Technology

.NET, SharePoint and Eclipse? Oh my!

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Earlier today someone asked me if it was feasible to do SharePoint development in Eclipse. So while my first thought was, “Are you f’n kidding me?” I decided to do a little looking around as I’m always interested in finding a way to do more .NET development on my Mac.

So here is my ultimate response to the question.

Short Answer: No. It is not feasible to do SharePoint development in Eclipse.

Long Answer: I could probably come up with a methodology to utilize eclipse (Assuming Java), to write some customizations that would interact with SharePoint web services, but it would never be truly integrated. Customizations might be in the form if an iframe out to a java page, or perhaps a java plugin embedded into an html/aspx page. I’ve done something similar with flash in the past. In fact if you really want to go down this road you’d probably be better off writing controls in flash, than Java, since you’d at least get a rich UI out of it. Of course with both tracks you’d probably spend more money in extra development time trying to get it all to work the way they wanted, than to just pay for a couple of VS licenses.

Now if you’re talking about using eclipse to develop some ajax functionality, that’s a little different. You’d still end up needing a tool like SharePoint Designer (SPD) to get the code into SharePoint (Though you could probably make due with just uploading the pages if it’s a publishing site). Eclipse might be a good ide to get the functionality working as a prototype. I sometimes use Coda the same way on the mac.

Now if you’re thinking about using a C# plug-in for eclipse, there’s no point. Even with all of the features that Visual Studio Express (The free version of Visual Studio) is missing it can still do more than any of the plug-ins I found for eclipse. You’ll also have no issues getting express for the latest version of Visual Studio. With plug-ins you normally have quite a bit of lag from the time a new version of Visual Studio comes out. And oh, did I mention that it’s free? Some of the plug-ins for eclipse cost money and the ones that don’t just seem to do syntax highlighting, and activate the compiler via a command line call. I can get that with Notepad++ (Also free).

Hope this helps any of you who might be curios about the same thing. I’m still looking for a good way to code .NET on the Mac. So far the best I’ve come up with are syntax highlighters since I’m usually dealing with versions too current for projects like Mono, but that’s better than nothing.

UPDATE 11/5/2011:

I’ve been using MonoDevelop off and on for a while, and while I like it, the issue I keep coming back to is that it will always be out of date. For example I like to do all of my web development using the Razor syntax in MVC 3. While Mono can execute MVC 3 and Razor code compiled from windows, the MonoDevelop tool cannot deal with Razor. (MVC 3 with asp.net seems to work fine.) This means that, for me at least, I still default to opening up a virtual machine for .Net development.

My Blog Reading List – The Quest To Keep Up

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A few weeks ago I talked about reading blogs to keep up with trends. This time I thought I’d share some of the blogs I’m currently tracking. I use google reader to manage my blogs and separate every thing into folders. Here is a list of my folders with a brief description, and also a few notes about the blogs I’m tracking in them as well as at what activity level I track them at.

Development – Blogs primarily about, what else, Software development. I don’t actually track a lot here, but what I do track I tend to read through. There are a few others I track, but they post so infrequently I’m not even going to list them here.
* Coding Horor: Jeff Atwood’s blog
* Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen
* ScottGu’s Blog: Scott Guthrie’s blog (Or as Hanselman refers to him “His Gu-ness”
* iPhone Developer News: This is really just so I don’t have to get Spam for Apple.
* Martin Fowler’s “bliki”: Mostly about Agile and customer interaction. More the business of software development as opposed to the implementation.

Marketing – These are blogs I follow to try and keep up with what is being discussed in the brand and user interaction world. While I’m not a marketer I like to know what is going on in this industry. Remember that the same poeple that marketers are trying to reach work at the companies that internal systems are also interacting with. If you ignoring what people are doing and interacting with outside of work, how can you expect to be able to build systems that help and engage them in the work place. I mostly just track through these quickly.
* Adverblog: I skim this one
* Advertising Age: I skim this one too
* BuzzMachine: It’s a skimmer
* Seth’s Blog: Seth Godin’s blog. This is probably the only one in this folder that I actually make an effort to read. If you’re familiar with Mr. Godin you’ll see some influences from him in my recent posts. While I don’t always agree with him I do find him interesting and thought provoking.

Geek Tech – These are blogs about cool technology. Everyone should be familiar with these, but I don’t think anyone has time to read all the posts. Besides most of them tend to report on the same thing. I usually skim for a while an only stop on items I think are interesting.
* Endgadget
* Gizmodo
* Mashable!
* Slashdot

Well I think that’s it. There are some others I track that are way off topic here such as Comic Book Resources, but this mostly covers the technology blogs. These add up to a lot of posts in a day and a week. It’s important to keep in mind that I many of these categories I skim in a few minutes and then mark everything as read. You don’t need to kill yourself to try and stay relevant.

Keeping up with the Jones’

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A few weeks ago I had lunch with a former colleague that I hadn’t talked to in several years. During the course of our conversation I learned that they are still maintaining vb.6 code and classic ASP in the current generation of the product. Now this isn’t meant to condemn anyone. It happens. The reason I bring it up is that the question of how to keep up to date was raised. He said he’s still learning about some of the features in .NET 2.0 and here we are getting ready for 4.0. So how do you keep up with what’s going on in the here and now when day in, day out you are working and thinking about ten year old technologies?

Here are a few suggestions I made to him and I pass them along in the hopes that they might spark some ideas in someone else.

Work on personal side projects. It doesn’t matter if you ever complete the project. It matters that it be something your interested in. Build it with a technology you’ve never used before. If you can complete it and get it out in the world then all the better, but don’t get hung up on having to deliver something, you may never get started. The world is full of deadlines and commitments, have fun and learn something.

Re-think what your currently doing and about how you might re-architect it. You may be working with older technology out of necessity, but there is nothing stopping you from taking notes about how you could update things. This can also be the basis of a modernization strategy for your company. Not a bad way to help your career either.

Read. Not just technical books either. Read about trends in your industry. If you’re in a situation where you need to seriously up-level your skills, you may have several choices as to where you go. For example if your only getting started with .Net for VB or classic ASP why not learn C#. Interested in mobile devices? How about a little objective-C? The point is there may be trends in your industry or specialty that help determine where you go.

Read technical blogs. This can be a good way to keep up with what’s coming down the pipe, and give you ideas for personal projects. It can also be good if you only have limited time. Be careful here. It can be addictive, and also a bit overwhelming. If you find you have too may entries to keep track of, think about cutting back on a few. I have a few that I skim and then mark them all as read, and I have others that I try to read every entry. Be realistic as to what you can read, and be consistent with staying on top of it. That might mean checking in once a week or once a month. Find out what’s right for you and stay with it.

While this isn’t by any means an exhaustive list, I hope it gives you some ideas, and that you come up with even better ones you can share.

Faster SQL calls with index covering

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As sites and applications begin to scale on the data side of the equation, you can quickly find your database to be a bottle neck to performance. Index covering is one technique that can help speed up your queries dramatically.

Technique: Index Covering
Applies To: SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase (Possibly also Oracle, DB2)
When to use it: Thin queries (limited columns) that do not operate on the clustered index.

So what is index covering? In SQL Server when you perform a query on a table that returns only columns contained in a non-clustered index, then SQL will return the values form that index, thus bypassing reads to the actual data pages. This is called Index Covering, and can greatly reduce the IO needed to perform the query.

Let’s say you want to make a call to your database that returns all of your customer names when passed in a particular state. The clustered index on the Customer table is CustomerID.

Select FirstName, LastName From Customer Where State = ‘Oregon’;

SQL Will scan through all of the data pages looking for all of records where ‘Oregon’ is the state. If you have large data rows this can be fairly costly in terms of IO. The field State is a horrible candidate for an index as there are only a finite number of distinct values that can be placed in the field. So what’s a princess to do when her turing machine slows to a veritable crawl? Index covering.

Create Index cust_state On Customer(State, LastName, FirstName);

Since all of the fields needed for the query are now contained in the index SQL will go to the index, find all rows where ‘Oregon’ is the state, and then, seeing that all of the other columns it needs are in the index, it will return the results. In this scenario SQL will never touch the actual data pages. Because the size of the index pages are significantly smaller than those of the data pages, SQL uses less IO. Now place your clustered index in a different filegroup and your performance gain can be even greater. But that’s for a different article. Also note that our covered index would also work with the following query.

