It wasn't long ago everyone was talking about a whole new way of working. It started with telecommuting in the 90's, but spread in this century to something far bigger. Remote work as a way of life, virtual teams, outsourcing, offshoring ... the scale just kept growing and the savings for companies appeared to be at least partly met by happy staff, whether that was a guy in the city who didn't have to spend 90 minutes each way in traffic, or a guy who was able to keep living in his small town while working for the big city firm so far away, or even a guy in a developing country who was able to earn more than his neighbours and follow the lure of high tech and problem solving at a time when no firms in that country were offering those jobs. I know many people in the big cities and the developed countries lost their jobs to those people, and I know it wasn't always simple to find traditional employment once the world of work started to change. Still, the world and the way many people in it earn a living changed and will not be changing back.

That said, in the mid 90s everyone I knew who was associated with any of this "new way of working" had come to realize it wasn't just a fire and forget sort of thing. You had to communicate a lot. And while technology made some ways of communication simple and cheap, so that video calls and conference calls and instant messenger and desktop sharing and so on are all vital, it couldn't do it all. You have to get face to face still, and you have to do it regularly. I recently finished a 10 month contract for clients three thousand miles away. I did the vast majority of the work from here, and had phone calls and livemeetings many times a week. But every 4 to 6 weeks I got on a plane and I went there. And wow, the work we got done in those few days! Mini hallway meetings, lunches, dinners -- I typically could "touch" half the project participants in just two or three days, and solve seemingly intractable problems by going to people's offices and listening to them and looking at their body language and telling them they could trust me or asking them what the real problem was. It made such a huge difference to the success of the project. I didn't get paid for the time I spent travelling to them, or the nights spent away from my family, but I gladly invested that time to make everything go smoothly and to be a successful remote worker.

Some other folks have noticed this too, and in a far more systematic way. How's this for a conclusion: "... common workplace-relationship problems, such as broken commitments, mistrust and misrepresentation of information, occur more than twice as often with virtual teams, as opposed to teams located in the same building. " Yikes! Apparently it's partly because things we do when we're upset with people work well if you see if each other regularly, but make things worse if you're apart. Or this useful summary: "teams are a lot more effective when they're working with their friends in another country than when they're working with those stupid offshore idiots who never understand our designs or requirements." So in that context, what could be a worse way of saving money than lowering the travel budget to zero and not letting people visit each other any more?

Yet that is exactly what's happening in a lot of companies. If it's happening in yours, do something about it. You need to visit your colleagues. If not, when your projects go pear-shaped, you may find the whole concept of virtual teams gets thrown out with it. And that would be a real shame.

Kate

I am pleased to learn that at least one of the sessions I submitted for Tech Ed Europe in Berlin has been accepted:

The Windows API Code Pack: How Managed Code Developers Can Easily Access Exciting New Vista and Windows 7 Features

Accessing new Windows 7 or Vista features is a challenge from managed (.NET) code. The level of interoperability required is out of reach for many developers. The Windows API Code Pack for the Microsoft .NET Framework is a sample library you can use in your own projects today that provides access to new user interface features (taskbar jumplists, libraries, sensor platform and more) as well as "behind the scenes" features that make your applications more aware and responsive (restart and recovery, power management, and more.) Discover a shortcut to Windows 7 and Vista development for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# programmers and how you can get involved.

Now comes the logistics fluffle of getting everything booked, telling "my" teams I'm going, and possibly picking up some other talks or panels or whatnot while I'm there. I'm looking forward to it already! I love Tech Ed Europe - it's such a well run show and the other speakers are a delight to spend time with and learn from. The energy is always good and on top of that the destination is fabulous. I adored Barcelona, so now it is time for Berlin to show me what she's got. What a week we've picked to be there!

 

You can still register at a discount. See you there!

Kate

I've done several Tech Ed talks, in Europe and the US, in which I've demoed lambda expressions, a new language feature coming in C++0x and implemented in Visual Studio 2010. If you missed your chance last year to watch my Tech Ed Europe talk, it's still available on page 3 of the "last year's highlight's" page. But that's 80 minutes and covers more than just lambdas. If you would be up for investing a tenth of that time, try this Channel 9 piece featuring Thomas Petchel. He's obviously VERY familiar with the STL and he illustrates perfectly how writing dinky little functions to initialize arrays can be tedious and time consuming, and how lambdas make them faster. If you watch that and like what you see, go ahead and give my Tech Ed talk a listen as well.

