Amazon has finally come out with the details around their Kindle Development Kit (KDK) you can read the details here.

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For the last year or so I’ve been working at a 100% Windows based enterprise development shop.   They ship a fairly large and complex application for health insurance providers, which draws on many of the core technologies in the Microsoft enterprise stable.

This post highlights a few things that make working in this environment a whole lot more onerous than it needs to be in my opinion, so let’s get started.

1. Installers

The Windows installation landscape has been a bleak one indeed for a very long time.  Tools like Installshield with their own proprietary languages like InstallScript make installer development unnecessarily painful and baroque.  Is there really any reason I should be programming in a language with no real data structures to speak of in 2010?  Even flow of control is handled in a way I can only describe as baroque.  There are methods/functions, but the main body of your installer’s code has to jump around everywhere using goto.  What a mess.

There is hope on this front, in the form of WiX, the Windows Installer XML toolkit, which allows developers to iteratively build and design their installer along with the regular development process.  Right now however the learning curve seems incredibly steep.  Perhaps Visual Studio could generate a template WiX project to get people started?

I’d also love to see some thought given to simplifying the deployment model for things like COM+ – which feels to me like a magic black box with myriad buttons and levers, all of which are a bear to get right at install time.

2. Builds/SCM

MSBuild needs to have dramatically better documentation, and to a lesser extent so does TFS  – they get the broad bits right – everything you could want to do through the UI is covered, but process automation using scripting / command line tools gets substantially murkier.

In the ‘credit where credit is due’ department, the TFS team has been incredibly responsive on their forums, and that’s what’s helped us get by so far, but there’s no substitute for first rate docs.

3. Infrastructure Scripting

As of right now, there are a thousand different interfaces to accomplish the same thing, and for complex configuration tasks like configuring IIS at install time, the possibilities can be dizzying.  I would like to see Microsoft choose one mechanism for run-time system/software configuration and document the heck out of it.

Kudos to the PowerShell team and The Scripting Guys for making great strides in this area.  PowerShell is a really nice environment for all kinds of scripting, and I look forward to the day when we can eliminate VBScript from our installers entirely in its favor, but we’re not there yet sadly.  The object pipeline is one of the more powerful concepts in the modern scripting milieu, and I think Apple and the UNIX world could take a page from PowerShell’s book in this regard.

Being a release engineer in a Windows world presents some very interesting and different challenges for someone coming from a UNIX background like myself, and with a little bit of emphasis and effort on Microsoft’s part, surmounting them could be a whole lot less painful.

infrastructure, Installers, installshield, microsoft, msbuild, powershell, release, releng, scripting, tfs, Windows Hide

I have no issue with most of the points he puts forth in the “Issues” section of his website, right up until we get to “Marriage” – conveninetly located third from the bottom, just above “Israel” and “Iran”.

Marriage
I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. States should be free to make their own laws in this area, so long as they reflect the people’s will as expressed through them directly, or as expressed through their elected representatives.

I’m a big fan of state’s rights, but let’s view this in context – here in Massachusetts, same sex marriage is 100% legal.  If Mr. Brown is elected, he will strip our state of one of its proudest moments in recent memory, plunging us back into the darkness of ignorance, discrimination and fear that has held sway since time immemorial.

As a heterosexual man who has been blessed by the gift of marriage in my life, I can’t even begin to express how strongly I feel about this issue.  To me, denying our fellow men and women this right because they happen to be attracted to people of the same sex is so morally repugnant as to be beyond words.

Do not allow the army of small mindedness and ignorance to douse the light of truth and plunge our fair state into darkness once again.

Whether straight, gay, yellow or purple, if you care about the basic rights and freedoms that make our nation as great as it is, go vote tomorrow, and vote against Scott Brown.

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Michelle and I have been having a lot of fun playing this game lately. It’s a must play if you’re a word game fan of any stripe, and even if you don’t generally enjoy board games (especially if you find them too slow).

What makes this one unique is that it all happens in real time. My lovely wife is a real shark at this and every other word game we’ve played, but we both end up having a lot more fun with this than most others we’ve tried.

