<CharlieDigital /> Programming, Politics, and uhh…pineapples

Windows Azure “Introductory Special” — WTF?

WTF Microsoft? Seriously?

This is what you call an "introductory special"?

This is fine and all, except in the months of January and February -- in fact, since I've signed up -- I've never used the caching service.  Heck, I've barely used Azure!  How can I possibly be billed for $46?  Yeah, I'm pretty much cancelling my sub after this; can't waste my time and energy every month double checking to see if I'm being ripped-off by Microsoft.  And on top of all that, I have to wait 4 hours for a support callback...

Now here is my theory: I am being billed $4/day just for having 128MB of cache allocated, whether I use it or not.  But this is beyond fucking stupid. It hurts adoption because it drives developers -- like me -- away from even signing up in the first place if I have to police by billing, even when I'm not using the service.  And seriously $46/mo. for having 128MB of web accessible memory available?  I get more memory allocated from my $7/mo. hosted shared server.  WTF?

I can accept the cost if there was some way to opt out or if there was some notice that I would be billed for being allocated the cache space or if there was some à la carte way to turn it off -- my mistake for not noticing in those cases.   But I was not given an option to opt out of cache, I was not notified that I would be billed regardless of actual usage, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off cache.

This is some serious bullshit.

Why Teachers Are _Really_ Leaving the Profession

I caught a portion of an interview last night on NPR as I was in my truck, leaving Lowes.

I sat there for a moment, dumbfounded by what I was hearing and entirely outraged by the bullshit that Republican Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman was spouting.

LYDEN: Last week, the Associated Press reported that nearly 5,000 Wisconsin teachers retired since the beginning of the year and that's more than half of the number from 2010. It's not a great way to start the year. Could the Republicans who passed this bill have done a better job of talking about it?

GROTHMAN: Well, I'm trying to talk about it right now. I will point out that at least one of the reasons why more teachers are retiring - we have heard anecdotal evidence that some of the worst teachers not waiting around for the inevitable and finally deciding it's time to retire. And I think some of those teachers who shouldn't have been there all along realized that without collective bargaining their time is up.

I was kind of riled up by this given that my wife is a former teacher (now an Learning Disabilities Teacher Consultant, but still works in the school system).  I've seen the dedication that she put into her work, I've seen the long hours grading papers and dealing with parents, I've seen results of her labor when parents stop her in stores years later and thank her for transforming her kids, I've seen parents specifically request to be placed into her class.

For all of this, she collects a relatively meager paycheck, but it's her passion and it's rewarding for her to be involved in the education of children -- in one capacity or another.  The low salary is made up for, somewhat, by the benefits that she receives.  Today, she came home with news about our insurance premiums: we're now required to pay about $280/mo. more for our health insurance plan because of changes enacted by Chris Christie and possibly the entire sum in a few years time.  To be clear, the sum of those premiums for a family of 3 is pretty much more than half of her monthly income -- enough to pay the mortgage on a small house.

I don't want to get into a long discussion on whether tax payers should or should not pay for the benefits of public employees, but at the end of the day, it is my belief that public employees are by-and-large hard working, middle class folk who provide valuable services to the taxpayers that are often hard to put a price tag on.  A good teacher can set a child on a path for success and help produce members of our society that contribute to our prosperity instead of being a drain on it.

But how can we possibly entice highly qualified candidates to these important jobs when as a society, we decide to strip these individuals of the benefits which largely make up for the otherwise less then illustrious labor of love?  Even those with a passion for teaching and helping transform kids will have to do a double take now and consider alternative career paths as we the movement against labor and the public sector continues to erode the middle class in America.

So I say to Glenn Grothman: the reason that teachers are retiring from the profession or quitting out-right is because society has created an environment where it's become untenable to put in the long hours and dedication required to be a good teacher for the already low salaries.  As the benefits that used to make up for the low wages continue to be eroded, the financial calculus will surely force more teachers -- especially the smartest and most qualified -- to reconsider their career choices for more profitable alternatives.

Post script: I think this is another case of Republicans driving the public sector to fail (by creating a dis-incentive for the most qualified, most skilled applicants) so that they can later point to the failure of the public sector!  Well, no shit, Holmes!  If you set the system up for failure, of course it'll fail.  Instead of the worst teachers leaving the profession, it's the best teachers that will leave the profession for better paying opportunities because these individuals are the ones that have the highest qualifications, the highest levels of professional ethics, and the highest ability to translate their skills outside of the classroom.

A UX Pattern That Needs to DIAF

Why, Home Depot, why?

