it or be driven by the charisma of the leaders. In this case, I assume the first. The contents of the petition must be stable and old enough that everyone has worked out the details. That’s the case with all the technical petitions I can think of, although admittedly that’s just a handful like the VB6 petition.

When it comes to the appalling scenario where we have at least 14 major categories of data access strategies in use in new projects today, we need the Microsoft teams to look forward and be creative in combining the best set of techniques – NOT pick one of the existing strategies and latch on to it because it came from the group that yelled the loudest.

Entity approaches are good because they better separate the business and data sides of our middle tiers. But they are also inherently difficult and inaccessible to most programmers. Entity Framework’s goal must be to bridge this gap. That means being extremely creative in picking its battles to reach toward the real world developer – not copy a strategy that is available to that developer today and fails (the combination of NHibernate and other tools used in a specific style of development). The failure is not because NHibernate is an Open Source tool. It’s not because people don’t know about it. If it worked in the majority of shops it would burn through our industry like wildfire. Why don’t you use them? Because they do not fit your development environment! This is not an easy problem that someone’s solved and Microsoft is looking the other way. It’s an incredibly hard problem – how do I know? I’ve been working on occasionally novel solutions to the problems for 20 years.

Entity Framework has issues. This is not news. It’s not even news to the Entity Framework team.

- EF is not a failure because it doesn’t fit TDD development

- EF is not a failure because business logic goes into partial classes

- EF is not a failure because it treats data as an important part of biz objects

- EF is not a failure because it accepts that most people do data first development

- EF is not a failure because lazy loading is hard – lazy loading can destroy performance

- EF is not a failure because its design tools are 1.0 level

- EF is not a failure because it has a poor strategy for merging into source control

All of these are potentially issues, but it’s critical, essential, I cannot yell this loud enough – Entity Frameworks must not be designed for the group that is best organized and screams the loudest. This already happened once with the disastrous IPOCO attempt that helped no one and wasted a lot of manpower that could have improved mapping and provided better metadata.

But then I’m sort of caught in a corner, because an important point of the petition is correct. Be cautions with EF. Do not jump into Entity Framework because of Microsoft marketing. It’s a tough platform that will get a little easier when the current spasm of books comes out. The niche is pretty narrow and if you step off the boards, the quicksand can be pretty deep. Treat it like what it is - an amazingly large and complex project that is being released as a 1.0 product. It’s an infant. The metadata and mapping still stink. Look at it as Microsoft’s current future direction, but remember how many current future directions we’ve had over the last 15 years (around ten) and remain skeptical.

Liking a User Interface

Kathleen — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:18:00 GMT

I think it’s important to differentiate between a likable user interface and a good one. A user interface can be likable and bad. It can be good and not likable.

I got a comment from my last post that said because someone liked the UI it was good. I disagree. A good UI supports you in all actions, at all phases of learning the program. Because it happens to fit the particular set of features you use now and the state in learning you are in now does not, ever, make an interface a good interface.

And I did not mean to imply that the Office 2007 user interface was entirely without merit. It attempts to address the fact we’d outgrown graphic toolbuttons, and toolbars as the sole organizational item. Those of us that could organize our toolbars pretty much liked them. Other users were often stuck with menus.

But menus have been the backbone of all of our learning programs and, as I understand it, screen readers. Bill McCarthy has a great post with an exercise to show you how deeply screwed up Office 2007 is to the Windows reader. He compares it to Notepad. If someone can compare to Office XP and post, I’ll be happy to link. Accessibility is important on two levels – it certainly retains its focused on people that can be enabled or disabled by specifics of the world around them.

If we are average in sight and dexterity, we expect computers to react to our own level of ability – we expect that the mouse adjust to our dexterity, the keyboard sized to our finger reach, and the font to be a readable size. If we are slightly off average, we compensate with larger fonts or a large trackball. If we fall outside the anticipated norms, we fall off a cliff, as shown in Bill’s exercise. Computers have the capacity to be a more level playing field- to extend enabling further.

