First Amendment

Over the previous weekend I have been sparingly indulging in the new Found Joys of WPF. WPF really does what I choose to call the First amendment to the way of development i.e. It effectively separates Presentation and Code-behind in desktop applications. Generally speaking few people have the gift of knowing how to create a stunning UI and design optimal code, this is generally due to the fact that Creative Artistic Juices rarely flow in the same veins as Creative Analytic Juices (except my friend Emmanuel Kitonyo). This has led to a need to segregate duties and thus a it results in a great deal of documentation and work on paint shop pro to design a useful UI that can be sent to the developers to implement AS IS. XAML now enables the implementation of the UI design to be done away from the code behind. so naturally the designers will be left with Expression blend and most of us with Visual Studio.

WPF has introduced the concept of Styles in desktop Apps (any one who has done CSS understands what am talking about). Thus it is my recommendation that every programmer/developer/engineer should have a run on this (not so newly) found technology. you can get Expression Blend, it really makes some neat UIs.

In the next few weeks I will run an article on how to create a mapping application for Kenya. Stay tunned.

On another front, I yesterday took some IQ test and scored really well and knowing the mindset of programmers/coders/developers/engineers and scientists of this computing field. I wish to challenge you my beloved reader to test yourself. You will feel really nice when you finally get to tabulate your "Superior" intelligence therefore confirming your long held belief that you are indeed...The Smarter one Now!!!...but don't take my word for it- do the test.

The Duckling phenomenon

An old adage says that the first thing a Duckling sees after being hatched from an Egg becomes the Mother, the analogy has never been more truer than when it is used to describe Programmers/coders. All programmers and other script-writing fellows are normal beings that normally follow the path (image) of their creators, the first language a programmer learns become the basis of argument and language of choice and consequently becomes the language to which they would fight to defend to the bitter end. Few characters have been able to escape this silly situation.

The big fight as far as programming is concerned can be summarized as a fight between two kinds of people. People who love to use BASIC-like languages vs. the Rest who love delimiting their lines with semicolons and using curly braces all over. The latter loves to bash the poor former and in day gone by “Dim x As Integer” loving coder/programmers/scripters were regarded as Para-Programmers who seemed to know nothing and had nothing to offer to the development environment. Fiery quips of “VB6 provides a better GUI development environment” were quickly pacified by the then quite effective “If VB (6) is so great, why doesn’t Microsoft use it?” and most definitely they (me included) didn’t have an answer to it. Arguments of Memory Access (like anyone used it anyway) were additional armory in the Arsenal of the Pro-semicolon faction. As they years passed so the argument evolve and with the evolution (re-writing) of VB6 to VB.NET and finally we had something in common - the CLR that made “Us Equal and Had No” equal (sorry Java Folks). Thus the argument changed form to “VB.NET can do anything C# can do.” This has been going on for a while and is kinda tiresome. So this is what I say, if you only know one language, you are crippling yourself. The world is out there, the weekend is ripe, fire up a new IDE and jot down a few lines of a not so friendly language –you might actually like it.

By the way what happened to “Managed C++”? No one seems to be defending it so much!