Rants

EntityDB: The next great Microsoft tool (if they would just make it)

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:38:00 GMT

Reading in the Industry blogs, official samples and documentation provided with MS SQL Server 2005+, Visual Studio 2008 and Linq to Sql and the Entity Framework, you will get the impression that we have a tremendous ability to efficiently decipher how to interact with a Database. Additionally, Industry leaders have led us down a path of Code Generators, Designers and the separation of UI Design from functional Object code; read "Astoria" and/or "MVC" here...

Didn't CASE do this sort of thing for us years ago? Didn't it also fail? There is huge amount of traffic about the topic of "Falling down when you hit a threshold" and insistence that all things should be built ultra-scalable. OK, that's great if you love to write plumbing. I for one, don't. What if that could be done for you, with the most efficient options always at your disposal; of course with the opportunity to tweak and extend to meet a specific need.

While there are many great arguments to be had over what is exactly ultra-efficient and those who think they have a better method must be able to override and extend the selected generation of code that is offered by not only being able to write that code, but also to inject it into the Generated Code (or at the least allowed to edit the templates) produced by Visual Studio.

If you don't already know why this is so important, we need to first look at the massive shift in Business Software Development and where we are going to be running most business applications. We used to run all our apps on our own hardware, inside our own network and everything was under our tight control. While this model still applies to much corporate development, I believe it will become less and less used as a cost effective alternative to a HOSTED solution. Pricing of hosted solutions have plummeted in recent years, in fact I am almost willing to bet that the cost of electricity alone using hardware just a few years old would cover the cost of a hosted solution. And what happens when I DO need to scale, How do I add 20 servers to the Web Farm overnight? Staffing requirements and maintenance of hardware start to become totally offset when we look at this model. I CANNOT BUILD A SERVER CHEAPER THAN I CAN HOST ONE! That is the real bottom line.

I would wager that MOST applications would run just fine on a hosted solution with one machine doing all the work, at least in the beginning, or at least with a hoster that gives you Web on one machine and your DB on another. Are we talking about every solution here? No, but I think we are talking about a gigantic sector of the market that is currently all but ignored by the provided tools we have at our disposal.

Don't get me wrong here, we have GREAT tools available and more coming, do they target what is really needed?

First lets look at the three new primary tools given to us by Microsoft. WCF, Linq to Sql and the Entity Framework. WCF provides a great pipeline to pass data between our UI, Business Objects and Database, but it just plumbing. Linq to Sql and EF provide a great way to interact with a Database IF and ONLY If you have a proper database in place first.

What does this mean to most data-driven development projects? It means they either need a DBA, or they need to hire one for the portion of the application that defines the database. This is one reason Migrations for Ruby on Rails has gained so much popularity, it hides this chore. Most of us don't care about the DB, it's just a place that holds data. Some of you can go on and on all day about the subtleties of databases but that is completely outside the scope of what I am talking about here. Not only will Migrations create a DB and Schema around what your App needs, it will also keep it up to date with changes made by any developer that can be easily stored in Version Control software like SVN or TFS.

This is what the Designers for Linq to Sql and/or Entity Framework need to do for us. I really don't mind changing my Linq to SQL Apps over to Entity Framework if it will allow us to focus on one great technology. It's great that they can operate against a currently created database, but they should also create one (IN AN OPTIMIZED WAY) when one does not exist. It should create Stored Procedures if I tell it to... Even if we are migrating a legacy application, I would still like to see what a tool spits out for me. I just might use the new techniques. There are tons of ways to move data from one schema to another, again, outside the scope of this article. So back to the scope... EF Does a great job of creating an interaction between Database and Business Objects, but it doesn't help us rapidly create a NEW model without an existing database and I think this is important in two ways, first and foremost, I don't want to write any plumbing code to do this. The tools are smart enough already to do almost all the work for us, it can go just a little bit further and create the expected interaction that solves most of the interaction of the database work for us. I can create a Model with the EF Designer by adding Properties and Associations, but it won't go and create a database around that model.

