Category: Writing

It’s Microsoft, after all

The news that will interest most of .NET developers today, is Microsoft decided to sack project.json and come back to MSBuild.

We feel lucky because we held off the transition to ASP.NET Core, but the other teams in my company might not be as happy. They will have to move back – and that means there will be a delay in developing new features. (Yes, we invest in a pre-release framework, because that’s what you need to do to stay ahead of your competitors)

You might say you saw it coming.

It’s not the first time Microsoft creates something cool, lets some of us fall in love with it (or even have our lives depends on it), the eventually kills it off.

Remember Silverlight?

Or XNA?

Or Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5? Technically there was WF 4.0, but the API:s were entirely changed, to the point that we can consider Microsoft killed WF and created something else with the same name.

Sadly enough, this is not uncommon in the software industry – especially in a big company like Microsoft. Microsoft has many divisions, each division has many teams and those teams, unfortunately, *compete* with each other, sometimes. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose the battle and their product is killed in a favor of other product from other team. It’s not something super secret about Microsoft – in fact – it’s quite well known.

It’s bad habit, without a doubt. You invest your time into learning it. Your company invests their money into using it. And then you have to start all over, again. You can still keep using the technology, it will not just die, but the does mean you put yourselves in the risk of lagging behind and security threats.

This time, it’s slightly better because the ASP.NET Core, technically, has not been released yet. It’s still bad because Microsoft should have made the decision before the Release Candidate, but I feel lucky. What if Microsoft makes it to ASP.NET Core 1.0, and we use it, then they kills it off in 2.0? What if we invest hundreds of development hours into it and then spend another hundreds of hours reverting back?

For me, personally:

It’s good thing this time we don’t have to learn a new thing. It’s bad thing this time we don’t have a new thing to learn.

 

 

Never send me my password

I’m not a security expert myself, not even close, but for more than once, I’ve been greatly concerned about the risks for having accounts in several websites. I wonder myself why did the developers there go with the decisions that bad.

It’s already bad enough to use HTTP on your register/login page . It’s even worse when you send me my password in plain text. Either the one I chose or the one you randomly generated for me.

Oh please, I know what my password is
Oh please, I know what my password is

And this has happened more than once. Each time, it raises my eyebrows higher and higher. I don’t want to rant here – but it takes great deal of ignorance or laziness, or both, do do such as bad practice about securities.
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Git: In easy steps – Another book project

Git: In easy steps cover
Git: In easy steps cover

Well, I might start a living based on writing. If my books sell good enough. Yes, it’ll be available on Leanpub and you can register now to get a notification: https://leanpub.com/gitineasysteps.

In this Easter I decided to start a new book project, based on what I’ve been doing daily: Git in easy steps.

Who is this book for?

This book explains Git concepts in a simple way, with examples in Git Extensions – the Git client to beat. It will walk through the flow and see what should we do, and why. Needless to say, it’s a beginner book. If you are already a Git expert, look else. (Of course you are still welcome to buy this book, well, you know, to complete your collection).

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Lessons learned from running a blog

Expect yourself to do many things, if not everything. You’ll be an administrator, a developer and a writer, all at the same time. This blog is the first time I install WordPress, first time I install and configure Apache, first time I configure CNAME or so, first time I use Google Adsense. It was not smooth all the way, but it’s not that hard and it’s really rewarding when I got it works. One after one. I failed sometimes, like when I tried to make WordPress runs on PHP7 (I’m not a PHP developer after, so I run away when the problem gets out of hand), but for most parts, I can find an answer from here and there on the Internet. Thank you, internet.

Attracting visitors is hard. Internet is full of things and no matter how you try, there are always other content somewhere more interesting than yours. Except if you are exceptional good at writing, or you are famous person, most of the people will not visit your website. Not even one. And sadly enough, many of your visitors will not return, even if your website was helpful to them. You helped them to solve a problem and that’s it. Attracting visitors is already hard enough, and keeping them coming back is even harder.

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