the case against .NET

Dell’s website has had an overhaul. Initial impressions are of a much crisper, less cluttered design - good.

However, it simply does not work! At least not for me. The main graphical element of the page is a Flash movie which shows different products in turn. Above this is a pulldown menu, which pulls down behind the Flash movie. Site navigation is therefore impossible. This image just shows the tiny part of the menu which is visible above the graphic.

They must have tested this on some systems! I’m running Ubuntu 8.04, and the site is broken in both Firefox 3 and Opera. Could it be that the Linux market isn’t quite so important to Dell after all?

The first taste of a new beer is usually a special moment, particularly when the beer in question is (soon to be) brewed in your home town.

When I read on the Adur Brewery Blog that the final bottles from the prototype batch of Merry Andrew had been delivered to the local off license, I quickly phoned my wife who kindly agreed to make a special trip. I’d missed out on all previous opportunities to sample, but am finally enjoying my first bottle. It’s a strong beer with a good complex flavour, though it could perhaps do with a touch more length. Went down well with the wife too (”good liquorice flavour”). We’ll gladly enjoy many more of these.

This hedgehog was found in a black bin liner (garbage sack) in our garage yesterday morning. We’re not too sure how/when it got in there, though it probably climbed in sometime during the previous couple of days. My wife was alerted by a rustling from inside the bag, which she had thought contained only garden rubbish.

Following advice found on the web, we bought some cat food, and gave it a little moistened muesli and some water. Apparently revived, it was released at a safe spot nearby after dark. It wandered away, and has not been seen since.

thecaseagainst.net has, at last, been upgraded to WordPress 2.5, having previously languished on the 2.0 branch for far too long. Thanks to a great short guide from Word Press this was a quick and easy process. Let me know if you spot any problems.

Now I need to find a new theme to freshen it up a bit…

Update: I finally settled on the Cutline theme from Chris Pearson.

I’m sure this has been blogged numerous times already (and I didn’t notice), but the biggest problem with Google, for me, has been that searching for product reviews has never worked. The top 20 or so results would always include one or two real reviews, and a pile of shopping sites which offered customers a chance to comment on products - only there were never any customer comments.

Well, at some point in the last few weeks this was fixed - properly. I’ve been trying it with various classes of product - by searching for the product name along with the word “review” - and it just works! The first couple of pages of results are consistently filled with the most respected reviews of the product. I’m sure this was a non-trivial problem for Google to solve, but I’m equally sure it’s a big win.

Tim Anderson has been blogging from Tech.Ed. In a useful post about convergence between Silverlight and WPF, he makes the comment

in many ways Silverlight is .NET done right, from a client perspective; it delivers just what is necessary for a rich client

This echoes my previous remark that Silverlight 2 suggests a route to a more manageable and lightweight deployment model.

This make increasing sense. .NET has not succeeded on the client platform, largely because of the multiple monoliths of the .NET framework. Silverlight introduces a model whereby elements of .NET may be distributed in a granular fashion - surely it won’t be long before Microsoft enables this facility for installable rich clients also.

I can understand why people sometimes get the impression that I’m a .NET hater. Most recently, this includes my former colleague David Arno. So, time for me to clarify my position (again).

Firstly, what really concerns me is when people can’t be bothered to think for themselves. They blindly accept whatever someone tells them, without engaging their considerable intellect. In software development today, the main problem is developers who don’t ever question what Microsoft hands down. They don’t seem to know that there’s a world outside of .NET, and therefore .NET must be the solution to every problem. (David is not such a person, by the way.)

I actually believe there is much that is good in .NET, and in the .NET ecosystem. Things that spring immediately to mind include LINQ, Silverlight 2, advances in TDD… In particular, it includes a very comprehensive set of server-side technologies - here, of course, deployment is largely not an issue. As a technophile, I’ve really enjoyed seeing the pace of software innovation ramp up because of the interplay of ideas between Microsoft’s .NET and the open source community.

Where .NET remains a disaster is in the area of deployment to client machines. There are too many variants of the .NET framework, and each of them is much too big. Sure you can bundle the framework into your installer (as long as the target version of Windows is new enough), but this severely limits the scope for web-based deployment.

The point was pushed home for me when I recently moved from Azureus to µTorrent as my Windows BitTorrent client. If you’re not a µTorrent user, you should know that it’s a really elegant, full-featured, intuitive application. In short, it’s a dream to use. The stunner is that the download is only 214 kB, and it runs on everything from Windows 95 up. This is the kind of thing that wins users - not MB of bloat for a basic utility.

In the battle for hearts and minds, Microsoft has a big problem here. Maybe Silverlight 2 suggests a route to a more manageable and lightweight deployment model - it’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds.