Jimmy Sole the Renown PHP Programmer is Back Online

Check out this great post from DIGG:
[Jimmy Sole had decided to take a break from blogging for a while. Now he is back and beginning to blog about PHP and will soon be blogging about many other web related programing tasks and perhaps some gaming and photography. Check out JimmySole.com today.]

Apparently Jimmy Sole changed his mind and for some reason he's not going to post any great PHP article in the near foreseeable future.

.NET Butchering is trying to launch an initiative to convince him to change his mind. If you're not sure just yet wether you wanna support the initiative or not my advice would be to go have a look at Jimmy's website and you'll make up your mind soon enough. If you decide to endorse Jimmy Sole please leave a comment on his blog.

read more | digg story

How long can a developer survive without Google?

How many times did your boss come up with "can we do X?" and you didn't have a clue about it but answered "Yes, no probs at all - consider it done"? You were probably thinking "WTF - I have no idea about this", and first thing you do when you're back and safe at your desk is googling the damn thing up. We can do stuff like that only because developers are merging into a collective intelligence through internet + Google.

Mortality rate (= getting the axe = being let go = being fired) would be dramatically higher between developers if Google wasn't there to keep them from falling apart (or reverting to slow and painful alternatives) every time they have to learn something new (meaning almost every day unless you are a Reporting Engineer - if so good luck with that).

I am not saying nothing new here, just that today being able to quickly find answers on Google is - if not the most important - at least the second or third most important skill of a developer/software engineer.

Said so, I tried a little experiment: I kept track of how many times I look up work-related stuff using Google during an average day of work (9 to 5 let's say):

10:05 - looked up C# 'as' operator to refresh a few concepts

10:48 - looked up COM on C# sample (there's always something wrong - if you do suck)

12:30 - looked up CoCreateInstance COM function

14:30 - looked up Abstract Factory Pattern sample (no good - Factory is enough for me)

15:55 - looked up T-SQL reference for 'collate' statement

16:40 - looked up osql to run .sql scripts from SQL through xp_cmdshell (BAD idea!)

So turns out on an average day I looked up 6 times on Google - none of those things were crucial for what I was doing but I needed to shed some light on some doubts or explore possibilities I wouldn't have had otherwise. To answer the headline, I start craving for Google after a couple of hours. After a day I would probably start to freak out. After a week or two I'd probably quit (OK , maybe not, maybe I'd switch to Yahoo before quitting). I am not able anymore to count all the times Google really made my day- and I have to say that this is the reason why I opened this blog, to participate in this awesome process of merging my experience based knowledge with the average guy out there who's probably doing the same.

In my experience sometimes people are ashamed of looking up stuff on Google - well they shouldn't be since today is more the 'look up on google skill' is more valuable for a developer than any other static skill and you don't have to waste your time trying to memorize APIs or looking for perfect references 'cause google is the perfect reference (if you know how to filter all the crap - obvious). Sometimes it is astonishing to see people that revert to Google (or the web in general) only if all other means fail after a few days of blood-sweating quests (meaning all the books on the shelves and everyone in the company have been consulted) - it is (most of the times) the other way around guys.

I won't go as far as saying that I couldn't do my job without google (did I already do that?) - but certainly I couldn't be as productive without.

OK - enough boredom for today.

P.S. if you don't agree I'd like to hear why.

Google Chrome Drawbacks (for lazy developers)

If as a user and software engineer I am nothing less than aroused by Google Chrome release after reading the brilliant comic (Google Chrome Comic) they are using as presentation, as a mere nitty-gritty developer I am somewhat worried about the fact that we'll have to bitch with yet another browser in order to produce cross-browser web apps.

It might seems a little obtuse (or plain lazy) - but yet at the moment if you are developing a ASP.NET application and you set as a system requirement IE x - no one complains.
On the other end we all now that if you start requiring something different than IE (i.e. Firefox or Google Chrome now) complaints will flood back like crazy.

Hence you have two possible ways to go:

1) develop your ASP.NET web-app optmized for IE (short for 'we didn't even bother running it even once on Firefox or anything else, so if it breaks it is YOUR problem')
2) develop a cross-browser application (short for 'we developed it on Firefox and que serà serà')

Option 2 could now assume a hell of a new meaning (I am talking stuff like adding yet another 'if' to all your javascripts) - possibly nothing will change since the google guys are sound guys and the webkit blah blah blah and the new javascript virtual machine (V8 - that has a specific API which can be included by other browsers and so forth) hell yeah.

Anyway apart from complaining regardless (I am a developer - it's my nature), I am looking forward to put my hands on the thing and assist to a new chapter of Browser Wars (coming soon on your machines and portable devices).

[.NET] How to Simulate HttpContext Cookies

This might be useful if you're developing an ASP.NET application and you need to Unit Test (for example with NUnit or some other unit testing framework) some .NET component but you cannot do it because your classes use cookies.

using System.Web; 
using System.IO; 
using System.Web.Hosting; 
//...
//...
//...
//Initialize this stuff with some crap
string appVirtualDir = "/"; 
string appPhysicalDir = @"C:\Documents and Settings\"; 
string page = @"localhost"; 
string query = string.Empty; 
TextWriter output = null; 
//Create a SimpleWorkerRequest object passing down the crap
SimpleWorkerRequest workerRequest = new SimpleWorkerRequest(appVirtualDir, appPhysicalDir, page, query, output);
//Create your fake HttpContext instance 
HttpContext.Current = new HttpContext(workerRequest);
//Create your fake cookie 
HttpCookie myCookie = new HttpCookie("myTestCookie", "value"); 
HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.Add(myCookie);
//...
//... somewhere else in your code
//...
//create a cookie object 
HttpCookie anotherCookie;
//Get your cookie from the HttpContext 
anotherCookie = HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.Get(0);
string cookieName = anotherCookie.Name;//cookieName should be now "myTestCookie" 
string cookieValue = anotherCookie.Value;//cookieValue should be now "value" 

You can use the same strategy to stuff the HttpContext with whatever you may need - maybe your problem are not cookies but some other HttpContext property your classes use.

Anyway I didn't figure this out all by myself - most of the inspiration came from this post on Haacked: Simulating HttpContext (btw - he says he has a better version of the post in the first line but for what I needed it I do not agree).

[Poll] Favourite Web Technology - Result

Hi there,

the first .NET Butchering poll - What's is your favourite web technology - is closed.
We had 78 votes in 10 days, which is not a lot but is something considering we've been around just for a few months.

To cut a long story short, PHP (40 votes - 51%) kicked ASP.NET's ass (36 votes - 46%). Just a few votes Ruby ( 11 - 14%) and JSP (9 - 11%), which might be considered as a good result for ruby but a very poor result for JSP (understandable, as working with Java Server Pages is a real pain in the ass). For the Others section (19%) we had a number of comments about Django, indicating the guy is kicking and screaming right now.

I'd say the result confirms PHP as the nicest web technology around, and ASP.NET as the hottest for the industry. Bye bye JSP, welcome Django.

[Poll] Which web technology do you prefer?

Hi butchers,

this is .NET Butchering first poll, and we're asking you about your fave web-technology: your favourite, not the one you are using (if they're the same then you're lucky bastards). It is a multiple choice poll so you're not forced to let anything out. If you go with none of the above you can leave a comment to let other people know what you meant. The poll will last for 10 days.

All the bets are on.