There are more than a few shopping sites out there with these "fancy" picture viewers like Home Depot and Newegg.com.

This has to be one of the worst UX patterns out there and every site that uses it never fails to piss me off with aggravation just trying to get an idea of what a product looks like.

You see, these web designers, programmers, and architects seem to not realize that most browsers nowadays (and even a few years back at this point) have supported automatic resizing of images to fit the browser window with full-size "zoom" capabilities and that the built-in browser scrollbar is a perfectly acceptable method of navigating an image.

Better, but still a poor UX

Even worse in the case of the Home Depot site, the cursor shape over the image leads one to believe that the image can be clicked and dragged.  Instead, you can only drag and move the little red box on the right to pan the picture.

Newegg actually does the same thing, but it's a bit better because at the least, it doesn't popup in a new window in Firefox and to some degree, I can understand why they do it because of the gallery navigation and the 360-degree view (there's some "added value"), but I would appreciate the option of just being able to see the full image without it being cropped off within some silly window.

This pop-out, image viewer UX pattern is definitely one that needs to DIAF.

Why I Can’t Be Bothered To Learn Silverlight

Aside from hating Flash and Flash-like applications in general, as I've stated before, I view Silverlight as a dead/dying technology at the scope of web and business applications.

It may retain niche applications in gaming and the Xbox platform, but I think that's it.

Of course, Silverlight diehards will point their fingers hard at Windows Phone, but I say it really doesn't matter.  The trends seem to show that WP7 is dead in the water:

However, perhaps the most surprising finding of last quarter was that Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform was beaten out by Samsung's Bada operating system. According to Gartner, over 2 million Bada-based smartphones were sold last quarter, earning the platform 1.9 percent market share. Windows Phone 7 followed with 1.7 million units sold, helping it to earn 1.6 percent of the market.

The last 12 months have been difficult for Microsoft. According to Gartner, the company's market share just one year ago was 4.9 percent on over 3 million unit sales.

At an anemic 1.6% market share for 2Q11, one has to wonder -- from the perspective of a developer: why waste my time on a platform that has such a trivial market of users?  Silverlight is already dying in the wider web.  I can't remember the last time I saw a Silverlight enabled web page that wasn't a Microsoft property.   But with this news of WP7s declining market share, one has to wonder when the diehards, Silverlight defenders, and (the absolute worst!) the Silverlight evangelists will just give it a rest and stop trying to tell me how awesome it is and how every business wants Silverlight apps and all that nonsense.

With the news that Windows 8 will support HTML5+Javascript apps and a tablet- and touch-friendly interface, one has to wonder how much longer Silverlight will have applicability in the mobile space.  Could Microsoft scrape the current, Silverlight-driven Windows Phone platform for one based on HTML5 as a derivative of their Windows 8 platform?

One thing is for certain, the market has spoken: Silverlight sucks!  Now go away, please (and take Flash with you!).

When is InfoPath Ever the Answer?

Since I've started working with SharePoint back in beta 2 of 2007, I've wondered what the infatuation with InfoPath is.

Everyone from enterprise architects and business users seems to be very intrigued by it.

As a more technical guy who's had to dig into it, I find it a puzzling beast and really don't understand why folks even give it a second whiff.

To understand why, let's take a step back and examine the landscape of forms technologies which are available in the typical enterprise environment and how they fit into SharePoint.

Web Forms

• Pros
  • Extremely flexible and powerful; a developer can create any form imaginable.
  • People are familiar with web forms because they use them: Every.  Single. Day.  When they log on to their gmail, when they buy something from Amazon, when they sign up for Facebook, when they log into The New York Times website -- people use web forms every day.
  • Deploys fairly easily into a SharePoint environment using .wsps and can be permissioned like other SharePoint artifacts.
  • Easily understood by developers and easy to hire developers or contractors to manage; web forms developers are a dime a dozen.
  • Easy to integrate additional data into the forms since it's easy to call out to web services, look up files in a file system, perform searches across SharePoint, etc. to incorporate additional data and intelligence into your forms.
• Cons
  • Requires a developer to create and update the form.
  • Requires custom programming.
  • Not available on the desktop or offline.
  • Doesn't work well for forms that need to also support print versions since it's nearly impossible to create a printed layout that will 100% match the on screen layout.