Kate

Recently I came across an article suggesting how a good developer should comment their code. This was aimed at those writing SQL scripts, but that doesn't particularly matter. The rules were the same ones I lived by in the 70's and for a long time since then. For example, at the start of each file there should be a modification history, like this:

/* Title: 002 - Setup SQLCMS.sql
Purpose: Setup the various components for SQL CMS
Version: 1.1
Modification History:
04/30/2009 - Buck Woody - Initial Script Creation
05/15/2009 - Buck Woody - Added MAPS load scripts

I copied Buck's since I don't have any like this myself kicking around. And why not? Because VSTS and TFS take care of that for me. Who changed it, what they changed, and why is all available in the repository. Duplicating it in the file itself just gives you another task to forget, and another pair of locations that might get out of sync. So I don't do these any more.

There's another kind of comment that we all used in the 70's and 80's and that was the "explain your names" comment. When you only had 8 characters to work with, you needed a big block of comments that told everyone that NPPLINV was Number of People Invited and CIDMNEW was Calculate Interest, Daily Method, New or whatever. But we don't have name length restrictions any more. So why do I still see this sort of thing:

Dim ClientName as String      ' Variable to hold name of client
Dim ClientBirthDate as Date   ' Variable to hold birth date of client
Dim ClientRepID as Integer    ' Variable to hold ID of client rep

(Don't believe me? I saw this very code yesterday in a VB6 app I was debugging.)

As Jon Torresdal points out, if you choose your function names and variables well, you don't even need those single lines that explain funky-looking calculations. Extract your weird stuff to a function, even if it's a single-line function, and it explains itself. You can see a similar approach, though comments are never mentioned, in Justin Etheredge's post about isolating logic into little functions.

So let's see, no comments at the top to explain what the file is, no comments after each variable to explain its strange and abbreviated name, no comments before funky calculations because they've been refactored into single line functions ... well what comments even remain, then? Well there's commented-out code - but I have a rule against that. There's this sort of thing:

'only update confirmed date the first time it's confirmed
If DateConfirmed = Nothing OrElse DateConfirmed = New Date() Then
    DateConfirmed = Today
End If

Sometimes these comments are there because the developer wrote the comments first, as pseudo-code, then filled in the code. Other times they are just an attempt to translate the code into English for the reader. Does it help? Well, maybe. But comments are becoming less and less important as time goes by. Interesting.

Kate

I've read a few articles lately that have no praise for the praise sandwich. If you haven't heard that name before, it refers to something like this:

Joe, I really like the confidence and energy you bring to your work. But yesterday's outburst was unprofessional and frankly unacceptable. It's the sort of thing that could get you fired. But you're such a smart guy that I'm confident you'll never do anything like that again. You're an important part of the team and we're all glad you work here.

You start out by saying something nice, then criticize, then say something nice again to end the meeting on a positive note. So what's wrong with that? Well partly it's all the "but" in there. I've talked about that before. There's more to it, though. Esther Derby says it "tends to erode trust in the feedback givers intentions, and once that's gone, there's not much chance any useful information will get through" which is a very good point. Her advice about how to deliver criticism is very good, most especially "don't sell past the close." Art Petty says it is "insulting to the receiver and borderline deceitful" and is really about making the criticizer feel better, not the recipient. Of his tips, I especially like "link the issue to business impact" - one of the real strengths the boss brings to any situation is the extra information about the consequences of errors. I have found over the years that people who write code all day really don't see a problem with broken links or bad images on live websites, because it still works and it's not like there was a code problem. That's just one example of course, but if you want to change someone's behaviour, it's important that they actually understand why it's truly a problem.

I couldn't count the number of times I've had to tell someone they really screwed up. I know there were times it was as little as two words. After establishing the facts of the matter, I once just sighed and said "Not cool." That was all that employee needed to be told. I've also had very long and heated conversations that did not result in changed behaviour. These days I go for shorter over longer. And I don't do sandwiches.

Kate

I've mentioned the sensor improvements in Windows 7 a little bit, but they really deserve a good long blog post of their own. Luckily for me, my fellow RD Sondre Bjellås has written it .

This is a handy demo board that does light as well as position (think Wii) with some buttons you can push. Sondre covers where to get the board, where to get the drivers, and a really simple sample app to get you started. Then you're going to want the Windows 7 Training Kit - the Hands On Labs have some fun demos. Check it out!

