Planet Smalltalk

More diagrams produced for MirrorImage documentation. These two show the Class/Namespace model in VW. In addition to the PNGs embedded below, you can grab them as PDF. I think that's more immediately useful than SVG, and the OmniGraffle sources aren't relevant.

I've also added a PDF form of the Class - Metaclass diagram.

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On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at Announcements, which are a replacement for Trigger Events

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk daily

The Pharo project has launched:

Pharo wants to take a fresh look at the Smalltalk philosophy and current implementations. The idea is to produce high quality open-source packages that will be loadable on a micro kernel.

I wonder what pickup will be like from the general body of Squeak developers?

Technorati Tags: squeak, pharo

UPDATE 26 June 2007: Tom found a "fix" for this. See the end of this post.

Earlier this week I mentioned a bug in Visual Studio 2008:

That's all well and good when the code spitter works correctly. When it doesn't, you get to deal with weird problems. Lately I've had two rounds of a problem with a large project converted from VB.NET in VS 2003 to VB.NET in VS 2008. Microsoft provides conversion utilities built into VS 2008 and they seemed to run OK, but I and another coworker have hit the same problem in our UIs.

Tom and I had each seen this a few more times by the end of the week and we could not find a way around it. Our most recent hope was that rebuilding the forms from scratch (gawd that'll be a lot of work) would stop this from happening.

It didn't.

We've narrowed our understanding of the symptom down to the point where we know that as soon as we do anything that allows the IDE to update the designer information for a form, any RichTextBox on the form has its Text property assigned to an expression that does not exist. Here's an example I just reproduced. First, the correct code:

	Me.tbIdentity.DetectUrls = False
	resources.ApplyResources(Me.tbIdentity, "tbIdentity")
	Me.tbIdentity.Name = "tbIdentity"
	Me.tbIdentity.Text = ""
 

And the error code, note that tbIdentity.Text is changed:

	Me.tbIdentity.DetectUrls = False 
	resources.ApplyResources(Me.tbIdentity, "tbIdentity") 
	Me.tbIdentity.Name = "tbIdentity"
	Me.tbIdentity.Text = Global.Cincom.KnowledgeMaster.EventMasterFull.c_KMDisplayTextBox.rtfText_Text  
 

Too weird. I keep changing the value assigned to Me.tbIdentity.Text to an empty string when I check the code in, and Tom deletes the line. Touch the form in a later editing session and it breaks again. Googling has been unproductive, the base error message "blah is not a member of blah" is too common, and words like member really throw off the search results when it comes to programming forums where the Google crawler bot is "not a member of this forum".

This only seems to happen to stock RichTextBoxes, so maybe when we convert our apps to use DevExpress widgets, this will go away. I hope so. It's a huge pain.

UPDATE: A circumvention has been found.

Tom noticed that this was only happening with Rich Text Boxes where the initial text is an empty string. He experimented and found that setting any other value for the initial text will prevent Visual Studio from damaging the generated code. Of course, we really want these fields to be initialized to String.Empty, so we're adding explicit updates in the Form's constructor or (my preference) in the Form Load event.

Technorati Tags: programming, software, visualstudio, 2008, vs2008, bugs, generated-code, richtextbox

Jim spotted a blog post by Sergey Solyanik regarding his leaving Google to return to Microsoft. Of course, Jim had something to say about the post (and it is a blogworth post) but he took it in a very anti-Microsoft direction. I think this missed some key aspects of Sergey's decision making process.

U finally made time this afternoon to read Sergey's whole post and found some things that were particularly interesting.

First, Sergey feels that Google gets the whole management/employee relationship thing right. Managers should support and enable and direct, but most of them should not be involved in decision making in certain areas. For example:

[P]eer-based review model where one's performance is determined largely based on peer comments, and much less so based on the observations of the manager. The idea that a manager is far easier to fool than the co-workers are is sound and largely works. A very important side-effect that this model produces is an increased amount of cooperation between the people, and generally better relationships within the team.

I know a lot of managers and team leads who would be very uncomfortable with this, but they need to learn to trust their people more.

Second, Sergey hits on something that some agile/xp books have mentioned:

Free food. More than just a benefit, it is a tool for increasing communications within the team, because it's so much easier to have team lunches. I don't think making Redmond cafeterias suddenly free would work (maybe I am wrong), but giving out free lunch coupons for teams of more than 3 people from more than one discipline to have lunch together - and at the same time have an opportunity to communicate ...

Food means more than convenience. Eating together is a social activity and helps people in groups develop an understanding of each other outside of the white board interactions of meetings. A company that feeds its employees says "we care about you" in a very personal way. I've heard a lot of anger over bogus cost cutting measures such as "no more free coffee" in my career. Small cash savings versus good will, sounds like a no brainer to me, but I'm not an accountant.

One food related change that I think hurt Cincom many years ago came about when the Clifton Engineering office was shut down. There was a cafeteria there and while the food wasn't free, the big lunch room was a gathering place where Cincomers could gather, break bread together, and interact with people outside their teams. We had several good card games going on, and some interesting non-computer discussions. When we moved to our new office, we lost that. No big lunch room, and while some teams eat together, I don't see a lot of mingling of people from different areas. There is a small cafe on the second floor of our building, but we sublet out part of a couple of floors and the cafe is not a "Cincomers only" venue.

Sergey left one company that felt developers were important and returned to another company that felt developers were important. I think there's some good information in his post that managers and developers should think about. His whole post is worth a read.

Technorati Tags: industry, culture, microsoft, google, management

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at ImageConfigurationSystem, which makes handling the command line a snap.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk daily, command line