Doctor Deploys Blog

I follow Rob Conery irregularly because of his work on Subsonic. His comments about Subsonic development were useful in a time when I was trying to wrap my head around MVP, IoC, DAL and DTO. Rob is a fan of ASP.NET MVC and today his blog post railed on a project to introduce MVP to ASP.NET Web Forms due to the use of the word "productivity" in their 3-minute promotional video. The blog post and comments that followed looked a lot like an argument people try to make for or against the WiX toolset.

In this case, Rob took issue with the others’ claim that ASP.NET Web Forms provides "productivity" while ASP.NET MVC provides "control". So he provides a list of counter-reasons why ASP.NET MVC provides "productivity". His list basically is an amalgamation of engineering processes (mostly TDD and Agile practices) Rob believes results in quality code. The problem is that if you don’t value the same things (unit tests, separation of concerns, etc) or if you value things Rob does not (the editable DataSource backed Grid control, session state, etc) then his arguments won’t change your mind. And based on the tone in some of the comments, his arguments might actually be counter-productive to the discussion

I see the same sort of arguments about "GUI-based installation creation tools" vs. the WiX toolset sometimes. In fact, often the argument is exactly the same: the GUI tools provide "productivity" while the WiX toolset provides "control". When comparing tools based on a quality like "productivity" the "goodness" of one tool over another will be based on what you value. Arguing about that won’t get you anywhere.

That is why I long ago quit trying to convince people happy with their installation creation tools to switch to the WiX toolset. Use the tool that has the qualities that you value most. I use the WiX toolset because it has the qualities I like and I continue to work on it to meet qualities I admire most in others.

Original post by Rob Mensching

I’m not big on New Year Resolutions. Not even when the year begins a new decade. However, the typical days off around the holidays do provide some time to stop and reflect. And the one thing that keeps coming to mind is that there are a lot of thoughts in my head that I would like to blog.

Unfortunately, a typical blog entry takes me a couple hours to put together. I just don’t have those hours to spend like I used to. So, in the free time made available to me this holiday I’ve been thinking about why it takes me so long to write a blog entry and what to do about it.

After much thought, the issue comes down to quality. Quality is a tricky word. The depth of it is explored in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is a bit of irony there because Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the books that while reading, fuels my desire to write my own book.

But the desire to make each sentence "high quality" slows the whole writing process to a crawl and very little content comes of it. That leads to a frustrating back log of items to write. In turn, the frustration leads to a lack of desire to write. You can see how this gets us nowhere fast.

So, after much thought, I’ve decided to try a new tactic. I’m going to just write and post. That means that some ideas will end up here half baked. Other ideas might be missing the necessary back story for them to make much sense. Some yet might contain some serious grammar or sentence structure problems (comma splices are sure to be an issue).

However, my hope is that by relaxing a lot and simply getting the concepts written down, I will slowly improve my velocity at creating quality. Or maybe I’ll find that quality isn’t all that important. Either way, I hope to find more enjoyment in blogging.

I have not decided what velocity I should target. I’m thinking two blog posts in addition to the WiX Working Group video post on Thursday might round out the weeks well. I expect there will be quite a few more personal things posted but I hope to post more entries about setup and particularly the WiX toolset. Of course, responses to your questions or comments could easily turn into entries here as well. <smile/>

So here’s to my pseudo-New Year Resolution for 2010. Happy New Year and I hope to see you around here a bit more.

Original post by Rob Mensching