I just saw this video of Congressman Joe Barton questioning Cheryl Campbell of CGI about the Obamacare website’s *hidden* code. http://youtu.be/N54gSI4Aft0 It really doesn’t bother me that the congressman doesn’t understand that he’s looking at a ‘comment’, not ‘code’. And it doesn’t bother me that he doesn’t understand that it was probably commented out because of the dynamic, incremental, nature of software development with decisions being made and unmade continuously on the fly. And it doesn’t bother me that he doesn’t understand this commented code doesn’t affect compliance since it’s not functional, not displayed, and completely ignored by the computer. I can almost guarantee how this played out; An overly defensive business analyst decided to add this in as a CYA tactic. The developer added it then somebody realized it was not to spec and told the programmer to remove it. The programmer commented it out instead of removing it because they’ve seen the flip flopping on functionality like this in the past (possibly multiple times in this project). The comments were never removed (are they ever?), and it was promoted to production. Then somebody with enough knowledge to be dangerous, but doesn’t know what they are looking at found it, and pushed it...

I’ve been convinced that I should not be using the same view model class for both loading the view and the posted controller action parameter. The trouble is it allows data to be transferred back which may not be necessary and it needlessly increases our attack surface. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always had unit tests specifically monitoring that only necessary view model properties are being pushed back to the entity model, but still, seperate viewmodels will allow me to eliminate that risk completely and even remove those tests. To be honest, the idea of having 2 view model classes that are nearly identical is not very appealing, especially given that if the structure deviates, the default model binder will no longer work with those properties which are out of sync with its partner view model. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very liberal when it comes to class quantities, but this was enough to make me uncomfortable. So I’m happy that I realized the post view model class can always be used as a base class for the get view model class. I mean it has to be in order for the default model binder to work. Using inheritance for these classes will a)...

2 recent experiences Earlier this year I had 2 experiences which made me pause & reflect: The first was an outsourcing company’s framework from hell.  The framework was made to make MVC work like webforms … I kid you not.  I suspect they had a webforms framework and were trying to hold on to their previous productivity gains by jamming their square peg into the MVC paradigm’s round hole.  The end result was an undocumented, inconsistent, buggy mess that only an experienced developer can figure out; ironically it’s the kind of mess an experienced developer would know enough to stay away from.  (Although I didn’t) Fine.  Whatever.  We all make mistakes right? But I did find the video on their website talking about how “good high quality code” “pays dividends down the road when you’re trying to add features” and how it “enables you to have high performance applications” a little nauseating, especially while fixing errors around Sql Server’s 2,100 parameter limitation.  Turns out they were querying ids matching their filter, passing the results back to .NET, and then passing those ids back into a second query.  There was a bunch of rookie mistakes like that which hardly enabled ‘high performance applications’. The second...

I have a theory that you can tell if a Microsoft web developer is good or not based on as single question. Would you choose webforms or MVC on a new project? Many readers probably consider this obvious, perhaps even equivalent to the choice between punch cards vs keyboard/monitor. I suspect most people reading this consider asp.net-MVC the logical choice, and only an idiot would choose otherwise However, I suspect most Microsoft web application developers would still chose webforms … scary as that is. I think that right now, MVC has really separated the good from the bad, at least as far as asp.net developers go. Developers on top of their game have at least overview experience with MVC, yet most weak or lazy developers haven’t been forced to make the leap yet, as a result they either haven’t looked into it, or have been so confounded by the paradigm shift that they’ve passed it off as a trendy fad. Please notice I said ‘choose on a new project’, not ‘currently working in’. I’m sure there are many developers who are working in webforms who would prefer to be working in MVC … I’m one of them. On the flip side, I recently met...

I just read the EFF’s new website (https://defendinnovation.org/) about how to change the patent system to prevent the patent trolls from stifling innovation.  I like some of the ideas, but question how realistic others are (i.e. #3? – C’mon; How many implementations in how many languages will you need to write to cover all your bases?) I realize this is an extremely naive statement to make, but I’m going to make it anyway; solving the ‘non-obvious’ aspect of a software patent is simple. … and it doesn’t involve judges learning to code. Here’s my proposal:  Software patent proposals should include a unit test suite and a single solution implementation.  The test suite would be made public immediately, without the implemented solution.  The public would take a crack at making the test suite pass. If there are no successful passes, then it could be deemed as a difficult problem with a non-obvious solution. If the patent office is bombarded with working solutions, then it unquestionably fails the ‘non-obvious’ test. It’s debatable what to do if a relative few brilliant developers solve it, while most fail.  But this would definitely eliminate laughable patents like Amazon’s 1-Click which would have bombarded the patent office in less than an...