The Joy of Lighter Tech

So I am a huge proponent of gaming laptops over "engineering laptops" or "developer centric" laptops.  In my experience when a company say like Dell sells an engineering laptop to corporations (not to pick on Dell, swap out any other "enterprise" corporate brand) they are selling them an over priced dog that will tend to overheat.  I would rather have a gaming laptop any day of the week.

With that in mind for my personal laptops I've always had HP or more recently Asus gaming laptops as my dev machines.  I usually had them with at least 15'6 screens (I still do) and they tended to be bulky with short battery lives, both tradeoffs I could live with.

This last time around though I got an ASUS G15.  It isn't perfect, but I upgraded the ram to 40 gigs (8 built in, 32 added...so only the first 16 gigs is paired, kind of a bummer but I haven't noticed a big slow down.  I also added an extra 1 Terabyte mk 2 SSD.  I've been running it for a little over a year and so far so good.

One of the advantages of the G15 is that it is light.  I would have never bought the G15 for it being thin and light because that usually means gimped performance.  Not so with the G15.  But more to the point what I'm finding is that once you go thin and light it is going to be really hard to go back.  

I packed up my older Asus laptop the other day, one that I previously thought was fairly light, and it was like holding a lead brick.  That pound or two of weight (1/2 kg ish) actually makes a pretty big difference.  And although the extra battery life for me isn't critical there have been a few times where it has come in handy.

So the point of this blog post, is that if you are like how I was, where you scoff at thin and light laptops, unless you need that extra 5% of speed you are missing out.  With modern chips that tend to handle heat better, that gap in performance between a brick and a thin and light is closing too.  

Just something to ponder when you are in the market for a new box.

The Next Push

OK, so I took about six months off from the working world.  It was a disaster...but I wish it was longer :)  Since then I've been working for about 5 months now.  But I haven't been doing any side projects as I've been too busy trying to keep my head above water.

But starting next week that changes.    This weekend I will pull a bunch of data off my old laptop so it will become my son's.  After that I add a new secondary drive to my new laptop and start installing software.  Hopefully two weekends out I will be ready to go.  My targets will be R&D for work, working on my game, photoshop, and video editing...in reverse order :)  

Content creation is fun for me, so that will be my emphasis with the new laptop and most of my spare time.  We will see how it goes.

 

Scripting Tables with Indexes in SQL Server Management Studio

 OK, so you got some tables you want to script out for whatever reason.

You notice when you do, some of your indexes are missing.

What the heck?

No biggie...just need to set some default from false to True.

SSMS->Tools->Options->SQL Server Object Explorer->Scripting->Table and view options (on right)

Toggle Script Indexes to True.
If you use triggers or other options there, I would toggle them to true as well.

Reference...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3067599/script-table-as-create-via-ssms-doesnt-show-unique-index

What's Up?

 Yo.  I'm still here for anyone who cares.  But, when Corona broke out and the schools closed either my wife or I needed to stay home and watch my special needs son full time.  I did while trying to work full time. For a variety of reasons, it didn't work out.  So I quit my job and have paused my IT career.  22 years with 20 of those being coding.  

Next week my son will be going to day care three days a week.  My cash reserves are being blown through much faster than budgeted (but I'm not surprised) so I am going to have to start coding again or doing something. I think what I'm going to shoot for is getting a part time job and then trying to do my own thing code wise at night.  I've got a few ideas that might generate a few bucks.  We get to see.  In about six months if that doesn't work out I'll try to pursue a job in cubeville again :)  Wish me luck and pray I find a niche before that!  

Anyways, I'll be sporadically posting again here.

The Demoralized Coder

OK, another useless non-coding rant.  Here is the skinny of it.  I've got a core 2 project, a fairly larger web application, that I migrated to 2.1 and fixed a few problems.  Then core 3 came out and I was told to migrate to 3.  Well the 2.1 to 3, especially with the entity framework changes, is turning out to be a real pain.  Add in Telerik, which is a great control set, but I'm not sure the latest build is really core 3 ready for prime time.  So I'm getting all these issues and it is kind of a mission impossible.  At one point core 3.1 is coming out (December?) which will fix a bunch of things. But all my work arounds to get this app working in 3.0 will probably break then or be unnecessary by then too.

In essence I've got a working app, and just to keep the code base current while Microsoft finds itself is causing me a lot of grief.  I've got some health issues, and I don't expect to live till I'm 90.  I think I'll be lucky to him the mid 70ies point.  I've already been in IT for over 20 years.  I gotta admit I'm feeling a little burnt.  The money is good.  But it seems like I'm back on the coda obscura track rather than the creativity/problem solving track.  I want to solve the customers problems for getting an app that does what they need, not debug MS code each time they tweak something.  It is kinda getting old.  And the complexity of web development at this point, it is nothing I can't do but just the joy of doing it lately is a little lacking. 