Kate

What language do you think this post by Jeff Atwood refers to?

There are over 220 billion lines of <language> in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world's actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million <language> programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many <language> transactions take place each day than Google searches - a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.

Wow. 220 billion-with-a-b? B as in Business? As in Business-Oriented-Language? You know, the only thing I like about COBOL (and I have written precisely one COBOL program in the three decades I've been paid to program) is that it made it possible to have a language called SNOBOL.

The comments are full of folks who are maintaining 30 year old apps with a million lines of code, but the thing about billion-with-a-b is that you need 220,000 such folks to hit that number, and what's more as Larry O'Brien points out 20 years ago folks said there were 30 billion lines, and while I can agree that existing apps are being maintained, I don't think there are 7 times as many lines of COBOL out there now as there were at its peak.

But that's not my point. My points is that when you live at the leading edge, the bleeding edge, you forget a really important rule: edges are thin. The handful of us who are moving our apps to 4.0 now, who are complaining about an incompatibility between our Visual Studio 2010 beta and our Office 2010 beta, who are using a language invented this century, are dwarfed by folks who have been using the same tools and the same languages throughout their entire career. These people are invisible because they don't come to conferences, attend user group meetings, buy programming books, or read blogs. Heck, at one of my clients, the AS/400 guys sat off to the side and behind a little wall of cubicle partitions that was double the height of everyone else's. Really. They also never came to all-hands meetings and were exempt from the company-wide .NET training I delivered.

So do these "dark matter" developers matter to the "bleeding edge" developers? I think they do. For one thing, when you have your shiny and exciting idea to change everything about the way some software works, these guys can cancel your whole project with one or two sentences. For another, they are likely the only ones who understand the data format, the business rules as actually coded, and the special cases that come up every 15 to 20 years. Not to mention they can work the text editor. If you find yourself in a situation with some COBOL (or equivalent) developers in it, don't ever tell them you didn't think they existed any more. That's my tip to you.

Kate

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the C++ standards world in mid July arising from the summer meeting of the ISO C++ committee. Agreement couldn't be reached on how to implement concepts. In the end it was decided not to include them in the next version of the standard.

What are concepts? They improve the experience for template consumers. C++ templates are amazingly powerful, but using them can involve a lot of guesswork and a lot of swearing. They're pretty easy to write, and just by typing a line of code you create a requirement, a pre-requisite, for anyone who wants to use your template. If you write a template that takes two instances of class T called t1 and t2, and then somewhere it says t1 + t2 or t1 < t2, then your template can only be used with types T that have the operator + or the operator <. Anyone who uses it for some other type is going to get an error message that might be useful, but might be your typical nasty template-related error message. That makes templates easy to write, but hard to consume. Short of actually reading through the code for the template, you can't know before you try compiling whether or not your consuming code actually meets the requirements for using the template.

Generics in .NET deal with this through constraints - the generic writer identifies the interfaces that must be implemented by any type that will use the generic - IComparable or IEnumerable etc. If you want to use the generic, you  implement the interface, and the compiler will help you get that done with readable error messages.

So that was the heart of concepts. Some sort of decoration you would put on your template to say "here is what I expect of those that use me." How important are they in general, and how important to C++0x?

• concepts’ presence or absence in C++0x just won’t make much difference to most users - Herb Sutter
  
• [concepts were yanked out and that is] a major setback for C++, but not a disaster - Bjarne Stroustrup
• removing them was our best available option both for C++0x and for concepts as a language feature - Doug Gregor
• Not the end of the world, but disappointing nevertheless - Alex Fabijanic

What do I think? I think that template consumers fall into two large categories - those who consume templates they wrote themselves, and those who consume the STL. If you wrote it, I hope you know what it needs, and if it's the STL, well you can paste your opaque error message into a search engine and someone's blog will tell you what you need to add to your class to use that template. I don't think there are a lot of people consuming poorly documented and sparsely used templates. I agree that concepts could result in that sector growing some day, but that few developers are walking around wishing for them or feeling the pain of not having them. I'm sure it's a disappointment to everyone who put so much work in to them, and who will continue to work on them towards inclusion in a future version of the standard, but the rest of us can relax and get ready to see the other C++0x goodies included in a standard where x might actually fit in a hex digit.

Kate