That’s huge! It’s awesome news for us and the community.

dashCommerce has had some pretty incredible success over the last 2 years, and I’m really proud of what we have accomplished.

We now have several companies selling providers / add-ons to dashCommerce at dashcommerce.com and our hosting services continue to grow and be recognized for our top notch service and support! Here is what people are saying about our hosting services:

We appreciate your wonderful customer service!
- Kyle

I downloaded dashcommerce a week or so ago, built it in vs2008 and haven’t looked back! I love it! I’ve just signed up for a year at dashcommerce.com and their hosting service is excellent, spot on.
- macca

You’re awesome! Even on New Years Day…such dedication!
- Corey Mitchell

Thank You again for your prompt responses – compared to other providers, you guys are a breath of fresh air.
- Demirelli

I must include a plug for the dashCommerce hosting service, their customer service has been very responsive.
- jimmidude

I am thoroughly impressed with your service. . . you guys ROCK!
- Stephane Thibodeau

Thank you very much for your help, to be honest I did not think when I bought this web hosting that I’d get such good and fast support. I’m very thankful and happy that I bought such a hosting.
- Muhanned Younis

I have proceeded to setup my website with much success. I applaud your talents for your product and your services.
- Mark D. Hoageson

So, if you haven’t noticed or thought of our hosting services, you should check us out! Our rates are great and our service is excellent!

We just pushed the dashCommerce 3.2 RC this past weekend, which has a lot of enhancements, bug fixes, features, etc. I debated on whether or not it should be a 3.5 release, but I figured 3.2 was just fine. The point, is, don’t think this is an itty bitty release – there is quite a lot in there! So, go check it out and log any issues, bugs at CodePlex.

So where is dashCommerce? What’s new and interesting? For those of you that are catching up to where dashCommerce has been, then you should probably check out a few posts, where I cover such things as increasing sales trends, Xerox’s use of dashCommerce, and increasing membership. The good news is that things are even better than they were last year! The numbers that we are able to get from PayPal show a continued trend upward (~$3MM / Qtr.), our membership continues to grow (33,000+), our site traffic is almost double what is was when I took over the project, we are still one of the most popular open source applications in the .NET space, and . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . the U.S Government recently contacted me to purchase a “special” version of dashCommerce. Yeah, you read that right, dashCommerce is being used by the U.S. Government!!! The contracts have been signed, the code delivered, and all is good in the world. Anyone that is an active member of the community should take great pride in knowing this. I know I do. One of the first projects to be delivered is going to be for the U.S. Army. This is nice for me because I am also a veteran of the U.S. Navy, so I take a lot of pride in knowing that something I had a large part in building is being used in this way. There is a lot of satisfaction there.

So, that is pretty much where we are. All things are in pretty good shape.

So much of what we are seeing as “new” is a regurgitation of stuff that happened years ago. Here is a sampling of some so-called new ideas and what I see as their origination points. Feel free to correct me if I don’t have the origination right, I’m just tossing out what I know . . .

“I feel like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Scaffolding – a lot of folks that talk about scaffolding refer to Ruby on Rails as the origin of that. Not true at all really. The first time I saw and used scaffolding was back in 2000. I had picked up a book called Designing Active Server Pages by Scott Mitchell (yeah – the 4guysfromrolla.comguy). It was a great book, and I have always like Scott’s approach. He is very thorough and creative. So no, all you RoR fans – you weren’t the first.

AJAX- A lot of folks have mentioned this one, back when they were mucking around with the XmlHttpRequest object, but before that there was something put out by Microsoft called RemoteScripting. It wasn’t the inline frame thing some of you may be thinking of. It was a Java component of some sort. It was a POS to be sure, but it was the only game in town prior to IE 5.0. I still have the code around where I was using it. As a matter of fact, I just cracked open the RSPROXY.JAVA class that was in there, and here is a nice little snippet for all of you Microsoft vs. Sun (actually, Microsoft vs. ANYTHING) fans – I bet you never thought you’d see this:

// ************************************************************************
// Microsoft Script Library
// Visual InterDev 6.0 Remote Scripting proxy
// Copyright 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
// ************************************************************************
import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.*;

import java.net.URL;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

I was using this back in 1999 to build a CMS. My boss at the time was showing the application to some other business associates and he was asking if they had ever seen the use of modal windows to do this kind of stuff in a web environment and the answer, at the time, was no. So, to anyone else that used the RSPROXY stuff to create AJAX applications back in 1998-1999. WE WERE THE FIRST!

Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control- This is an idea that came out of the Java space. Martin Fowler was the idea man behind this one. Actually, if you use .NET or Java, I’d be willing to bet you owe a lot to Mr. Fowler. He’s kinda got one of those “scary” brains. He has also been known to hang out with the RoR guys, which makes me think that you will always find him hanging where the action is.

MVC – This “technology” is 30 years old. It ain’t new, any way you slice it.  ’nough said.

There’s probably plenty more, but those are the ones striking me right now. What concerns me about this is that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of true invention going on in the .NET web space. If you look at .NET in general there is a flurry of activity and most of it involves regurgitating Java frameworks. The ALT.NET folks were trying to come up with a tag line and one of them put this out there:

“ALT.NET, porting Java Frameworks one project at a time.”

Or something like that. It’s spot on really. The path being traveled is so similar to the Java space that it scares me. Why does it scare me? Because of all the things you can find wrong with Java, the primary barrier to entry for anyone getting into Java programming is the high fragmentation of libraries, frameworks, etc. It’s a bitch to figure out where to start. And the .NET space is blindingly following suit. Has anyone checked out how many Dependency Injection frameworks there are in .NET? I can count 7 in my head and it’s only going to get worse.

One good thing about the “old” Microsoft (i.e. Pre .NET) was that there were fewer decisions to make and less work in evaluating technologies. Now, throw the open source movement on top of all this and well, holy crap – all the work is in just figuring out your development stack.

But beyond that is the lack of invention in the .NET web space. If anyone see’s something I’m not, please let me know because when I look for “cool, new technologies” I look less and less at .NET and look more closely at fringe projects like Rebol. The point is, I’m looking outside Microsoft.

I find that the major hurdle in writing good code is not programmer knowledge or detailed specifications or a clearly understood end user -  it’s discipline. As a matter of fact, if you look at a lot of the software engineering initiatives making a lot of noise in the programming world, you’ll notice a trend. RoR and their “Convention over Configuration” mantra, Microsoft’s Guidance Automation Toolkit and Extensions, even Unit Testing to a degree (pick your poison here) – they all strive to enforce (or give you the tools to enforce) an approach to writing code. Coding standards, code reviews – they do it to. They are all attempts at discipline surrogacy.

And there is a reason for this – discipline in programming is hard work. It’s not fun, glamorous, or even remotely engaging. It’s definitely not going to make you a blog superstar.

As a programmer / architect, all of these initiatives should tell us a lot about our craft and where it is currently falling short. Intuit has done a lot of work on PSP/TSP, and I was on one of the architectural teams that went through the program. While it is no silver bullet, it does give you great insight into how you program, what mistakes you make and, most interestingly, that you make the same mistakes over and over again. It was this process that made me realize how important discipline is in coding, and that the most dangerous attitude to have in programming is one of the creative genius. Don’t get me wrong, there is a ton of creativity in programming, especially at the architectural level. The danger lies in falling in love with your creativity and sacrificing your code or user satisfaction to the whims of your ego.

So don’t listen to Jeff, and don’t listen to the creative genius types – focus on discipline.