It’s too complex – The X blog – Christian Droulers

I now write as regularly as possible on the Invup Geeks’ blog.

Take a look!

I recently left SherWeb to begin a startup business called Invup.

We are currently using a cubicle of the very nice offices in the One Marina Park Drive office, courtesy of MassChallenge!

Here are a few (crappy) pictures:

Check us out, we might be big soon!

Edit: I’ve now created a small library that replicates the Compensable functionality of WF, which was my main use. It can be found at http://code.google.com/p/system-transactions/.

Oh dear, I can’t be the only one who’s gone crazy over how annoying and shady WF is when created in .xaml files, along with the Visual Studio 2010 Visual Editor.

Well, I have. Currently working on a pretty big system that uses WF extensively to make sure that operations are atomically done, so we first started using VS2010 and Workflow Foundation and it’s great. But then, after you make big workflows and start opening more than a few at a time, VS crashes, or slows down considerably. Then you find a typo in a parameter and change it, but then the refactoring support is pretty bad, so you end up having to test your workflows and have them crash at run-time instead of compile time for certain things, some others are caught at compile time.

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I just added another project to my projects page. It’s the Control Panel I’ve been developing for SherWeb in the past few months.

It’s been deployed for all our clients since tuesday, and it been a roller coaster of a ride since then. There were a bunch of features that hadn’t been properly tested, some because we simply didn’t have the time, others because only a huge number of users could find in such a short time.

I basically spent the entire week identifying, fixing and publishing bug fixes. It was a pretty entertaining experience. Lots of pressure, but in general, the new Control Panel was very stable. I expected more errors with the large number of users we’re supporting. It’s faster and easier to navigate than the original Control Panel.

I want to give props to my colleague Marc — I wish I could link him, but he has no site — for being as awesome as he is and for helping me out with tasks and bug fixes on this project. He’s a life saver and one of the greatest guys I know.

A good word for Jonathan. I copied loads of code from the original Control Panel’s code, and he developed most of it. Good job!

All in all, I’m very proud of this product. It’s stable, reliable, fast(er) and safe. I really enjoy working for SherWeb. There’s always a new challenge ahead while it remains the domain of Web development, which is what I love.

So I spent a part of my day researching Perl as I’m setting up Request Tracker at work and it’s made in Perl. While reading loads of blog posts on why Perl is good and why Perl is bad (I get sidetracked sometimes), I starting wondering if I was using the languages I know properly. That is to say, idiomatically.

Many of those blogs posts had comments on why people agreed that Perl sucked or that it rocked. They often compared it to other languages, saying so and so was better most of the time. I actually chuckled at a couple of arguments that went back and forth since most of them were about style issues.

Nobody seems to like languages for what they truly are, and that is a programming language. Just like english and french, they are a matter of personal tastes and what you’ve been raised with, in a manner of speaking. I was raised by a francophone¹ family and I learned english later on in my life. I am far from being a perfect speaker / writer in this language, but I still love it and I think I have a really good grasp of it.

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If any of you are using Windows for developing, you might know that the XP fonts are kind of annoying to the eye. Vista introduced Consolas and are now offering it for download.

It’s a highly legible font and it pleases my eyes.

It also looks much better with ClearType activated. ClearType can be turned on by going to the Control Panel, double-clicking the display icon, going into the appearance tab and selecting effect. The second listbox there should let you choose ClearType.

It’s pretty much eye orgasms.

So it seems that a lot of people are trying to achieve this. More and more people are becoming aware of CSS and its awesomeness and I think it’s about time. We’re not in 1996 anymore.

Then, getting a nice horizontally fluid layout isn’t very easy for most. If you try pixel widths, you can’t make it fluid, if you use percentages, borders start to mess things up and it’s not sharp enough.

I’ve found this solution on the internet, though I can’t remember where.

Here is the html:

<body>
    <div id="sidebar">
        Your sidebar here, menu, whatever
    </div>
    <div id="content">
        Your content, headers, all kinds of fun.
    </div>
    <div id="footer">
        footer text.
    </div>
</body>

And here is the CSS:

#sidebar
    {
     width: 250px; /* whatever width you want in pixels or % */
     float: left;
    }
#content
    {
     margin-left: 250px; /* same as the #sidebar width or more if you want space */
    }

And there you have it. You can mess around with width and all that. You just have to make sure that your next div (#footer) is cleared on both sides (clear: both;) or your content might be over the next divs.

So that’s it. Now you only have to have designer talents and you can build awesome sites with sidebars. You can easily add a sidebar on the right with the same method, but floating your div on the right. My sidebar is currently working that way, you can look at the code.

Have fun with it.