I should not have to know about how the interaction happens, just that it does and that it does so in a fairly efficient manner. If I lose a certain percentage of performance due to layers, then so be it if I can create my application 10 times faster. If the tool developers choose to implement change tracking in a DataContext or Object Context that is great, do so in a way that makes sense for the CODE developers to use, not require me to go hire Database professionals to argue about the proper plumbing or storage techniques. Linq ALREADY knows how to create efficient SQL, if it did so in code generation vs. dynamically at runtime who cares?

We can host a solution out in the cloud so should we need to be worried about the optimization of how our application persists its data? Certainly there is is need to cover legacy applications and all the DBAs running around out there, that is well covered right now. What we seem to be missing is the ability for competent application developers to create Rich Internet Applications (read Silverlight and Ajax) and have the data persisted without a bunch of plumbing and tweaking.

What is NOT covered is the ability to rapidly envision, design, develop and deploy solutions destined to live on a Hosted Solution -- even if it is "hosted" internally. This solution will most likely have a distinct separation between UI, Business Objects and Database, but do I really need to see those distinctions in my code? Not really. Do I really need to spend the time to wire up all the Databinding when the MetaData already knows what I need to do? No Way, a tool can create that for us. It can already look into our metadata and see what we need to do to hook up a DataGridView to a table.

I would venture to say that the tools are already here, they just don't work the way we need them to so we can build these applications quickly. I spend MOST of my time Creating a Database, then working on plumbing and interactions between the Database and the UI, I should not have to do this any more. Microsoft did a fabulous job of giving us a database that can scale with us as our application grows. We have SQL CE, SQL Server Express and SQL Server Enterprise to grow with us, we can use SQL CE for Mobile Apps and offline stuff, wouldn't it be wonderful if I did not have to architect that portion of the solution any more? I am talking about the people who do not have the luxury of a full time DBA.

Of course, the solution is there, staring us right in the face, the answer is the Designer for Entity Framework. If this Designer could be used to build out the Database, and track the Schema changes, then it would take down part of the battle, just a little more work and it could completely remove the NEED (we should always have the option to extend and modify though) for us to write anything between the Business Objects and the Database.

We should not need to write Serializers for Silverlight, WCF or anything else, the tools already KNOW how to do that, they just don't. The MetaData is there, let's use it. Rob Conery's Subsonic and ActiveRecord shows there is interest in such a tool, but I say this tool needs to come from Microsoft and it needs to be built into the current generation of tools we are using or are being pushed to use (aka Linq). With Rob and Phil working AT Microsoft why can't they contribute some of that knowledge over to the ADO team and get this into the EF Tools we need. Pablo, Mike, Dinesh and the rest of the ADO Team are doing a great job so far, but they are only touching on what we really need. The newest version of EF finally gets a way to do disconnected graphs which is a step towards the goal thanks to Danny Simmons.

These tools need to work seamlessly with Linq and allow me as a developer to write applications with little or no concern for how my data is persisting. I want to create Controls that I can offer to my UI which work seamlessly with Ajax or Silverlight and not require me to write a ton of plumbing just to move things back and forth from one layer to another.

This is the challenge for the new world of development. We have already moved to a hosted world and our tools need to move there with us. But what do I know, I am a VB developer first and foremost... This is what I know, my customers are asking me to create these applications and to create them really fast. I can choose to use the tools I know best or I can branch out and find something new. The problem here is that I have already invested years of time to learn the tools I am using and they are simply not doing what I need them to do to make my job truly easier.

My Invoice Object doesn't really need to know what DataContext my Customer Object lives in and I as a developer should not have to be concerned about that in the slightest. I should be able to freely take a Customer I loaded from Invoice "A" and assign it to be used for Invoice "B" without worrying what context it came from, Invoice "B" just needs to know its a valid Customer or that it is a new one I just created without me forcing something into the plumbing to test it. It should know how to roll itself back when I cancel changes, etc.