And the second level at which accessibility is important is during the lifetime of people with average abilities. Almost all of us will have limited ability when we are young and old. Many of us will pass through stages of temporary limited ability. A few years ago when my arm got wrecked I had my mom (a programmer in her own right) reformat my code. I could write the code, but I couldn’t quite handle arrangng the declarations with one parameter per line the way I wanted to deliver.

More attention needs to be paid to making computers physically easier to use. It will also save some people from life changing RSI injuries.

Which was one point of the post.

The other was that much as the Office 2007 user interface sucks, I do not think it is beyond redemption.

- Add back the menus as an option and the default appearance when you start

- Raise the logo to a button and have a timed “look here” toolbar/arrow (although I’d really prefer to see those things in a ribbon page)

- Have the Alt popups also include short cut keys (Ctl-I, Ctl-B) so these are discoverable

- Fix accessibility, which might be a fully separate user interface for screen readers

- Allow the font on the ribbon to be changed

- Have the ribbon bar learn my habits. Do not collapse Word Count which I use daily.

- Re-prioritize the Home ribbon page so the ugly and rarely useful styles take up ½ the screen width and Cut/Copy, and all the very common formatting items remain small icons

- Allow me to promote commonly used items to the ribbon. I use Paste/Special/Unformatted all the time and its buried

- Rethink the ribbon in light of the wasted space on each side of the document on a standard monitor. Pull things like styles back into sidebars. Use this space with abandon. Consider allowing me to move ribbon pages there, or at the very least create a magnificently large and beautiful set of shortcuts.

- Fix the Quick Access toolbar. It’s a good idea gone bad. It’s as far as you can get onscreen from where I’m usually typing, there are not displayed shortcuts, and it uses small icons. And absolute ton of work could be done here.

And those are the thoughts of someone not a professional UI person. If the Ribbon solved accessibility, used space effectively, morphed automatically to how I work, it does have potential.

But right now, it sucks.

The Elephant in the Room

Kathleen — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:20:57 GMT

I have a hundred (ok dozen) finished not quite ready blog posts. Except it’s hard to finish them because I don’t particularly like saying hard things. Negative things. Some of which will be brutal to people I have enormous respect for and consider friends.

I’ll get back to the technical things. It’s just the code gen stuff has been evolving at a background level in real projects and I need to work out verbalizing the core, the best practices of the details. And, my column takes up some of my Tips and Tricks type stuff.

This is one of a series of passion posts – posts about how deeply screwed up our industry is becoming because we are tied to Microsoft and they are becoming rather screwed up.

Let me start with someone I don’t know, that way it’s easier for me.

Redmond Developer published a cover story regarding Steven Sinofsky replacing Jim Allchin as head of the Windows team. That’s cool. Let Jim move on to whatever pleases him. Maybe he’ll have time for lunch as he’s second on my list of people I’d like to meet (and no, neither Gates nor Ballmer is first).

The entire article was about Sinofsky “holding his cards close” - meaning we don’t know what’s coming in Windows 7. First, I agree completely with the article. We should rise in revolt at any attempt to remove transparency from the Microsoft development cycle.

Microsoft wishes to believe it is just a company making money. It is not. Perceptions to that affect are bad for us and bad for Microsoft stockholders. Microsoft’s job is not to create great new products. Its job is to lead an ecosystem with great new products. Out here, that’s not a subtle difference. Microsoft decisions affect trillions of dollars in investment and assets for companies around the world. They have an absolute obligation to be transparent and if they do not continue to lead through transparency – which is the only way to ride the tornado they created – we must call the bluff that we have no options. We are certainly not there now, but we as the consumers must not bow down to the vision that we have no choices. As individuals today, we may have little choice. But as an industry, we can create choice.

It is imperative that Microsoft lead by transparency.

But the article ignores the elephant in the room. Sinofsky came from Office – unless my timeline is warped – he brought you Office 2007. Let me choose the nicest words possible: Office 2007 is an abomination. Do not believe for one second that this was an attempt to make your life easier. Do not believe that any honest usability lab could have been shown this UI to be useful to you. And for reference I use it and have for over a year, so this is not a comment on the initial shock factor. Nor will I waste your time with the stupidities in the interface. Let’s jump to why.