Select State, FirstName, LastName From Customer Group By State;

“I’m confused. You said earlier that State was a bad candidate for an index?!” Under normal circumstances it is. Good index practice would tell us to order our index columns as so (LastName, FirstName, State), with the most unique (selective) values first. Remember that when working with index covering we are creating an index for a special purpose. When dealing with large scale databases you need to start thinking differently about your data.

Large scale data systems like the ones I’ve been thinking about lately can seem more like data warehouses than OLTP systems. In some cases they are both at the same time. I think the biggest mistake a developer or architect can make is to become rigid in their thinking about how data needs to be defined and structured.

PS: For those of you who got the veiled reference to Diamond Age. Gr@75!

Performant Scalable Thoughts

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I’ve been filling my brain with thoughts of online community building and involving fans more in how you define your brand. I’ve been reading what I can in the space, whether it’s blogs or books trying to form a clear picture of where we are headed. Not just as an industry, but also as a connected society. For those of you paying attention, that’s right I said “fans” and not customers. If you aren’t thinking about your customers as fans, then you probably also think that this whole internet thing is just a fad.
So what does this have to do with Scalability? Lots! For those of you who don’t already know, it’s my job to translate what our marketing and design teams come up with into deliverable solutions for clients. As a digital agency this mostly consist of ways to communicate with brand fans, and a campaign that takes off can need to scale-up quickly to handle large amounts of users, then scale back down over time. At the same time you don’t want to spend an exorbitant amount of time (and client money) building a monolithic site that can infinitely scale if you are only expecting a few thousand users going to it. Don’t get me wrong. A few thousand well targeted users who are fanatic (there’s that word again) about your brand, can be a higher measure of success than 20 times that number who visit your site once, and never give you another thought. But what if your site takes off virally? Would you have to throw out your existing code and start over, or would you have all the pieces in place from the start that will help you scale?

While not every site needs to scale like facebook or twitter, there are several things that can be done with no impact to existing budgets that will help with scalability down the road and performance immediately. This post is the start of a thread on the subject of scalability and performance. While some posts will be short snippets of practical advice that any site can take advantage of, others will be targeted to specific problems involved in scaling a system.

So here is the first tidbit of information that can be used in any web site. It involves client side browser performance.

Most browser cache is case sensitive as it does a straight string compare of a named resource. Therefore if include a reference to an image file on a web page like so

<img src=”Image.jpg” />
it will download the file and place it in the browser cache. If you later reference the same image on the same or another page but change the case in the source url as such

<img src=”image.JPG” />

the browser will download the file from the server again as it perceives it as a different file/url, and create a second entry in the browser cache.

This isn’t a problem if your web server acts in the same manor as Apache where all urls are case sensitive to begin with. In this case the server will not recognize a resource unless the url is presented in the same case as the file on the server. Because IIS isn’t case sensitive a browser could potentially download a file hundreds of times if the case in the source url is slightly different every time.

Updates to Right Now and Galleries

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It’s been a while since I’ve made any updates to the site and I figured it was about time. Just a few minor updates, but it takes care of a few items that have been bothering me.

  • Right Now: There’s been an issue with the right now feature in some browsers where clicking the feature causes a postback that resets the page so that the window never appears on the screen. Looks like it’s working on all the major browsers now.
  • Image Gallery: I’ve never been fully happy with the visual layout and navigation of the image gallery. After rolling my own AJAX libraries for the past 3-4 years I recently dived into jquery. While I’ll probably always keep my own library for light-weight needs, I have to say that I do like the feature set of not only jquery, but also the tools that have been built on top of it. I’ve redone the image gallery with jquery and jquery tools.
  • Header Image: While this isn’t a functional change I did feel that the header was taking up too much space. I shrunk the height by 50px, and added a tag line. There is another revision I’d like to do to it, but that will have to wait for another time.

There are some other things I’ve been working on for the future, such as automatic updates to ping-o-matic, and forums. Actually the forums code is implemented, but I haven’t set up the categories and made it public. I also have a few other posts in the queue that I can hopefully get posted soon, including using jquery with SharePoint, and one about organizing technology disciplines around the notion of tribes.

That’s all I have time for now. Malignantly Yours, Will.