With Generics and XML Literals, VB is a Top Notch Code Generator. Kathleen has proven that here and Karl talks about Metadata and what we can do with it over here... We don't need Yet Another Code Generator. We need something that works with the existing modelers and designers and just makes our life as developers easier. It needs to be INSIDE Visual Studio and we need to be able to work with the templates. I should not need LLBLGen or MyGeneration or CodeSmith or SubSonic to do something Visual Studio pretty much already knows HOW to do, it just doesn't. I don't need another designer that works with an existing database, I need the CURRENT Designers to Make the Database AND the plumbing.

I personally think this should be the direction for the next revision of Visual Basic. VB IS the glue that puts the framework together, sure you could also do it in C# (if they added XML Literals...) but VB is already geared for it so why not enhance it's productivity even further by giving us a way to be far more productive than we are today. This does not require any great shift in the tools we already have, it just requires Microsoft to use them smarter and provide us the keys we need to open the door.

Some of my frustrations with Linq to Sql

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:20:00 GMT

I have been working with linq for a decent amount of time now and there are still some things about it that really bug me...

1. When you have a model that has both ID Fields and an Association (which just seems logical because we don't want to force a load of an object just to look at its key) if you are creating new records and use InsertOnSubmit, if you have an attached Association - Say an Invoice with an attached Customer, even though the Customer is already in the database, Linq to Sql will helpfully just add a new one and create a new ID for you. Holy Duplicate Data Batman! I have no idea why this would seem like a good idea to anyone. If I have a record that is associated and loaded and it has a PrimaryKey defined, why in the world would it even attempt to insert it? This happens even when I loaded the Items with LoadOptions. but I do admit that I am dropping the DataContext in between retrieve and submit, nevertheless, this should not happen.

2. If you need to delete records and submit new ones, there is no guarantee that the deletes will happen first so you are stuck with having to do the deletes first, then add the new ones in a separate command or you will most likely get key violations unless you happen to be extremely lucky on occasion. Thankfully we have TransactionScope to deal with the whole submit as unit of work.

3. Loading an Association does not automatically set the ID if that field is also in the map. This is another weakness that should happen automatically. I should not need to write that myself in OnPropertyChanged.

There are some others, but it is these 3 that continue to annoy me time after time when using Linq to Sql. I keep trying to blame myself about not "getting it right or something". However, I just can't. This seems like a reasonable expectation of a well thought out framework for working with objects, unless of course you like re-routing plumbing to make it go your way.

TechED Observations

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:08:00 GMT

By far the most frustrating part of scheduling TechED Sessions in which to attend is the inability to send my entire calendar to a device. Why can't we just get all the sessions in iCal format. Clicking each session is a real pain and makes me NOT want to use the scheduler. Export to Outlook is 3 clicks per session… let's see I am here for 4 days and 5 or 6 sessions a day… this really sucks when it could be a one click download and a 2 click import for the entire calendar.

In fact, I resorted to printing out the calendar, I would MUCH rather have had it in my phone and Outlook Calendar. I will not click every session just to do that.

Unfortunately, the Conference Bag I received I rejected immediately and got another due to a zipper malfunction… an hour later the zipper broke on the second bag. I smell a recall coming as there has been in the past… for the same reason. I understand about cutting costs and all that, but recalls end up costing more.

SDK Web Installation Suckage...

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:00:00 GMT

If you are running the RTM of Vista and If you want to start programming for Vista then you will be needing this:

Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista™ available as a Web Install or an ISO

First of all, it can be hard to find so the above link helps you find it among all the Betas, CTPs Service Packs and other content specific SDKs (WF, WCF, etc.)

The key is to find the one that is released AFTER Vista went into RTM, not one of the SDK releases from back in November of 2006.

