>What I know about you is you have astonishing software development skills, so maybe I am dead wrong. And you describe it in clear terms, which is a neat trick considering you are writing in a second language. Whenever I see something you have written, I read it. You are terrific. (Once I asked someone with MS connections why the heck they haven't hired you and was told "They can't afford him" LOL)

Ha. Trust me you wouldn't want me to work for Microsoft :-) It wouldn't work - corporate culture is not for me and what I know about how MS works inside from many friends, this is the farthest thing I'd want.Smart folks: Definitely. But corporate hell: no thank you :-)

Thanks for the vote of confidence though Mike - at least somebody has faith in me :-)

To be honest though I feel out of step where software development has been heading. All this talk about agile development (most hypocrisy in real life) and extensive discussion of 'proper style' is leaving me with a really bad taste in my mouth. More and more technology is downplayed and taking second fiddle to abstract patterns that are IMHO not making life easier for developers - quite the contrary. Especially the insane focus on testing with its mocking and faking and IOC results in code that is maybe testable but extremely difficult to implement and much worse for anyone to follow. The amount of waste of time that goes on with all of this is monumental. The same goes for various patterns that gain favor for a while before they fall out of favor for something new or 'better' a year or two later only to be obscure hints of a past that nobody understands 3 years down the road.

The concepts are good for many of these things but ultimately the implementation to date has been sucky. I still believe that classic patterns - basic abstraction of 'business' logic, some 'basic' abstraction in the UI layer buys you 95% of what all these other solutions buy you at a much less painful learning, design and implementation curve.Add in some basic unit testing against real-world scenarios and you get nearly to 100%. For the tiny remainder hacked solutions are Ok...

In the end I feel what matters are solutions that are easy to build and easy to follow without a huge level of abstraction so that they are dog slow. Maintainable code that doesn't take a CS degree to understand just the concepts of. Solutions that can be maintained by someone that isn't clued in to the latest fad technology/pattern and can understand it. Efficiency doesn't have to be complex - and that seems to be a point missed by many of the solutions today.

+++ Rick ---






>
>It's just that I have fallen under the spell of a couple of advocates of smallball, if you will. In one case it was MVVM, in the other MVC. They stepped through some demos that made me think what at first seems like overengineering in fact makes things easier in the long run.
>
>Re WPF, we are on the same page, although I have never expressed it quite that vividly ;-) Something about it has always just rubbed me wrong. But you're right, it has supplanted WinForms. And the whole parade of desktop apps, my comfort zone, seems to have moved on down the road.
>
>
>>You should know by now, Mike - I like things simple. Overengineered stuff has little room in my toolbox. If a technology takes a long time to understand just the concepts and implementation, it's not really an improvement. Abstraction can happen on many different levels and MVVM is just one way this can be done. I'm not sure that is necessarily a better one.
>>
>>I still dislike WPF - it's a horribly complicated architecture full of inconsistencies, but it is clear that that's where we are heading for the future given that WinForms is now a complete dead end. I think especially for business apps it's so much more complicated to build a straight LOB front end than it was for WinForms both from a design and code perspective. In my view that's simply not an improvement but jacking off with technology ;-)
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>>+++ Rick ---
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>>>That is a very interesting statement about MVVM. Not meaning it's unusual, because I have heard variations many times from others as well about architectures. Too much room between me and my code. I'm just surprised to hear it from you.
>>>
>>>>No not using Prism, although I'm getting ready to start work on a WPF app and I might check it out. I think most of the MVVM schemes are way too complex and they don't really make things easier...
>>>>
>>>>NuGet - yup just published a bunch of stuff on NuGet (West Wind Web Toolkit stuff which includes all the general purpose utility tools too as a separate NuGet package).
>>>>
>>>>NuGet is one of the nicer things Microsoft has done in a while... Really sweet to be able to just dump components into a project off the Web...
>>>>
>>>>+++ Rick ---
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>>>>>Thanks, Rick. Can't find a way to do it with CodeRush either.
>>>>>
>>>>>I got search and replace to work pretty well in cloning a project ( Prism module ) once I remembered to do case sensitive searches (c#) for names and realized it wasn't going to actually rename the files.
>>>>>
>>>>>Once I get this prism module stuff working the way I want it i'm going to give some serious thought to templating it.
>>>>>
>>>>>I'm also trying to figure out some good ways to use Feature Extension and Instant Feature Builder as Karl Shifflett does in In the Box.
>>>>>
>>>>>Have you used that or NuGet? ( The more I do the Prism stuff the more I am looking for some RAD shortcuts.)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>Oh how I wish. Neither Visual Studio nor Refactor! refactorings support renaming namespaces.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I think there are issues on how these tools can track changes once the namespace actually changes. Making replacements afterwards breaks the Code model in memory. Just a guess, but I'm sure it's occurred to the Refactor! folks before - it if it was more easily doable it could be done.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>However, I typically use a search and replace in files and that works fairly well and is quick..
>>>>>>
>>>>>>+++ Rick ---
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Bringing in stuff from other people's Prism samples, for example and need to reset namespaces.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>VS 2010 - seem to remember there is a clever way to change the namespace on a lot of files at once ( yeah, I know I can do a global search and replace but I thought there might be one place I can sync namespaces - or a 3rd party goody that does it )