Steve Hiner Talks About .Net

My weekend with KendoUI

Steve Hiner — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:00:34 GMT

Over the weekend I spent some of my own time trying to convert my current client's MVC3+DevExpress site over to use KendoUI instead of DevExpress. Not that I dislike DevExpress at all, I'm actually a fan, I just thought I'd find out if it would be better. KendoUI is the new thing and this was an excuse to spend a couple evenings to find out what it's like in the real world.

First of all, I'm new to MVC. I typically do web development in ASP.Net WebForms. It's possible that some of my issues were due to me not totally groking MVC but I don't think that's the case.

My feel so far: KendoUI is not ready for real ASP.Net MVC development. I had all kinds of trouble just getting it to work at all. From what I can tell some of the sample code on the site just isn’t correct. I ended up having to go to one of the local samples they install, do a view source and extract the code from there to get it to work.

After failing multiple times using different techniques I ended up encoding my model to json. That was mostly my last-ditch effort to get the features I want working. As far as I can tell if you just convert a table to a kendo grid it support paging, filtering and sorting. Not shocking but a bit disappointing. Unfortunately after working out the issues with getting it to understand my json data I found that Kendo doesn’t convert datetime values as they are encoded in json so all my dates looked like /date(009234203420)/ which isn’t useful at all. I tried implementing a formatting workaround suggested in the forums but then my whole table would appear empty. Even if I got that to work there’s yet another workaround in order to get filtering and sorting to work on dates because the original workaround only fixed the display issue, dates would still be filtered and sorted in their ugly form.

Turns out it’s wicked hard to debug issues with javascript libraries like that (I'm not a javascript pro, I can write it but that's not my main dev language). It would have been hugely helpful if it dumped some info to screen to tell me why my table was empty. When the library is handed json data with 10 records and doesn't display any of them I wish it had the smarts to realize it should tell me why. Maybe there's a debug option I didn't enable, that's quite possible. Remember this was just a quick test to see what it would be like and what the learning curve is. The KendoUI site makes it look really simple, I wanted to find out if it is.

After spending a couple late nights on it I scrapped the idea and went back to DevExpress. I REALLY wanted Kendo to work cause it looks so promising but I was only willing to give it a couple evenings. It was clear that the learning curve + pain + debugging problems + $400 price tag wasn't nearly worth the UI benefit + coolness factor. Of course being generally happy with DevExpress MVC3 didn't help KendoUI's case at all.

Looking at their roadmap they plan to have official ASP.Net MVC extensions sometime in the first half of this year I think. Maybe when they have actual extensions it will work better because those will run on the server directly and will translate the data however they need to in order to work right on the client. Unfortunately I think the Asp.net MVC extensions will require a license for their Asp.net suite and won’t be included in the basic $400 KendoUI product. Maybe I misunderstood their plans but that's what I remember from late last night.

It’s a nice looking library so I hope it becomes more usable for Asp.net dev some time soon. Like some Microsoft products in the past KendoUI looks great in simple demos but it doesn’t work so great in the real world. Maybe with heaps more of my time, lots of reading and some pluralsight style training I could have made it work but if a library doesn’t make my life better I’m not gonna use it unless the long term benefits are huge.

Windows BSOD debugging for dummies

Steve Hiner — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:43:32 GMT

Found this great, simple walk-through for using debugging tools to dig into kernel memory dumps to find the root cause for a system crash. http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2008/11/01/how-to-debug-kernel-mode-blue-screen-crashes-for-beginners.aspx

Interesting new programming QA site - StackOverflow

Steve Hiner — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:16:57 GMT

StackOverflow.com

It’s a cross between a programming web forum, Wikipedia and Digg. Basically people ask questions, people answer questions and people vote on the answers to push them higher or lower in the stack. If more clarity is needed the original question and answers can be edited as needed rather than posting new responses. Theoretically this means the good answers will float to the top and they will be complete answers so you don’t have to read through dozens of responses to figure out the complete answer. It also means that old, obsolete questions and answers will tend to sink to the bottom of the stack. Also, questions and answers can be tagged so you can do more targeted searching. It’s free too (no Experts Exchange bait and switch tactics).

You can read about the idea behind it here.

The more time I spend on the site the more impressed I am with their ideas. As you post questions and answers and those posts get voted up or down you gain and lose reputation. At certain reputation levels you get more power on the site (ability to vote posts up/down, ability to comment, etc). It really should cut down on the noise since new users can't comment at all and they can't vote the questions/answers up and down until they've spent some time on the site. That means, hopefully, it will be harder to "game" the site like people try to do with slashdot and digg.

Check it out, it's going to be a killer site. They should branch out into non-programming sites too.

Out-Treemap - PowerShell treemap cmdlet

Steve Hiner — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:42:07 GMT

In order to use the cmdlet first you'll have to grab the Microsoft Visualization Components from Microsoft Research.

If you don't want all the visualization components here is a zip file of just the treemap generator dll. Unzip it and put TreemapGenerator.DLL in your scripts folder.

Grab this file to get the scripts I demoed at the meeting.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I'm hoping to do a full writeup for the blog soon.

Edit 1/10/2012: Clearly I never got around to writing a full blog post. I was going to post a screenshot or two but I have found that the treemap generator does not appear to run under Windows 7 64-bit. When I try to run it I get the error:
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Could not load type 'Microsoft.Research.CommunityTechnologies.Treemap.NodeColor' from assembly 'TreemapGenerator, Version=1.0.1.38, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3f6121a52ebf7c82' because it contains an object field at offset 0 that is incorrectly aligned or overlapped by a non-object field."
Maybe someday I'll try to resolve this for Win7 but don't hold your breath.

Who am I? What am I doing here?

Steve Hiner — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:37:56 GMT

Hi, I thought I'd start my blog by introducing myself. I'm Steve Hiner. Christian, father, family man and programmer.

I started writing code back in grade school. It was in the early 80s so I was about 10-12 years old at the time. I believe it was on a TRS-80 and I'm sure it was some form of BASIC. A while back I ran across an old audio cassette tape with one of my first programs on it, a sci-fi text adventure game. I remember my mom helping me read through a programming book while sitting at our home PC (a Heathkit system my dad built - with 128KB RAM and dual 5-1/4 floppies - at the time that was quite a system).

Fast forward to college where I got a Civil Engineering degree. While getting the degree I started taking every programming class I could get credit for. Because of learning in the college of engineering my first serious programming was in FORTRAN77.

After graduation I worked as an engineer for a couple years but got bored with it. When my current boss offered me a job programming I jumped at the chance. That was 10 years ago.

Now I'm a Windows developer focusing on .Net technologies. Most of my time is spent writing the UI to interface with hardware the company develops. I've worked on everything from a stock trade sorting app to a machine vision app. As systems integrators we do a little bit of everything so projects are always new and interesting.

I've become something of a PowerShell fanatic lately so I'm always looking for problems I can solve with a bit of PowerShell scripting. I'm really blown away by Microsoft's new shell - it really is an amazing piece of technology.

Well, that's me. Who are you?