Awarded Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET MVP

Since I became an MCSD charter member in 1995, I finally reached a new height in my career. I had a physics major, but I was very fascinated by computer when I got my PC. I only took a C++ course in college; at that time C++ “compiler” was still a C translator. The class project was to write a C++ pretty printer; that is how I learnt parsing and data structure. I immediately applied the knowledge to my first consulting assignment. My client wants to rewrite a DOS program to a Windows program, but the company that wrote the DOS program would not give them the source code. Fortunately, all the data in the program is available through several reports so my assignment was to parse the printer language so that I can extract the data. In 1995 to 1996, I wrote a VBA like interpreter and a mini web browser, all in 16 bit VB3. In 1995, I was also invited to Redmond to write the Microsoft Access 95 exam. Then I worked comfortably for a insurance software company for 9 years.

In 2006, I had a chance to work with a very innovative team at ESRI. There I was able to apply my parser skill again on a very innovative project called Site Builder. It is essentially a wizard that can generate a map website like Windows Live map. What makes it interesting is that it can reverse engineering an existing website by parsing ASP.NET pages to extract information and allow user to modify the website through the wizard.

In 2007, I returned to the insurance industry. I noticed that due to various cross-cutting requirements, developers often turn a one page rating spec into 3000-5000 lines of code. There I started experiment with domain specific language (DSL). I was able to express the rating logic in only 20-30 lines of code, with almost one-to-one correspondence to the written spec. Then I can execute the DSL with a runtime that has only about 600 lines of code. Any new cross-cutting requirement can be implemented in the templates. As the company was moving from Microsoft technology to Java, I was sent to the Java team. There I worked with Struts, Spring and Hibernate. Although I quickly gained 3 Java certifications in a few months, I felt I missed .NET. I would say simply piling up best frameworks and best practices would often lead to bloated rather than best software.

In 2008, I joined an insurance software vendor that is a .Net shop. The shop still has a large number of classic asp pages. So I started writing ASP Classic Compiler using Microsoft dynamic language runtime (DLR). My previous experience with Struts allows me to exam ASP.NET MVC very thoroughly. I am very glad that ASP.NET MVC, through several quick iteration, has exceeded Struts. I am very glad that ASP.NET MVC has made effort to reduce repetitive code. For example, you can just add a few DataAnnotation attributes to the entity, the validation rule can even propagate to the client Javascript code! I also like to see the new generation of user-friendly tools like LightSwitch. I was slightly disappointed that LightSwitch was tightly coupled to Silverlight. I was hoping there would be an abstraction on top of the actually WPF classes. This way the tool could not only generate the desktop software, but also true Web AJAX application; I think both Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Script# has demonstrated its feasibility. We have been changing UI frameworks too often. If the tool put reasonable abstraction over the UI and tier, developers just need to fill business logic in a few places in the template. The build system can then generate whether we want desktop, web or a new type application that we are not even aware of today. If we have been working with a more abstracted toolkit, we could probably work with the tool for much longer than jumping through different frameworks.