ASP.NET MVC in a corporation – part #1

Posted by Marcin Obel – August 25, 2009

.NET LogoEach big organization like this in which I work is mostly based on processes. Everything from purchase orders to computer hardware is described by them. To be honest I am not a big fan of this way of work. My mind is closer to Agile way of thinking rather than stiff procedures for solving problems but from a bigger perspective this approach seems to work because my current employer has over 100 years and is in very good health.

One thing which is quite funny with processes is that someone has to figure out how each of them should work. In case of my department, which is very young and in its nature very different than rest of the organization, there is no process for many things and we have to develop them for our own. One of our processes is “software development process”. Because the department consists of about 300 developers, administrators and IT specialists and we are using wide range of tools and technologies, the process I mentioned above is very general and describes things in a high level. In order to be able to use it and be safe in case of internal or external audit we need many supporting documents which customize it to a needs of particular team. This detailed documents describe how we should do development in a particular technology (for example .NET Framework), what tools, libraries, methodologies can we use etc. Of course we do not choose tools with which we will work only basing on our subjective opinions and feelings. During choosing process each technology or tool is evaluated by a group of specialist (developers, administrators) and compared to its competitors/equivalents which are available on the market.

Currently I have a pleasure to initialize a process of ASP.NET MVC evaluation. Its purpose is to check if this framework can be used as the replacement for ASP.NET Web Forms and Model-View-Presenter pattern which we are using now. Because the evaluation process does not touch only ASP.NET MVC but also other presentation framework for web .NET application me and my teammates had to prepare a list of things to check and evaluate:

  • Data binding
  • Validation
  • Navigation
  • State saving
  • Embedded controls support
  • Testability
  • Security
  • Collaboration between developers and UI designers
  • Adoption to existing projects
  • Extensibility
  • Community support
  • Documentation availability
  • Development tools support

Order in which topics on the list appear is accidental and all items are in my meaning equal in theirs importance.

Because I am currently at the beginning of the ASP.NET MVC evaluation I do not have to much more I could share with you. Only thing I have prepared is a mind map with detailed topics I will have to take a look at. I will provide more information about pros and cons of the framework for a big companies in a next posts. If you would like to hear about something regarding this topic please leave your comment below.

My beginnings with Ruby

Posted by Marcin Obel – August 23, 2009

Ruby LogoSince some time I have had a feeling that I should turn my eyes in direction other than .NET and technologies connected to it. Maybe not as a new path of career, because I have invested a lot of time to get to the point where I am now, but as something additional what can give me some new perspective and help to become a better developer. Because I cannot learn all available technologies I had to choose one and only one of them. After reading some blogs and mostly because of Jeremy D. Miller’s opinion my choice fell on Ruby and the Rails. So many developers are excited about this technology, I decided to find out what is a source of theirs excitement.

So how am I going to learn Ruby? First of all I always try to start from a book. In this case I am going to read (in fact I have already started yesterday) Polish translation of “Ruby in a Nutshell” by Yukihiro Matsumoto. I think and the author has the same opinion that this is not the book for someone who is new to programming and wants to learn his first language. The “Ruby in a Nutshell” is something like language reference but in more accessible form so for me (developer with above 8 years of commercial experience) is perfect. I do not need 20 pages of description how to use while loop or what are iterators and where can be used.

I am not able to read this type of book from end to end without touching computer so during reading I am going to play a little bit with the language itself in a more practical manner. In order to do it I had to setup a development environment and there I faced first problems. Turned out that current version of Ruby (1.9) for Windows does not have official all-in-one installer. There is installer for version 1.8 and some preview installers for 1.9 which do not work perfectly (at least on my Windows 7 machine). Because of this I had to install Ruby manually using binary distribution and again I had problems. Of course binaries were in a form of compressed file so I uncompressed them and moved to C:\Ruby directory. Secondly I have added C:\Ruby\bin\ path to the environment variables. In my opinion this should be all I have to do to start learning but turned out that I was wrong. The official binary distribution does not contain all required libraries and was crashing from time to time. After some googling I have found very useful blog post (unfortunately I have lost its address) which solved my problems pointing where I can find missing libraries and where should I put them.

When I had Ruby environment ready to work, theoretically I was able to start playing with it but … I am .NET developer and I used to use reach IDEs with syntax highlighting, suggestions, debugging, refactoring tools etc. I decided to find such tool but about it, learning progress and my thoughts about Ruby from perspective of my quite long experience with .NET I am going to write in some of future posts.