That's because LessThanDot is now no longer hosted on a dedicated server over at godaddy.com but we moved to host4geeks

You might be interested to know that we have moved up in the world.

Our old server was a dual core intel processor with 2GB RAM and 2x300GB disks with linux on it.

To our new server being a similar dual core intel celeron processor with 8GB RAM and 2x250GB disks. We needed the RAM more than anything.

The transition was smooth and not too many people noticed. Except for Ted who lost a few views on his last post, sorry Ted.

Enjoy.

And NCrunch.

Well here it is, number 500, a half millennium and this is also exactly my 5th year on LessThanDot. It all started with this post about OOP.

And it will all end with me giving away a Personal License for Resharper, Dotrace or DotCover (you can choose one of those three) and a named NCrunch License. Look below for more details.

I hear there are people who would not make a big thing of their 500th blogpost, they are wrong. Damnit, it took time and effort to write most of those 499 that came before this, and I'm kinda proud of that. So what shall I write about.

I'm not going to bore you with my best post, my most viewed post, my most liked post. I won't even tell you I'm awesome, because I know you all know that.

I was gonna ask some people to write something for this blogpost like I did for blogpost number 400. Been there, done that, boring as hell.

I could try to write my first good blogpost, but I will keep it mediocre like all of the other ones.

So I went on Google and looked up the number 500. But found it to be boring too.

I could write about what I did in those 5 years, trust me that is even more boring.

I could talk about my future, what future? This happens to be the last day of humankind so there is no future to look forward to.

Darnit, now what?

You'll be happy to note this post is not about VB.Net so that is positive.

I could tell a joke... but I'm not very good at that. Yes, I know I'm not a very good programmer either and I still do that.

Blogpost 500, my 5th year here and the end of the world and I have nothing to say.

Except that today is the birthday of Samuel L. Jackson, happy birthday man.

December 21st is a very boring date in history it seems. Nothing exiting happened on that date.

Oh wait this is the shortest date of the year. That's exiting. Oops, it is the shortest day on our side of the world and the longest on the other side of course.

If the world is still here tomorrow then I will start writing the next 500. See you on December 21 st 2017.

And now for the prizes.

I will ask 3 simple questions which you can answer in the comments and will then pick the winners ta random from the people that answer the question correctly. Don't forget to use a working emailaddress. The first one to be come out of the draw will get to choose which license he wants the second will get the remaining license.

Jetbrains who are sponsoring this post allow me to give you a personal license of either resharper, dottrace or dotcover (you can choose one of the three). Each one of them is an unmissable tool for any .Net developer.

And Remoc Mulder is giving away a named license of NCrunch.

So here are the Questions.

1. Who is the blogger on Lessthandot with the most views.
2. What is my preferred programming language.
3. Name 3 of the founding members of Lessthandot.

Have fun.

And thanks for listening.

The contest ends on the 25 of December at 10 am Belgian time.

Update

This competition is now closed.

Here are the winners.

In the comments of his last post about comments you will see a discussion about what is and what is not a backup.

In short any kind of copy of your data is or can be a backup. It is however not a backup strategy. Your backup strategy depends on the how you value your data or even parts of your data and how paranoid you want to be.

If you are a sysadmin you want to be very paranoid about your data, all of it. Because you are in charge of data that is not yours, so you have no idea about the intrinsic value of each and every document.

If you are the head of you family and you have all the pictures of your children on their then that data is important and your strategy should be appropriate for that situation. You will need off-site copies and you will like on-site copies. You will also want multiple copies.

Do you need multiple copies of your OS-drive? No, but it can be very handy if you have an image available so you can restore it quickly when disaster strikes. But if your house burns down you will probably need to buy a new laptop anyway and then that image is pretty much worthless anyway.

So let's just say that the people in the comments where not completely wrong but we can not rely on "normal" users to know those difference, and it is always better to be safe then sorry.

Also keep this in mind: local backups are for fast recovery of small disasters, external backups are for slower recovery of bigger disasters.

So tell your friends and family to have as much copies as possible in different places. And they should write it down too. Because we all know how they remember their wifi password when we need it.

And a disaster never happens when you want it to happen.

I think it was Scott Hanselman who once said that he would look at a candidates computer and see how many ConsoleApplication he had in his Projects folder. Because ConsoleApplications typically mean that you tried something, they have little use other wise ;-).

Reading in a Blogpost what the 8 things you probably didn't know about C# are is good but I doubt most of you will remember any of it in an interview if you have never used it in real life.