Two thumbs up.

http://www.bananagrams-intl.com/index-us.asp

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Since when did “Happy Holidays” become persona non grata?

I realize that for many people, it is the epitome of bland political correctness – however for me, it’s what I want to say!

I don’t want to wish you a Merry Christmas, or a happy Channukah, or a blessed Ramadan, because I don’t know if you celebrate any of those things. What I do want to say is that I hope you have a happy, enjoyable, peaceful and serene holiday with your friends, family, or whoever else it is you enjoy having around.

So, Happy Holidays!

That’s all

backlash, correct, cranky, customs, greetings, holidays, politically, social, society Hide

Or has the number of new programming languages been increasing exponentially of late?

I don’t just mean the number of new languages being invented, because that’s always been the case, but the number which are actually garnering a fair bit of tech buzz?

In the last few months, I’ve heard a LOT about Clojure, Scala, Factor, and most recently Google’s Go.

I can’t help but wonder if maybe we should stop inventing new programming languages and paradigms, and maybe focus on using the ones we have already more effectively and creatively.

Then again, maybe I’m just getting old

clojure, computers, development, factor, go, invention, languages, programming, scala, technology Hide

Just (well, a week ago, but work was blazing white hot upon my return, so no time to write got back from a week in Aruba, and my experience this time around was completely different…

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I’ve been enjoying Twitter for quite a while now.

Despite all the blather out there about it being a self indulgent waste of time, I think it’s become pretty clear to anyone open minded enough to actually wake up and smell the coffee that it’s a communications medium like any other, but one that lends itself to the dynamic, fast paced nature of the modern world we live in. I personally find Twitter useful on a number of levels, but first and foremost as a tool for the dispersal of technical information to interested parties.

For instance I follow Guillaume Laforge, one of the designers of the Groovy programming language to see what’s up with new releases of his software, what he’s up to, etc. I’m also following a number of members of the Windows PowerShell development team at Microsoft to get the inside scoop on that awesome tool.

I also follow Amanda Palmer, lead vocalist for The Dresden Dolls, several authors, and a smattering of friends who’ve also been turned on to Twitter, as well as some feeds around hobbies and interests of mine – the Corel Painter community has an incredibly vibrant Twitter presence.

My point here is that Twitter may have originally been about what people are eating for lunch today, or that the train is late in coming and they’re stuck next to a guy who smells on the platform, but like most things it has evolved and become something much more than the designers originally intended.

There is this rather useful convention in the Twitter world called hash tags – things like #powershell or #groovy or #redsox – these let people with particular interests ‘tune in’ on related tweets whether or not they’re already following a person.

In the last week however I’ve begun to see a trend I really do not like. Tags like #spymaster are being used by people playing games that use Twitter and your followers as the medium.

This clutters up my Twitter feed, but more to the point, makes Twitter much less usable and interesting for those who don’t have and/or don’t want to need fancy clients that can filter out certain tags so they won’t be bothered by them.

I like Facebook, it’s been a fantastic way for me to get back in touch with a bunch of people I am really psyched to be in contact with again, but as anyone with a lot of Facebook friends and not a lot of time knows, the silly games and apps can get quite chatty and really annoying awfully quick.

I’m not saying anyone’s doing anything wrong here – some of the apps are fun and a couple are even useful or enlightening, but when you log in and see 120 Little Green Plant requests, 50 Snowball requests, 40 Mixed Drink requests, and 300 ‘Other’ requests, it gets real old, real fast

So that’s my take on the matter. Let’s keep Twitter as much signal as we can, lest the noise overtake us and leave us drowning in its wake.

Technorati : communication, customs, facebook, friends, games, morees, social-networking, twitter
Del.icio.us : communication, customs, facebook, friends, games, morees, social-networking, twitter

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It has been forever and a day since I posted here. I apologize for the fade, my 4 or 5 readers must be thinking I’d joined the silent masses of bloggers who can’t overcome the inertia and fail to post ever again…

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One morning a few weeks back I was told to get in early to meet about an upcoming release that was happening…

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