Sales people explained

It has always been hard for me to communicate with sales people. I think this is a problem most technical people experience. It doesn't matter whether they are selling me things, or selling my work. They just live in another absurd and parallel universe.

It is common knowledge that communicating across continents can be a challenge because of cultural differences. It's the same when communicating with sales people. These are the main differences to "normal" people as I see it.

• A more liberal approach to the truth or maybe just a more ignorant attitude towards facts. They are often only interested in the good story. I you want to hear about the perfect world or solution, do contact a sales person.
  
• A low signal to noise ratio.
  The goal for communication for a sales person is the communication itself. Whether any useful information is communicated is often not important. The entropy of a conversation can therefore be very low. Often it's just not worth the communication.
  
• Have no interest in, and no knowledge of what they speak of. The best feature of a sales person is his ability to small talk. Most of the time he won't have the slightest idea about what he is selling.
  

Don't get me wrong. I generally don't think salespeople are liars or bad people. I just don't think they always comprehend the stuff they are working with. Therefore it is harder for them to separate right from wrong. Therefore they are hard (or impossible) to communicate with.

Bulk calling of methods

You have your domain model defined in a class called DomainModel. You have a lot of usercontrols that handle seperate parts of the domain model. All the user controls implement the following interface:

You want to call the PopulateControl method on all your usercontrols to get data mapped to the UI. This is how you would do with plain.

When did things stop being natural

I might be a bit off on this post.

I'm just a bit confused with a word. To begin with everything was natural. When you apply a natural process to a natural substance, it will remain natural. So when and how did some things become unnatural?

Creating a bug report

I have seen some bad bug reports. This is my little guide how to write a useful bug report.

• Get to the point. It’s about a bug, and that’s what you should be writing about. It is of no in-terest why this bug is so important to you.
• Explain the context. Al though you might think the context is obvious, explain it anyway. Explain how you can reproduce it.
• Be polite. The people that are to fix the bug are probably very enthusiastic about fixing your problem. By calling them names they will be less so. They don't necessarily have anything to do with the bug in the first place.
• Give it a priority.

Validations in Plain

We thought we were very original when we thought of the validations for plain. It turns out that there is a NHibernate Validation project that uses the same idea.

Although we were not aware of the NHIbernate Validation (and I guess the other way around) the way the validations are defined are very similar. The biggest difference is that Plain validation is focused on the domain model and the UI. NHibernate is focused on the domain model and the data layer. Plain Validation has (or it is supposed to have) translations for displaying validation errors directly in the UI.

As the two validation frameworks have very similar capabilities, we might make a mapping for you.

Programs I'll lay out for a fresh install

I've seen a few bloggers listing the programs they want on their machines.

I have thought of this as well, and the conclusion is that the only program I need to be bothered installing is apt-get. When I have apt-get installed and it is pointed to the repositories I want, any other program is an ease to install and won't take long. I can wait untill I need that program to install it.

This of course only goes when I'm on Linux. There is no apt-get on Windows, and installing a fresh machine will take a looong time. Keeping track of licenses makes the process even longer. I won't go into that. :)

Being pragmatic

Being pragmatic means that you consider what works over what is correct or pretty.

I'm a big fan of being pragmatic. A big mistake I see is that people think that if you are pragmatic you should not be concerned with doing things smart. This is wrong. I believe pragmatic is about spending the least amount of time creating a thing that fulfills a need.
If the need is to be able to maintain it, the pragmatic solution won't be to hardcode everything.

The pragmativc solution is not:

• Ignore common sense
• Start coding before you think
• Avoid design

The pragmatic solution for me is almost always to stop and think about what makes sense. This is the way I solve my problems in the most optimized way. I hope you will too!

Configuring Sharpdevelop for web projects

I want a small .net IDE installation that is fast. I have for a long time been happy with Sharpdevelop but one big issue is that there is no default webserver provided that you can use to develop web apps on.

Luckily my good friend Kristian Gundry has fixed this for me.


By providing the right parameters you can start a webserver. Either you can start the mono xsp2 webserver or you can use the one that comes with Visual Studio Express.

Happy happy joy joy! :)