Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

A bit of a grab-bag this time around. Everything from ESB Toolkit to REST to WCF is on deck this week.

BizTalk ESBT: Just to clarify, “Everything” includes “All”, but “All” doesn’t mean “Everything” Methodology The Law of Demeter Is Not A Dot Counti.

I started to really feel the same way a year or two ago. My response was to make the descision to focus on the underlying principles of coding, designing and architecting good software instead.

I haven't regretted it - today I believe I am a much better, more confident developer than I was before. Not only do I pick up the new tech much faster, as and when I need to, but I have also learned to make better value judgements on which of the shiny new toys are not _worth_ learning at the moment (ie many on your list above).

Of course, I feel the same way, but I'm in this situation for about 20 years (since I stared working in IT).

The first years I tried to get access to as much technologies as possible and get as good as possible in this areas. Each year some new.

But after some years I had to slow down and to focus on the technologies I thought I would really need for my daily work.

And few years later I had to accept that I can't learn all technologies related to my daily work, but to pick just some of them and try to get my work done, even when I knew there were tools out which likely fit better for a given task.

But there just isn't enough time to evaluate them all.

The first years it was easy because only a few areas where covered by IT and the tools where quite simple and not very powerful.

Now IT covers almost each area imaginable and in most areas many and very powerful tools are available from different vendors and even from the same vendor (e.g MS).

My capacity just doesn't grow as fast as the IT development.

My biggest disappointment in this years was the Entity Framework. Because I wasted so much time to become familiar with it, just to learn, that the time was wasted at all.

V1.0 is useless at all (a prototype at most) and so much change was necessary for V2.0 that most of my concerning knowledge is out of date just before I could make use of it.

I'm also not sure V2.0 is worth using it. So you didn't miss much in this topic ;-)

Another big disappointment is, that the information MS provides are so generic that I most of the time have troubles to find out what a new technology or tool would do at all.

So, this got quite long.

I hope my poor english isn't to boring to read ...

FYI there is no EF 2.0, its EF4 to sync with the framework version number.

Lets assume everyone in the world feels the answer to your question is "Yes". What's the alternative? NOT having this stuff? You Sam, I don't think you'd say MS should never have developed WCF :)

Is the problem that it is Microsoft thats delivering all these things, that they're public, that info on them is so widely disseminated so we hear about them all the time? Back in the day, you only heard about this new stuff by reading MSDN magazine, and everyone complained "why are all the articles on stuff I cannot use TODAY!?" (wait, has that changed?!)

If MS wasn't doing these things, we'd rely on open source libraries, or we'd be writing our own half-ass stuff, or doing without, or complaining "Maybe I should switch to Java or some such, they've got this or that framework!"

My opinion is its all ego. We all think we're awesome because 10 years ago we WERE able to keep up with the "new tech" because the pace was slower. Now that the pace has increased past (most everyones) capability (or desire) to keep up, we're annoyed. MS shouldn't slow down for us, we're just going to have to get used to the idea that we aren't going to "know it all." We're going to have to "specialize" and choose certain tech to ignore. For example, I'm probably going to ignore WF, and MVC, and Azure for at least a couple years. I'm definitely going to ignore Oslo. I just eliminated a bunch of reading from my TODO list :) Plus, most people only "learn" new tech when they discover it makes something they need to do NOW, easier/faster/better/cooler. We just need to know enough about these tech's to know what they are, what they're good for, and hopefully be able to tell when they should be used.

So my honest answer to your question is, Yes. But so what that we can't keep up with it all?

Yeah and I think it hurts the offerings, the REST support in WCF currently is poor and with time being so tight I'm not sure they are going to push things forward enough in the next version (especially as doing that would involve canvassing opinion from the REST community).

A bit of this comes at our (developers) request--that Microsoft make their technologies and innovations a bit more agile--release often, get feedback, re-release. It's up to us to not only make the decision between architecture technologies, but versions as well.

If we know 3.5 SP1 and it's underlying tech is "more" stable then it becomes a decision to stay there or look towards 4.0+ and weigh ROI.

As a few others have mentioned, it is also almost impossible to "know everything" like we could 10-15 years ago. No longer does the fact that you can turn a computer on mean that you're also able to write software AND fix the printer. ;)

For me, I keep somewhat (albeit this is probably up for debate) sane by focusing on technologies that a) meet or exceed business requirements in my job or b) look fun to play with for personal/community gains. If it doesn't fall into those categories, I familiarize myself enough with it to know it exists, the high levels, and how it interacts with the technology that I do use; however, I leave the details until I find a reason for further exploration.

I agree.

While I am a Fan boy...There were too many crippling issues in Expression Studio 2 and VS2008. I'd much rather see VS2008 fixed and Expression Studio 2 updated and if Silverlight would have received updates rather than changes.

Good to see however that Expression Web 3 received many crucial fixes, many of us couldn't even use it on IIS7.

My thoughts exactly...

Its like a race against time trying to catch up with all the stuff happening. Apart from what MS releases, I also like to spend some time on some open source stuff that I'm interested in. So at the end of the day, the big question is .. what would you like to read now?

One of the biggest challenges I face is that which technology stack option do I select. Do I go with MVC, do I go with .NET Data Services or EF or LINQ etc.

I completely agree with Kevin,David and Bert.

And Zöchbauer, it was very nice reading your post!

You completely forgot all the wonderful things that are coming in Synch Framework and Compact Framework.

MS has a tradition of making a lot of noise about new releases -- the development story is the new technology. That seems to be running into trouble with a new emphasis on more visibility, more agility, shorter release cycles, etc. I imagine that it's very difficult to tell a PM who's achieving faster iterations, etc, 'well, we need to start tamping down the promotion of each of your releases.'

EF2? u mean EF 4 ;)

coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/.../entity-framewor

I agree with this post 100%, and you didn't even mention stuff like LINQ and WPF and whatever else the uber-geeks are touting these days.

Simple development tools are more productive because programmers can spend less time figuring out how the tool works and more time actually programming. The code is more maintainable because it's easier to understand.

There was a time when people could create useful applications using VB3. Somehow businesses managed to survive on VB3 applications.

Absolutely!

I guess the problem is that Microsoft is in effect competing with absolutely everyone, other vendors, OSS etc etc, and there's a lot to keep up. The rate of change is mind blowing, I try to read something new every day and I still feel my knowledge levels is somewhere back at .NET 3.0 and a bit :(

The biggest problem is how to make this all fit in an Enterprise Application.

Also, so many teams are duplicating idea's or standing on each others toes, it gets really confusing.