Morning musings from the man that has no time for his blog.

You know, for a very technical person that works on some heavy grade, highly dynamic programs, I really don’t talk about it much here. Maybe I like to keep church and state separate (in this case “Job Life” and “Free Time Life”). Maybe it’s because once I find a solution to a common programming problem, I’m just too pooped to write it out in detail.

What can I say? “Lazy” and “Programmer” go hand in hand. More so now that LINQ is ready for prime time. There are grumblings of Microsoft just creating more lazy programmers. For those that don’t know, LINQ is a new way for .NET languages to talk to an MSSQL backend. Before LINQ, Joe Software Engineer had to create OO classes that matched the table Schema, and link it all up with ADO (or for those that like CodePlex projects the Database portion of DAAB). Now it’s as easy as dragging and dropping the tables (and stored procedures) you would like to play with into the IDE (Visual Studio 2008) and all the dirty work is done. Don’t like the objects generated? Go ahead and change them foo! They are there, ready for your customization pleasure.

The best part about all of this though is Query construction in the code (!!!), no longer do you pass a string or call a stored procedure. Now the OO programmer can write what they want in an OO way and the T-SQL is done for them. I’ve yet to explore what effect this has on SQL injection, but I have to say, bravo Microsoft.

I was at the local “Heroes Happen Here” convention where they were demonstrating LINQ and someone leaned over and mentioned that this will create more lazy programmers. Yet another arguement was that the middle tier architect is out of a job. However, if it saves time and get a product to testing, and ultimately production afterward, I’m all for it. I see it as the difference between building your shield and sword completely from scratch to fight the dragon, or having a sword and shield generator, and having to sharpen the sword and reinforce the shield a little bit. I really don’t see what the tendency is to belittle new (easier) ways of accomplishing goals (see also “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal“).

Alright, see? this is why I don’t blog about my job. Half of you are asleep. Much like I am after watching Star Trek for more than 30 minutes. I was watching Star Trek Voyager with my Dad (he love Star Trek) and I couldn’t get into it. I used to be able to watch it as a kid, but that was when I didn’t recognize the holes in plot and that barely anyone other than the main characters can act. I have too many questions I guess, my dad almost shut it off because I was logic-ing it to death. However, he doesn’t like Lost, so I guess we’re even. I’ve tried to get him into it, but he doesn’t like the “flashback soap opera” portion of each episode. I tired to get Meghan into Lost too, but it didn’t introduce the characters fast enough for her. Oh well, more for me I guess.

Sigh, time to go, hope you enjoyed my ramblings.

Late!