Trying those things out and seeing how they work and experimenting with them helps to remember a little better. Especially if you had trouble implementing what you learnt.

And writing about what you learnt also helps because bringing the message so that it might be understandable is more difficult than you thing. And no I don't think I am very good at it.

That's also the problem with the articles.books you read. All of it is viewed from the perspective of the author. Your perspective is different.

Adapting theory into practice is what makes a mediocre programmer a great programmer. And it also one of your greatest challenges.

Just look at the TIOBE Programming Community Index for September 2012

VB.Net is now the 15th most important language in the Galaxy(seeing as there are no other sentient beings in this galaxy).

Last year it was just 39th with 0.31% which means it more than doubled in just a year.

Given that it will be at nearly 2% next year and thus in the top 10. and in three years time it will thus be at 8% and in the top 5. Another 2 years later it will be at 32% and thus the leader on the board. Another 2 year later there will be just crumbs left for the rest.

Predicting the future is easy if you can look into the past.

This is kinda how they predict the weather too.

Of course all of the above might be wrong.

Anyway, I don't do it for you. I do it for me.

I learn by writing. I learn by making the demos. I learn from you.

For example in my last post I made statements that something was impossible in VB but it was possible to do in C#. And all of a sudden someone leaves a comment and tells me I'm wrong and that I forgot something.

And you know what, he was right. I did forget that VB did that. But I learned and remained graceful in my defeat.

My blogging about the resharper plugin learned me how complex resharper really is and how driven they are to help the community to work with their product. I got in contact with the right people that help me along.

I also learned that you can get good service if you blog (rant) about something.

I also learned that I am not alone with my problems.

And when did I learn all this? I learned all this in the last two weeks.

So yeah I do this all just for me, me, me. Despicable old me.

And so should you.

I know it takes effort and dedication. I know it takes time and energy. I know you are timid and anti-social. But don't worry, I am timid and anti-social too. And I don't have much time and even less energy.

I have written over 450 posts on this site so far and I think it made me a better programmer.

And I'm not very good at this kind of posts so I'll stop and let you get on with writing your next post.

And if you want you can always do it here on LessThanDot. It is free and you get a dedicated public. Yeah, I like this site ;-).

A few hours later I got a mail from someone at flexera software.

My name is ..., and I’m a Senior Technical Support Manager with Flexera Software. Your blog post and tweet were recently brought to my attention, and I wanted to reach out to discuss the situation directly with you. I’m very sorry to hear of your frustration with the overall activation experience, and I want to ensure we get things taken care of as quickly as possible. At the time of receiving this email, have you received an email with your corresponding response code to allow you to activate successfully? If not, here are the missing pieces of information I’ll need to track this down:

God only know how he got that particular emailaddress because I used 2 others to try and activate their product. I'm guessing that G+ has something to do with that.

Anyway I replied and got the response code.

So this week I had to install their product on another computer (the build server).

And again I did not recieve the responsecode via mail. Oh joy. So I sent another mail.

And last Monday I had to install the limited edition on another computer and again I sent the activation mail and 2 days later I still don't have a reply.
I'm sure our company is not blocking the activation mails since I got the one before that after after 48hours.
I don't understand why you can't automate this process and make it faster. This way it is quit unusable, frustrating and a waste of time.

And I admit that I was a little less friendly this time.

But he responded in a correct and timely manner.

I will also take a deeper dive to find out why you’re continually having trouble. I’m not yet sure if it’s a problem on our end or yours, but I will take a closer look and work to get that resolved. Thanks for your continued patience.

And they did find a problem in their processing of the emails.

I also wanted to share the results of my research, and the good news is that we’ve found the problem. It was a problem on our end, not yours, and it was resolved about mid-day on Monday (9/10). All offline activations submitted after that time were processed successfully, and we don’t anticipate the problem occurring again.

I understand that things can go wrong in software, bugs happen to everyone.

But I'm still not convinced that me having to activate a free product is the way to go for them. If you want me to upgrade to a paying version of your product at a later time, you should make the free version as painless as possible for me as a user. I will choose your product on the trail version or on the free version that is out there. I understand that you want my emailaddress for marketing purposes. But activating that free product seems like a waste of mine and their time.

I find it especially strange that I could not use the same activationcode on multiple computers the code is PC specific. They probably use the same activation software for their paying version and don't bother to write something different for the free version.

Mind you, I had to use the manual process because our proxy didn't like their online method. So normally it would be easier to activate.

So even though I am very happy with their service I can not be happy with my experience with their product. I would have rather not needed the service at all.