It was an attempt to protect Office - at your expense. Open Office is pretty damn good. It’s run on most of the computers in my home. We exchange documents with Office on a regular basis. There is no true force keeping people on Office for the vast majority of document and spreadsheet creation. Microsoft knows this. So it created a user interface that it believes it can protect. If you don’t believe me, look at what you have to sign to use the interface.

Ha! Let’s put the features you’re guaranteed to use every day under a logo that does not look like a button. Mom becomes the geek of her retirement community whispering that secret. Let’s backtrack on accessibility – don’t let them change font size. Let’s have the only discoverable way to make italics be Alt-H, Alt-2. OK, we’ll leave Ctl-I but to discover it (previously in the menu caption) make them type Alt-F, Alt-I (you can’t tell if that’s a 1 or the cap letter I on screen either), six down arrows, enter, Alt-t, one down arrow (assuming you know which tab Italics is on), tab, two down arrows. (Think you’ll never have a stroke or skiing accident?) Oh, and does any of this work right to left yet? Full stop. I could go blog post after blog post on what’s wrong with the Office UI. This UI was created to be different and protectable, not better for you.

The core issue is that Microsoft put the person in charge of the most extreme shift to controlling the ecosystem since Lotus and AmTrak fought over the sliding bar interface (if you don’t get that joke, never mind). Protection of a grossly overpriced Office superceded the good of the ecosystem. And the person in charge of that mess is now running Windows. You worried? Add in that he is being allowed to reverse a companywide shift to transparency apparently started by Ballmer himself eight years ago.

The shift to transparency is couched in the Karl Rovian phrase “translucency” meaning secrecy.

Transparency means “my people will not be afraid to talk to your people.” I’ve only seen two fallouts from transparency: Insider’s groups whine a little about not having much warning ahead of the public (It is beautifully short, often at zero) and people being disappointed when Microsoft backtracked, particularly on Vista, previously known as Longhorn.

Hey, I was there. I drove through fire to get to the Longhorn PDC and ice to get home. Microsoft got explicit feedback (from me and many others) that it was too grandiose a plan “even if you could do it, which you can’t, we can’t uptake it.” The shrinking of Longhorn was the right thing to do and the stupid thing was that they said they could do it all. You don’t fix that by removing transparency. In fact the transparency around Longhorn was important - there was a lot of feedback regarding which features had marginal value like the whole let’s do the file system in SQL so we can organize our photographs stuff.

Translucency means “I will control what you know.” It means things aren’t public and there isn’t a route for you to give feedback until a beta stage – in case you haven’t noticed, betas happen at feature complete meaning your input is explicitly excluded in terms of shaping the product. It means people can’t talk. And, it is not the solution for the issues given. Just look at Charlie Calvert or Paul Vick’s blog. They don’t say “This is what we’re going to do.” They say “this is what we’re thinking about.” It’s transparency with honesty and realism. And it gives you an opportunity to shape the product in public discussions. It wasn’t transparency that led to Vista disappointment; it was a lack of honest assessment of reality.

This is getting long, but I want to answer the 89 people that have already started writing comments that Microsoft is a company and is in the business to make money. That is totally true. But, as the keeper of the ecosystem, they make money by managing the ecosystem to the ecosystem’s advantage. They cannot help but make money if the Microsoft ecosystem is healthy. They will wither as a natural result if the ecosystem is damaged, no matter how they contrive to exploit the dying ecosystem. It cannot be any other way. Trying to protect the ridiculous price of Office with a unique but terrible UI metaphor to perpetuate the myth that people must use Office is a disservice to shareholders. Hiding the future of Windows 7 prohibits us giving the feedback. Here it is: the most important thing in Windows 7 is to get Vista right: fix the driver issues for legacy hardware, improve performance, fix a few annoying bugs like that stupid toast the details layout, keep up the improvements in security. Hmm. That’s about it. Market it showing off the cool features its already has and only throw in new things that work really well.