You also need the VS 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Vista, but you should already have that or opening VS2005 will nag you every time you start it.

Installing this is not difficult, run the Setup.exe that downloads (Can't we get specific filenames for these things by default already?!?)

I recommend USING THE ISO, otherwise you will sit on this screen with absolutely no feedback for hours.

What sucks is that I had to use Filemon to keep checking to see that it was actually doing something and not hung up somewhere. I also particularly like the effective use of space in the Status field... Try resizing the Dialog, the Image Aspec Ration is not locked... lovely example of what one can do with an SDK...

Cancelling the Web Install will only cancel what is currently downloading and not what is already installed, so it leaves you in an unknown state of the installation process since there is no feedback. This is most likely due to the fact I was presented with this lovely screen:

The Web Install will continue where it left off, but it's not very intuitive, it forces you to either Uninstall or to Change the installation. Changing the installation will lead you to a screen to pick components with all the stuff that it has not installed unchecked. Check them all and continue... I was afraid to uninstall actually because it may have tried to remove some critical component for booting Vista. (It probably won't but why have to go through a whole retore if you can avoid it.)

Save youself a lot of hassle and uncertainty; installing from the ISO is much easier and you don't sit on the download screens wondering what the heck is going on. It's going to take about the same amount of time to download so don't waste your bandwidth with the Web Installer. Installing from the ISO literally took 5 minutes.

I don't plan on updating these links as they change, so as this post ages it will probably stop working. Hopefully someone will actually do some better Quality Control and the relavence of this post dies.

Tecra M7... Coming Soon.

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:27:00 GMT

Having just bought an M4, and subsequently having NOTHING but problems with it since the day I bought it, I managed to get it returned today.

In case you missed it as I did because I was at TechED, the Tecra M7 was introduced. It should start shipping within a week or two. I am getting one of these babies instead of the M4 for obvious reasons.

The M4 seemed nice, but I must have gotten a lemon or something, the HD came in DOA (so I bought a new one instead of waiting for them to replace it...), Then the thing started heating up all the time, even under XP, and the touchpad never worked right but I could almost ignore it until I just saw this thing getting worse by the day.

Hopefully the M7 takes care of the heat problem, but who knows... I do think this may be better for my main machine over the next couple years and should run Vista better than the M4 does. Besides, I REALLY wanted a widescreen tablet.

Another Happy Vista Customer...

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:42:00 GMT

I can't help but wonder if this guy was Beta Testing Vista...

If you haven't heard there are some complaints about how Vista tends to make your laptop get really hot.

Personally, I don't think my machine gets any hotter under Vista than it does under XP, but I tend to stress XP really hard running in Tablet Edition with at least 2 SQL servers and possibly a VPC running all the time. My M4 gets MUCH hotter than my M200 ever did unless I throttle down the processor.

I blame this is a problem on the hardware manufacturers instead of targetting the blame inappropriately at software causing stress. This is rediculous actually, the software should be able to take full advantage of the stuff in your machine without running the risk of causing an international incident on an airplane.

So what will happen when a laptop with bad batteries finally catches fire on a plane? Will they ban laptop as well as lighters? Who knows, but this is getting rediculous, there are enough geniuses out there and enough technology to make a better battery than we have today, so what's holding them up? Can't really blame big oil for this one, or can we?

MSDN and or Passport Rejects IE7

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:58:00 GMT

I tried to log into the MSDN Subscriber sites under IE7 on Vista Beta 2 and had a rude surprise. IE7 launched about 20 tabs that all were broken and basically refused to let me log in. It's probably some security setting in IE7 or Vista Beta 2 but it sure doesn't handle this very gracefully.

Will we ever get a decent battery?

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:42:00 GMT

Here is some tech that looks very promising: http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392803

Could an advance similar to this finally be the thing Robert Heinlein described in his novel Friday?