I am a one man team of developers. This has the advantage that I work with the most awesome developers in the world. But this also means it is kind of difficult to learn new things. For this of course the internet is a great place.

Blogging is a great way to learn and a great egoboost from time to time or a humbling experience when you get it wrong. And it is always good to read other peoples blogs. Most people however will limit themselves to simple examples to get the point across, which is understandable.

And then you have twitter. But twitter is limited in characters. So then comes opensource.

Reading someone else's code can be a good way to learn but you have to be sure to not learn the wrong thing. Of course you can learn from someone else's mistakes too. And there is plenty of code to read on Github, codeplex and Google code. More code than you can ever read in one lifetime.

And then the last step is to actually contribute something. I kinda think I already contributed to some projects by submitting bugreports. But there is nothing more satisfying than making the changes yourself.

The story

So last weekend I was writing a blogpost about servicestack and easyhttp and I thought the easyhttp needed a way to add the queryparameters in a better way than me having to concatenate the string myself. So I discussed this with Hadi Hariri, the creator of easyhttp. And he told me he would be glad to accept my pull request. I for one thought it was going to be a simple change.

So I forked the code. And made the change. Simples! No not really. For one easyhttp uses mspec and for some reason I could not get the resharper test runner to run those tests. So I gave up on that and wrote some nunit tests instead and Hadi would convert them when he had the time.

Fast forward a week. Hadi didn't have time to write the mspec files and had therefor not yet granted me my wish, uh pull request. So I set about trying to run the tests and convert them myself. I discovered that ncrunch ran the tests. I had not yet used ncrunch in anger, but I can tell you it works. Of course some of them did not pass on my machine. Because I did not have couchdb installed. So I installed it and made a database. Another new thing I learned.

So I converted the nunit tests to mspec and made everything pass. And told Hadi about this. Hadi then rejected my first pul request and I made a new one.

We skyped a little about the code and Hadi thought it would be nice if also the post, put, stash,... So he rejected my pull request again. And I set about making the changes and added more tests. And then I made another pull request. And this time it was accepted. And built into a brand new version of easyhttp. Namely 1.5.3.

Conclusion

I learned at least 4 new things while doing this. So what more reasons do you need to contribute to an opensource project? Oh yeah you might want to look for someone as awesome and patient as Hadi for your first pull request.

The problem seems to be that most people first find a pattern and then try to solve all their problems with it. Then decide it doesn't work for them and decide never to use that pattern again because by now the pattern has become an anti pattern.

Have you ever tried DDD? Have you ever seen how poor it can perform? Have you ever tried making it perform better and then come to the conclusion that you are no longer doing DDD like it was meant to be? Did you read the part in the book that says DDD is no suitable for all projects? I see a pattern there.

MVC is bad let's invent MOVE and use that, or better yet let's use MVVM.

People seem to start of with a pattern and then build their software around that and then they start hitting some walls and they build ladders to get around those walls. And then instead of getting a maintainable app you get a big mess, because you are trying to use a pattern for a problem that it wasn't meant to solve.

Before you use a pattern you better make sure you have a problem that needs fixing.

CRUD apps aren't a problem that hasn't been solved before, but I see so many attempts to find yet another way of solving it. Most likely because it is just boring.

Patterns are there to solve common problems but it seems that people are just creating problems so they can fit their pattern to that.

KISS is so much more maintainable then adding layer upon layer of abstraction.

And don't forget you are writing software so you can add value to the business side of things and not to boost your ego.

Just some ramblings of an old man.

I had to tell him what an array was. I had to tell him what a property was. I had to tell him how to make a generic list. I had to tell him why it was a bad idea to return a System.Xml.XmlDocument in a webservice. And why did he use strings for everything? What happened to date and ints and complex types?

Nothing like such a thing to scare the living daylights out of me. Because I will have to use those services. I count on them to work as intended. I count on them to repair them if something goes belly up.

We are paying them for a good service and the least I can expect is a reasonable programmer that knows what he is doing.

Would you go the a garage where you know the mechanic knows nothing about your cars and needs your input to tell him where your sparkplugs are.

Is this because our industry has a lack of professionals? Is this because our industry makes it to easy to write bad code? Is this because we make RAD development possible without requiring the user of your tools to know what code they generate?

And you know what? Our managers are more than happy to pay them for their services, because the code does more or less what they ask for. And it's the result that counts. And it might even come in on budget (for now).

It's sad, very sad. But I guess things like that happen in every industry. Because all that matters is making money and staying within budget.