The most valuable thing Microsoft could do for its future position and the ecosystem would be a commitment that Vista will be compatible with all existing hardware and to write the drivers themselves if necessary. Twenty five years ago, in the midst of the Xerox PC debacle, a tiny little company in Houston took on IBM by promising if software didn’t run on its OS, they’d fix it. Guess who? That’s a powerful promise. If Microsoft can’t make that promise on drivers, they screwed up and need to fix it in Windows 7.

Either that or they need to plan a decade long strategy for uptake, including ongoing availability and upgrades to XP.

If the Windows team was transparent, showing us flashy features, our answer would be “for god’s sake, just make Vista work well”.

This is your ecosystem. Don’t stick your head in the sand. Pay attention to what’s going on. Talk about it. Scream about it.

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PS. I don't know how widely used the "elephant in the room" metaphor is. It means we have something so big we can't be unaware of it, but at the same time, we're avoiding talking about it.

Comments Fixed

Kathleen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:41:00 GMT

For someone that writes software for a living, I have a remarkably hard time using it. I would not have expected "Filter: Ignore" to display no new comments. Ignoring a filter would be more like showing everything.

Happily I have friends that are as patient as I am confused. Thanks to Bill McCarthy and Susan Bradley (who reset my password which was lost in the bowels of my system and I wanted to switch to Live Writer) my blog is slightly more functional.

My apologies to the folks that wrote comments that I seemingly ignored for the last several weeks. They should be fixed, and please let me know if you have difficulties.

I'm still approving anonymous comments so that will sometimes take a while. Non-anonymous comments go live immediately. Unless I start getting spammed too badly.

Minnesota VSTS User Group - Code Generation in 2008

Kathleen — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:57:00 GMT

I'm stepping out of my comfy sandbox again. Not only am I going to Minnesota in February, but I'm also talking to a VSTS user group - to remember that it's not just about code.

You can get more information here.

I am really looking forward to this talk and sharing perspectives with people that I'm hoping connect on some of the process questions about code generation. While I dropped the ball on updating the abstract, this talk won't just be templating techniques - I'll spend a good bit of time on the research I've been doing moving to an activity metaphor for code generation - raising above the simple process declarations. This is very fun stuff and I'm excited to find a group interested in sharing it. If you're in the area, please come by.

DNR TV on .NET 3.5 Languages - Part 1 Posted

Kathleen — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Check out .NET Rocks TV this week for the first of two parts on .NET 3.5 languages - that's right C# 3.0 and VB 9 together. It makes sense since most features cross over, and where they don't you'll want a handle on the differences.

.NET Rocks

Kathleen — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:18:00 GMT

I’ll be taping .NET Rocks today with Richard and Carl. The show is due to be posted on January 3.

Los Angeles Masters Series - Workflow on Dec. 1

Kathleen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:11:00 GMT

I’ll also be doing an all day “Introduction to Windows Workflow” talk on Saturday for the Los Angeles .NET Developers Group . If you’re in the area, or can get a great weekend flight rate in, it’s a fabulous deal. I call it “Introduction” because there’s still so much we’re all learning about workflow. But this will be much more than a little drag drop. I’ll be specifically focusing on architecture guidelines that I want people to work with from their very first workflows. I’ll be looking at Why as much as How. I’m also available to give workflow sessions in your organization if you can’t make it to LA. The link for the LA event is http://www.ladotnet.org/default.asp and I don’t think it is sold out yet.

I’ll be at DevTeach this week. If you’re there, drop by and say Hi! Conferences each have distinct personalities. DevConnections was intense in Las Vegas early this month and I know I walked right past at least one friend without seeing them because my brain was elsewhere. I tend to push myself hardest at DevConnections. DevTeach and SDC (Amseterdam) are much more relaxed for me and I’m looking forward to a great week. I’m talking on three subjects I enjoy – WPF controls, WF activities, and What’s New in C#. I didn’t manage to get a single conference to let me do both C# and VB new stuff this fall, but I did it at two conferences. I believe in being bilingual.

Next week I’m in Roanoke and then California Maryland. If you can make those user groups, it will be great to see you. That’s my party down ending to an insane quarter. The last of 27 speeches in 90 days. I’ll spend that weekend hanging with some old friends’ labs near Charlottesville and meeting their nearly grown kids for the first time. A totally awesome ending to what’s been a great quarter. I’ve got to be the luckiest person on earth.