“Daniel Bridgestone figured out a way of storing power - a kind of an improved battery, but in the sense that a thermonuclear bomb can be described as an improved firecracker.” - Robert A. Heinlein

In the novel, the inventor just churned out so many that he made energy nearly free. He states that there is power everywhere, we just need a better way of storing it. Of course this is an astounding truth; who needs oil when we could effectively charge and store energy in seconds from the sun. The biggest problem with solar power today is the means in which to store it.

I do not speak out of ignorance here, I have a house that has run off solar power for the last 7 years. My biggest beef has always been with the batteries, I have plenty of power, the batteries just take too long to charge.

I look forward to the day technology finally catches up to need and power is ubiquitous; not really even considered as something that drives the economy.

So you want to be in My Living Room...

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:01:00 GMT

I have been working recently with Microsoft XP Media Center Edition (MCE 2005), my HDTV, my XBOX 360 and my collection of media.

This is not some casual idea I have entertained, but an ongoing frustration I have had for years.

Some of you who know me, know that I have a fairly interesting media setup and am always looking for ways to improve it without resorting to writing everything myself.

First of all let me get a couple things straight. MCE is NOT, repeat NOT a consumer electronics grade device unless you purchase a prepackaged solution. Even then, it won't do probably half the things you expect it to do.

Other Options:

Meedio, MythTV, Freevo, SnapStream, BeyondTV, etc. ad nauseum. all have pluses and minuses associated with them, but NONE have hit the mark yet for real Digital Living.

Consumer grade devices such as Tivo, Pinnacle Show Center, etc. also have pluses and minuses, but these do not yet integrate well with a wide range of media, nor a user specified network of storage nor a mixed OS network.

My simple advice...

If you want the panacea of everything connected, shared and easy to use, you are just going to have to wait unless you want to commit to a VERY NARROW range of devices.

The Problem...

The net problem here is fairly simple. Nothing works across the board with other manufacturer's items because there is no standard, there will not BE a standard anytime soon, and actually creating a standard will take YEARS just to get most of the right people in the same room together to even start to discuss one.

I want all my stuff to talk to each other.

My immediate frustration comes from the simple fact that MCE requires and Analog Tuner. Why? This is a rediculous assumption to make on the part of Microsoft and their excuse about has something to do with the way the (TV Program) Guide is handled. While I can appreciate they need to set a baseline... I think this is a preposterous excuse, I just don't see the reasoning behind promoting a “digital media tool” that requires anything to be analog. Both My ATSC cards work just fine with the 3 main guide sources.

We have had complete Digital TV (not to mention HDTV/ATSC) for years and most OTA markets have a robust set of digital stations providing content FAR, FAR superior to anything you can do with and analog signal if you live more than a few miles from the source. Besides the fact that saving a digital signal just means saving the stream as it comes in the a hard drive instead of converting it to something a hard drive can read.

The reason this is so frustrating is that Peripheral Manufacturers can't seem to make a decent driver to save their life. Not only can they not talk to other equipment, they can't even co-exist most of the time without serious voodoo.

Case in point.

I have an Asus S-Presso.

I bought this originally because it looked decent, was quiet (most of the time) and had what I needed in a base product.

I wanted to rip out the internal analog TV Card because I thought it was inferior to a Digital Card since I live 40 Miles from the main OTA signals in my city (and the fact that there is only 1 PCI slot in the system). I chose to go with the DVICO Fusion 5 Gold because it does everything I want and is supposedly MCE 2005 Compliant.

Next I wanted to upgrade the anemic onboard video with something more robust, so I went for an affordable ranged device the ATI AIW 2006 (also supposedly MCE 2005 Compliant)

Frustration point 1.

Digital TV works fine out of the box on the internal VGA Card.

Analog TV works fine out of the box on the ATI device.

Both are MCE 2005 compliant

so what do I do...

I do a fresh installation of MCE2005 on my base hardware, then upgrade the video card, then add the digital card.