So I ponder...there is the machismo factor of being on the bleeding edge...but I gotta say as of late I'm tired of bleeding all the time.  I'd like a lighter stack to work on, or maybe switch from web development to something else for awhile.  Not sure what or if that is practical.  I've got a great job with a great company, just the tools I've been given to do the job are starting to suck IMHO. 

I know waaaaa....I'll suck it up and make things happen like usual.  It just feels like ever iteration of doing this gets a little harder to pull off, and little longer to do, and more of a pain.  I like it when I'm not developing against moving targets so much and can get proficient without having to do a bunch of hacks to make things come together and focus on creating rather than hacking out esoteric problems. 

It doesn't help that this year has been really hard on the sick front.  I think I've been under the weather 4 out of 5 days on average this last 3 months.  Trying to think when you feel like a roasted turd isn't helping.

So, when this iteration is done, I will figure it out and make things come together, I hope to get a little bit of time to really think on what I want to do in life.  Do I want to reup for another 20 years doing the same thing I've been doing, do I just need a break, do I need to change focus?  Change tools?  All this I'm going to have to pray through.  Fear of taking a big money hit in changing careers is present, but my family unit if tightening the belt a little bit is possible we could get by with me making less money.  But, I don't want to screw them either.  All stuff to think about.

Securing MVC Applications

This is a great 10 point article on how to secure your MVC applications by Saineshwar Bageri.  Worth a read.

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1259066/10-Points-to-Secure-Your-ASP-NET-Core-MVC-Applic-2

What is Microsoft Doing?

Maybe I'm just old.
Maybe I'm just cranky.
Maybe I'm not that good.

Dealing with Microsoft, to me though, is getting old.  I love C# and many aspects of their web development stack, but I'm tired of all the false starts from Microsoft...

• Webmatrix->Now kinda "Web Pages" in .net Core
• MVC vanilla or Core...will vanilla be supported?
• Web Forms...complicated and code bloat for sure, but instead of abandoning, now when the browsers are finally getting to the point where standard HTML5 is pretty much supported, Microsoft should have enhanced and slimmed down web forms and did them right.
• Continual configuration nightmares.  Once you figure out a config setting, no big deal, but if you aren't into the art of writing / modifying config files all the time, needing an obscure setting can be pain.
• Powershell and Unix envy.  Having it is fine, but abandoning GUI tools for it is lame.  I can just use Linux at that point and I would have a more stable OS...
• IIS...This whole push for Core...is Microsoft going to fix IIS or just get c# to run everywhere?  To me this will translate into MS devs abandoning IIS and using open sourced C#...without attracting to much of the cross stream from the Linux dev crowd to adopt the other direction.  Dumb.  Plus again, if I want to program on Linux, I can already do that.  
• Visual Studio seems to me to be collapsing on it's own weight.  Creating a simple web project now produces like 500 files with 10 folders and all sorts of again config bull sh*t.  Just to say hello world.  I get tired of the seemingly .5-1.5 gig bi-weekly updates to Visual Studio as well.  Come on guys, get your stuff straight.
• Entity framework...ambitious idea, I got it to work, but not without it's quirks.  Slow as balls though for high scale apps unless you get in and start tweaking the frack out of things. 
• Azure...I actually use Azure for home projects, but for professional development I, at least right now, could care little about it.  No way the enterprise stuff I work on is ever going into "the cloud".  So I get worried when I see the latest round of Microsoft Certs all seeming to contain Azure test questions.  I have no problem with Microsoft having a set of Microsoft Azure certs, I mean by all means of course.  But to FORCE Azure knowledge everywhere in order to remain certified pisses me off.

I don't know.  Programming to me seems like a lot of fads for smart people.  Web development is taking data from a user and / or displaying data in a meaningful way with security.  You can make that as complicated or as simple as you want.  It seems like just when web development was becoming fun again (HTML5 stabilizing, not having to write as much separate client code for browser exceptions, lot's of client side frameworks to do animations and such with) my dev stack, Microsoft, exploded.  

Kind of a bummer.  Especially with so many things C# / .Net do right.  Again maybe I'm just getting old and suck, but it seems like with the Microsoft stack lately I struggle with my tools rather than providing solutions.  That bugs me.  I'm looking for something lighter.  I'm not 18 any more where I enjoy jumping over hoop after hoop to get something to work, especially when in the past it seems things were much simpler and easier to get things done.  

I know Waaa right?

I really liked the MVC / SQLite in wal mode on IIS stack.  Though I only used it a few times it worked for me and I was productive in writing quick little web apps.  .Net Core MVC less so. I guess I will explore Core web pages and see if they are light.  I'm also looking at doing somethings in the ancient LAMP stack,maybe just to give me some perspective and possibly provide some backup skills in case Microsoft goes off the deep end.  I'll probably pick up Node again as well.  Ruby?  Naah...Python?  Maybe.