DevConnections Orlando

Kathleen — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:28:00 GMT

I’m happy to be back at DevConnections in Orlando April 20-23^rd. We’ll be at the Marriott again which is big enough to hold the expanding show.

I’ll post soon as to what I’ll be talking about, but I expect to expand on the topics popular in Las Vegas and important to you – Workflow, WPF, and data architecture. I know I'll be talking about customizing Entity Framework in the Data Access track.

Stay tuned for the schedule to be posted and start twisting your boss's arm.

Vista Death Watch Overstated

Kathleen — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:16:00 GMT

I think it’s awesome that John Dvorak is still writing for PC Magazine. The world has spun around many times and this industry looks almost nothing like it did when we all started in the 1980’s. One of the things I love about Dvorak’s voice through the years is that he’s not afraid to stick his neck out and be wrong. He did that in his recent editorial on Vista.

Vista, good and bad, is not about marketing and only slightly about price point. You simply don’t need to market and operating system if PC manufacturers are doing it for you. Microsoft did blow the pricing because Microsoft and the ecology need Vista more than you need to move. The pricing is dangerous in the long run, but not terribly relevant in the short term.

The problem with Vista is that the reason you want it on your desktop is technical subtleties, not flash. John says “all the cool and promised features of the original vision of Longhorn”. That implies that a fundamentally better security model isn’t a cool feature. I was in the room when Longhorn was announced at PDC, and it might shock people to learn that people like me were telling our contacts at Microsoft that they were crazy in thinking developers could uptake that many new features in less than a decade. Four years in, we didn’t exaggerate by more than a year or two. The Longhorn vision needs to come in bits and pieces.

What Vista needed most is exactly what Vista has: a new security model and baked in 3D graphics.

I moved to Vista against my will because I bought a new laptop in the timeframe where PC manufacturers were not offering XP. I have fallen in love with the productivity features of the operating system. Real productivity features are rarely flashy. The new Windows Explorer has two features worth the price of admission. I can drag things on and off the “Favorite Links” pane to have a real time view of my focus. The ability to drop down higher level folders to easily reach sibling folders also saves a handful of seconds dozens of times every day.

The downside of Vista is also technical. The real elephant in the room is not price, it’s drivers. I have a perfectly good HP LaserJet 6L which last I heard did not have Vista drivers. I already struggle because it doesn’t have a USB port and laser printers are finally cheap, so this hit my “never waste” nerve far more than my actual pocket book. Microsoft’s belief that hardware manufacturers would write Vista drivers for old equipment was naïve. Microsoft should have provided an independent driver upgrade tool – and if that was not possible, create even low-performing drivers to keep the plethora of accessories functioning and out of landfills.

I advise family members on software and often buy it for them. My Dad’s on Vista. He hates it, but it’s where he belongs so he can play more safely on the Internet. My Mom’s on Vista and doesn’t mind because she upgraded from Windows 95 (no joke). She’s her retirement communities computer expert now because she knows tricks like how to go back up a directory in Vista’s file explorer and how to use that text box in the Start Menu. My brother’s brand new box is XP because he has more invested in peripherals than the new laptop (two expensive keyboards, etc). My niece is an artist and Vista is gentler and less clunky. An ex stripped my niece’s previous box of MS software and loaded Ubuntu. My son’s are also both on Linux. Their choice but it’s good that they have to pay attention to their OS.

In the short run, the problem is technical features never win without flash. That’s our problem. In the long run, Microsoft chasing Google is stupid. John’s correct that they sell software and they should still be worried about Linux. The reason more people aren’t on Linux is that they are afraid of it. Remove the fear and Linux is a perfectly adequate operating system – already having some of the core security features Vista added.

Welcome

Kathleen — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:46:00 GMT

I'm back blogging. Too much to say, too much to do...

Bill says that Susan scares all the spam away. Spam killed my previous blog, and I can't see blogging if you all can't talk back.

Hopefully it will be a fun ride