Word Document Forms

• Pros
  • Fairly flexible with a programming model that can be easily accessed by power users via record macro or custom written macros.  Can build fairly complex interactions.
  • Deploys easily into a SharePoint environment by simply uploading a document template to a list and associating it as the default template.
  • Quick Parts map fields directly onto content type fields on the list - save the document back to SharePoint, and the fields are updated in SharePoint.  Update fields in SharePoint and they are pushed down to the Word document.
  • Business users can create these easily.  In fact, if you asked someone in HR -- for example -- to create a form, more likely than not, they will create a Word or Excel based form.
  • Form can be completed offline and saved back to SharePoint.
  • Printed form is pretty much identical to electronic form.
  • Businesses already have large inventories of Word forms.
• Cons
  • Macro programming isn't accessible to most business users.
  • Macros may present a security risk.
  • Not as easy to perform complex tasks (for example, multiple web service calls) as it is in web forms.
  • No direct integration with the server environment and the SharePoint content store - may still need event receivers and what not to accomplish certain tasks.
  • Requires Word runtime on the desktop.

PDF Forms

• Pros
  • Form is "locked down" once deployed.
  • Form is easy to build using Adobe Acrobat.
  • Printed form is identical to electronic form; create one form and use it everywhere.  This is especially useful in some cases in some industries like life sciences.
  • Everyone has Acrobat on their desktops.
  • Business users already have the skills to work with Adobe PDF forms and PDF forms can be easily created from Word forms.
  • Businesses already have large inventories of PDF forms.
• Cons
  • Requires paid versions of Acrobat to create forms, but your business users probably already have these.
  • Requires some custom programming to expose the form fields to SharePoint (but easy to program and only needs to be done once); not supported out of the box.
  • Dynamic forms are difficult to create, requiring developers to write embedded Javascript or logic to build the form dynamically on the server before serving it.

InfoPath Forms

• Pros
  • Microsoft really wants you to use it and thus they've rigged it into various points in SharePoint, Office, and SharePoint workflows (but you can do these with web forms, too).
  • Some forms can be used in the web or on the desktop.
  • Easy to build basic forms (but not as easy as it is to use Quick Parts in Word).
• Cons
  • Requires license to InfoPath to create forms and your business users probably don't have these.
  • If you ask a business user to create a form, the user will either: 1) create it in Word, 2) create it in Excel, 3) create it in PDF, 4) ask IT to create it.  No business user will instinctively think "Ah, I'll create an InfoPath form".  It's not a technology easily leveraged by anyone but someone technical.  The idea that power users can create and own their forms is a myth; no business user wants to spend their week working on a form when they have hamsters in IT to do that for them.
  • With that said, it's going to be a LOT easier to find developers who are strong in web forms (and they'll probably be cheaper) than it is to find developers who are strong in InfoPath (and they'll probably require higher rates).
  • While some forms can be used via Forms Server or on the desktop, the truth of the matter is that Forms Server enabled forms are limited to a subset of the desktop forms' functionality.
  • InfoPath forms are difficult to work with programmatically compared to writing Word macros or ASP.NET web forms.
  • Anything beyond basic interactions will require programming anyways, so why not pick the technology that's easier to program for?
  • Complex form fields (for example, repeating rows) don't map to SharePoint fields and cannot be surfaced in SharePoint as metadata, making it somewhat less useful unless you're willing to spend the effort to manually manage that serialization of data.  But then, why would you choose InfoPath and not Word or web or PDF forms?
  • Electronic forms are not identical to printed versions (as is required for some FDA forms which can be submitted electronically or as paper forms or as scanned versions of paper forms) so in some workflows, you'll need to create separate forms for printed versions and consolidate that data manually.  If you need to create those printed forms in Word or PDF anyways, why bother creating InfoPath forms?
  • Difficult to share forms with users outside of your corporate firewall because: 1) they probably won't have InfoPath on their desktop (but they will have or can easily get Acrobat or Word) or 2) you have to get them access to your network to serve them the form via Forms Server.  With Word based forms or PDF forms, you could theoretically just email the forms, collect them, and upload them -- it gives you the flexibility to create these types of workflows.

Ultimately, I think InfoPath is a poor choice for forms because there are better options either from the perspective of developers or the perspective of a business user.  It's a myth that InfoPath will allow business users to self service and easily create and customize their own forms and thus save time and money.  If anything, it's even easier for business users to create their forms in Word, a tool they are already intimately familiar with.  Anything beyond the most basic of forms will require programming and IT involvement anyways and if that's the case, why bother with InfoPath when it's harder to resource for?

I don't think I'll ever understand the infatuation with InfoPath as a solution.  I do wonder if most folks are simply unaware of the Quick Parts functionality in Word 2007 and 2010 and how nicely it integrates with SharePoint.