Når kommer motreaksjon sosiale medier

Sosiale medier er den nye farsotten. Over hele verden har menneskene knyttet seg sammen via populære produkter som facebook, twitter og linkedIn. Og det siste året har også næringslivets inntreden kommet for fullt.

Dette er vel og bra. Sosiale medier er en fin ting. Men det kan også være en dårlig ting. Når eksponerer man seg for mye? og til hvor mange? Jeg er nok ikke alene med å ha venner på vennelisten i facebook jeg ALDRI snakker med. Noen vet jeg knapt hvem er. Hvordan ble det slik at vi skal være venner med alle? Sannsynligvis et konkurranseinstinkt, men også en bekreftelse. Har man mange venner er man populær.

Jeg har vært en ivrig facebook bruker lenge, men nå har jeg kommet til et metningspunkt. Jeg vil ikke ta del i så mange "venners" liv og vice versa. (Dessuten skriver de aller fleste hva de har gjort og hva de skal gjøre, som ikke alltid er like interessant) Sannsynligvis løser mye seg bare jeg fjerner 60% av vennelisten. MEN! Venner er sterket begrep og det satt faktisk litt hardt inne å fjerne "venner" fra vennelisten. Gjør jeg meg upopulær? Blir de sinna om de merker jeg har fjernet de som venn? Sannsynligvis litt irritert. Et moralsk dilemma altså...

Project Manager

Here it goes..
For the last 4 months I have been working as a project manager in my company. In the beginning I had some internal fights opening charts and reports instead of Visual Studio. I guess i kind of miss programming a bit, but my new tasks are also exciting.

The tricky part for me was all of a sudden telling people what to do. This was people i've been working together with for many years and i felt a bit uncomfortable with that. It seems that everyone has now got used to the situation and accepted this, and I am satisfied with that.

Later on I won't write so much about programming techniques any more. I will also write about methods and frameworks for project management, agile development and scrum

Less coding, more... other stuff?

I just realized that I haven't done so much programming this month. I have always thought that we developers can measure our work by watching the progress in our development projects. Well, this is still right, but nowadays I am not the one in our team who does the coding. I am the one who ensures that the other team-members can concentrate on the programming and ensure progress. So what do I do now? Well, I do some programming, about 2 hours a day. The rest of the day I spend my time writing e-mails, updating project management software, ensure communication with other teams/departments, consulting other people if something needs to be clarified. And there's always support calls, of course. Mostly internal support calls, actually. At last there is always a document or two that needs to be written. Some routines must be created or updated, etc..

Although I am really fond of just programming, I kinda like these other duties too :) There's lots of other things that needs to be done when you are working in a team. So if my "new" tasks at work will help the overall status in our team and contribute to more efficiancy I will gladly continue doing this.

Delegates and anonymous methods (by PEtter)

A little stange thing I found using delegates in vb .net 3.5

Starting with:

Public delegate Function Something(ByVal a as integer, ByVal b as integer) as boolean

Public Function doSomething(ByVal a as integer, ByVal b as integer) as boolean

  return a = b

end function

To use this you would do something like this:

 Public Function ExecuteDelegate(ByVal a As Integer, ByVal B As Integer, ByVal d As Something) As Boolean

            Return d(a, B)

        End Function

And then you can use your function with a delegate:

  ExecuteDelegate(1,2, addressOf doSomething)

In .net 3.5(vb) you could simplify this by using inline functions:

ExecuteDelegate(1,2,Function(ByVal a As Integer, ByVal B As Integer) A = B))

And so to the strange part.

If you do not need the parameters to resolve your return value you could do:

ExecuteDelegate(1,2,Function() false )

As you can see, inlining the delegate without the correct signature, but as long as you provide 'no signature' this works fine!

'Funny'?

Gantter - web-based project management now in Norwegian (Norsk webbasert prosjektstyring)

I am a big fan of Gantter, and I use it in my work daily. So I contacted Volodymyr Mazepa and offered my services, and it resulted in a Norwegian edition of gantter. I'm not sure if it works in Firefox for the moment, but if you are norwegian and use IE then you will automatically get the norwegian version of Gantter.

Go check it out  on http://gantter.com

Url routing with Asp.Net 4 webforms

Since the introduction of ASP.Net MVC this framework has gotten very popular, especially if you follow all the blogs out there writing about it. But I would really like to know how many have actually ported their applications from Webforms to MVC? I think many programmers are curious to MVC because of the url routing hype that's been going on (This is actually the main argument I hear from some developers), but they forget that changing to MVC requires (for many) a lot of new aspects in the way they code. They may have to sacrifice some habits/techniques and this takes a lot of effort.

Guess what? Url routing can be done very easily with the routing engine in ASP.Net 4 Webforms.
I recommend that everyone reads this article from Scott Guthrie.
So if url routing is your main argument for porting to MVC, maybe you don't want to convert your webforms applications after all? :)

Buy, not build - Confessions from a Telerik junkie

Most of the developers I know don't like 3rd party controls. They like to be in the front seat, to have control. That's of course a good thing, because it shows they take responsibility for their own code, and they also have full control of future changes.

I understand why they do this, but I have a different opinion. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. If someone already has done your job then you could focus on other things. Choose a vendor! I myself use Telerik GUI Controls all the time. Telerik is a serious, professional company that has grown immensely over the last year. Their controls are fast and reliable, customizable and they always have well defined roadmaps for future changes and features in their product families.

So instead of using several weeks developing my own treeview with load on demand nodes and context menus, I can use default built-in features on the telerik treeview and use my resources to focus on other aspects of the product.

Of course, there are other 3rd controls vendors out there with less professional values that you should avoid. There's NOTHING more annoying than running into a bug that's beyond your control. You simply have to wait for the vendors to fix it. That's probably the biggest reason why developers like to build things themselves. If you have experienced this once, you would definitely not want to be there twice!

But as long as you use a professional vendor like Telerik you have nothing to fear. It's going to save you a lot of time. Check it out yourself at http://www.telerik.com