Xperimentality

Last night I went to dinner with Aaron Skonnard from pluralsight, Jeff Barnes, and Robert Cain.  Aaron and Jeff talking services, Robert covering Database, and me on the UI, we had the conversation covered from all angles!  One of the things we talked about was the limitation on the breadth of material you could precisely cover now, effectively specialization.  On the other hand, we have the need to know things outside of our specialization in order to make good decisions about the use and application of our specialized area of knowledge.

This morning, in trying to get caught up on some reading, I read Jesse Liberty's blog entry about specializing.

So the question blazed even more in my mind.

De-Specializing?

My story, as I imagine is the story of many of us that have been in this industry for 20 years or more, is similar to Jesse's.  I remember a day when you really could know everything about the technologies around you.  I remember being an expert (whatever that really means) in ColdFusion, ASP, JavaScript, Windows Development, SQL, and more.

As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with all the changes.  At first, it was very difficult for me to give up technologies.  I liked knowing all the things I needed to know to accomplish any task asked of me.  One at a time, I quit trying to keep up with the latest changes in certain technologies.  I started moving more toward a web technology focus, then to a more UI technology focus.  And it continues to this day.  I still try to keep up with ASP.NET, AJAX, etc.  I also have been keeping up with what I call the "XAML technologies", being WPF and Silverlight.  But even this becomes increasingly difficult as all three of these areas, ASP.NET, WPF, and Silverlight, explode into new realms of capability and, thus, possibility!

So what are the implications of specializing in these technologies and why can it be so difficult to specialize and still be effective?

Take Silverlight for example.  It would be possible to narrow your scope to XAML as it relates to Silverlight.  You could dive into the controls, styling, binding, usercontrols, the visual state manager,etc and never even have to use C# or VB.NET (or JavaScript in the case of Silverlight 1).  So do you become a XAML expert and not keep up with the changes to the C# and VB.NET languages?  Possible, but would you be or become an effective Silverlight developer?

So, perhaps that is a bit of a microview example.  So let's get to the real question that is on my mind.  Staying with Silverlight as our example technology, how far do you go and how deep do you go into WCF and REST-ful services?  While "services" is definitely a completely different technology focus than Silverlight, it is my feeling that Silverlight, WPF, and ASP.NET, will be most effective when services are a part of the picture.  This is especially true with recent and soon to be announced advances in the "services" space.  As an example, just think about how "services in the cloud" are going to affect UI development (or at least it's integration with business logic and data).

Specialized Generalist?

I'll admit, I am way behind on the advances in the "services" space and have to get caught up soon.  I imagine next week's PDC may be the fire that ignites my getting back up to speed.  But how far should we go in the technologies that are not our chosen specialization.  Is it possible to become a generalized specialist? or perhaps a specialized generalist?  Perhaps the definition of specialist, or how we define specializing, has to change.

I imagine it won't be long before these questions are answered out of sheer natural progression; given the rate at which new technologies, perhaps we could call it "integration technologies", are emerging and evolving.

What do you think?

I had kinda made a promise to myself that I was going to make sure I did not turn my blog into just a place to link to other information.  In the beginning, I began to get sucked into that black hole, but occasionally there are just some things that can't be said better!

To that end, my good friend and co-worker, Jeff Barnes, just sent me a link to a write up about 2 very different WPF books.  I thought it brought to light a good point.  Here is the blog entry on Coding Horror that I am speaking of.

I recently had gotten evaluation copies of these two books to determine if one or the other might make a good reference book to be used in a WPF training class I am teaching.  Needless to say, Nathan's book was the clear winner.  Not that there was no good information in Petzold's book.  Quite the contrary.   But when choosing a book that people are going to be able to use on a daily basis, the layout and format of Nathan's book is exceptional.

Bottom line is this: with the number of technical books on the market today, choosing a book is more than just choosing an author or a title.  It often takes flipping through a book to see if the content is going to make you go to sleep or excite you!  Thanks to both Jeffs!

I thought I would give Windows Live Writer a shot.  I have been wanting to look at desktop editors and would really like to look at some editors that would run on pocket pc.  As usual, there is too much to investigate and not enough time to do it.  Since this is my first time setting up an app to post remotely, I thought I should make a test entry.

So far, I like this.  If for no other reason than spell-check!  Jeff is the one that pointed Windows Live Writer out to me.  I stay in a hole so much here lately that I don't know what is going on in the world around me...so thanks Jeff for pointing me to a new tool to play with!

Well back to my hole!  Hopefully, I will be ready to get a lot of my WPF posts out here soon (as well as a new skin...if I can ever get it to look like I want)!

Well I will be dog gone!  See, all I needed was a little patience.  Last week I mentioned the Google Calendar and that it would be great if they released an API.  I guess I should be careful what I ask for.  Google has released their Calendar API.  It was announced last night on the Google Updates Blog.  And they already have a C# client library available!

Now I have one more thing I want to play around with that I really don't have time to play around with.  When someone opens up a shop to sell extra hours in the day, I am going to be their best customer!

Some people say that the next World War will be fought with conventional weaponry.  I say the next World War will be fought with innovative technology and the battle front will be located in the trenches of our computers!  Yesterday I mentioned Google Calendar.  Well today I was pointed to the Longhornblogs.com.  It appears that Microsoft is fighting fire with fire and releasing their own online  calendaring offering.

The "browser wars" were just a pain in our neck!  It was unproductive, and I think it actually made me dumber trying to keep up with all the varying browser issues!  But what is going on now with Google and Microsoft is quite another matter.  I think Google and Microsoft are going to continue to push each other to constantly be more innovative.  They are going to have to look at using the current and future technologies to stay ahead and forge into ever newer territories.  We are actually going to benefit from this battle!

It has truely been a volley up to this point.  Just look at a few examples: Google Desktop Search vs. Windows Desktop Search, Google Earth vs. Virtual Earth, Google Toolbar vs. MSN Toolbar.  The list goes on and I am sure anyone reading this is familiar with most of them.  I can't wait to see both companies continue to push innovation in the areas of the web experience!  So I don't know about any of you but I am getting my bag of popcorn and my foam finger and getting ready for a battle for the future!

Jeff just posted some information about Google Calendar so I went and took a look. I like it!  Unlike Jeff, I typically use Thunderbird.

One of the things I fight with is centralizing my information and access to it. My time is spent between  client locations, remote locations, home, and the office. Granted, I use a laptop so I can carry some stuff around with me, but even on my laptop I have multiple profiles. I have tried a lot of things: portable applications that you carry on thumb drives, online file storage, sites like BackPack.  Some I like, some I don't.  The problem is that I have not found that silver bullet.  Maybe it is not out there.  But as many of us developers as there are, that I would like to think have the same problem and feel the same way, you would think one or more of us would have forged that silver bullet by now.  I am watching Live.com to see if through its extensibility and gadgets, it might get close.

Back to Google Calendar...what would be cool is if they release a developer interface.  I think it would be really nice to be able to integrate your own web site or application with their calendar.  I could see some really cool Atlas apps and Live.com plugins that would behave similarly to Outlook Web Access without using Outlook.  In the mean time, another new online toy.