This should all be the proper order and it is. The problem is that it still doesn't work in MCE2005. Analog works, but Digital does not. The Digital software works fine, but doesn't need the upgraded analog device, in fact, using the analog device now conflicts with the analog tuner on the digital device and we have a mess again. Disable the Analog device on the Digital Card and the DVICO software stops working with analog channels... Disable the Analog device on the ATI card and MCE doesn't work, nor was there any point in getting an AIW in the first place.

Why do I want MCE anyway? So I can use an XBOX 360 as a remote device... (not even close to working yet...)

So what do I think I will do now? I don't really know, most likely go with Meedio (if I can prove it works to myself...) since it was working fairly well before I got the Fusion (to replace a MyHD device that nothing supports...)

So how do I connect my iPod into this mix... you don't...

How do I access my archive of recorded shows and music on my NAS Devices that are running Linux from my XBOX 360? You don't...

How do I get my Pinnacle ShowCenter to read content (some it will, some it won't, but it has to run with the server software from Pinnacle)

Can ANY of this stuff see my C-Band Satellite or control it? NO...

Bottom Line.

Stay AWAY from this stuff unless you plan to spend WEEKS working on it or pay lots of money (I have seen people pay over $100K to get all this to actually work in a very limited way...)

Just forget about “convergence“ for a while until some frustrated genius has had enough and goes off to write the “Grand Unified Device Language“ that makes everything talk to everything else and lets you store it and play it wherever you want...

More to follow... (about what I am doing about my particular frustrations with the digital life...)

Xbox Hysteria

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:35:00 GMT

OK, so I want one... still, I went to 2 stores to check out the mood... it was 7pm... Best Buy has 75 machines... with about 100 people in line... Walmart had 30 machines with 50 people waiting.

This is nuts, I mean sure the Xbox is indeed hot, but is it really that hard for a manufacturer to know that there is going to be a huge demand for these things? Of course on Friday, there will be nothing but a bunch of angry, bitter consumers looking to buy the hot item for Christmas and there will be nothing in the stores.

If the marketing department thinks its great to build a buzz, I am betting its going to backfire on them when there is nothing in the store on the biggest shopping day of the year. (or is this the best kept secret... all the stores get restocked with hundreds of units on Wednesday night... methinksnot)

Had they actually planned for stock to be there, they would have sold many many times the amount they could have buy trying to build such a buzz. Perhaps they really don't want to sell them since they are supposedly taking a loss on them again. In the quantities they are making these things, they probably will make a profit, but I suspect that they could have ramped up more stock if they really wanted to get one in everyone's hands who wanted one for Christmas.

I am annoyed and have a real mind to just not get one now since I will have time to reconsider whether it really will be what I want to use as my entertainment terminal. I'm not a gamer, sure the games will be great in HD, but I want one more for the media capabilities it offers. A PC doesn't cost THAT much more for what you get, the Asus S-Presso is a good alternative.

Here is another really stupid move...

“At this time, access to development tools for the Xbox 360™ video game console is limited to developers working on approved titles for licensed publishers. This will change over time, so check back for more information in the future.” from http://www.xbox.com/en-US/dev/developingforxbox360.htm

Microsoft has always made a point to make development tools available for Windows, why are they restricting the Xbox so much if they really want wide spread third-party support for applications. Perhaps they are just trying to micro-control what goes on these things or they are afraid of little geniuses like DVD John spoiling their control of the platform.

Whatever they are trying to do, its irritating me. I hope these shortcomings don't create another potentially great media center (like the Mac Mini) which falls flat on its face by the shortsightedness of the marketers who should have put these in the hands of people who can really make it great.

I don't want to develop for the PS3, its going to run some bizarre *nix variant that will be a pain in the butt to code for. Since the Xbox is running some flavor of Windows creating something amazing with VB.Net or C#, the Compact Framework and DirectX shoud be a breeze if it ever sees the light of day to those who don't want to sign an NDA just to right some code.