I have been an avid reader since the 6th grade; I love books. As someone who makes their living through technology I have been fascinated by ebooks and ebook readers. Amazon’s Kindle platform and Apple’s upcoming iPad are very cool devices. I however will not be using them as ebook readers anytime soon for several reasons.

1. I love books. I love holding a book in my hands.
2. I reread books I love. I have several series of books I have reread many times.
3. When I buy a book I own a physical copy and no one else can tell me what I can and cannot do with it.
4. I am not dependent on a third party corporation or reader to be able to read what I have purchased.

For ebooks to be attractive to me they would have to have the following attributes.

1. Be cheaper than the print books.
2. Be available within a reasonable time frame of the books release.
3. Be unencumbered by formats that restrict my use of the ebook on the platform of my choice.

Here are some articles with commentary by some of the authors that were effected by Amazon’s actions over the weekend.

Charles Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
Cory Doctorow: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html
John Scalzi: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-pricing/

I have seen a lot of trashing of MVC by Web Forms adherents lately.  Web Forms advocates arguments break down into two categories reasoned opinions and FUD.  Here are some of the reasoned arguments I have seen.

• they are already comfortable with the Web Forms page lifecycle
• they don’t want to lose their investments in server controls that they have purchased or developed

Here are some of the arguments that just seem like FUD to me.

• Web Forms are better for larger projects
• Web Forms are more productive

Developers that have a lot of experience with Web Forms and a large investment in doing development using the Web Forms model and aren’t interested in MVC should stick with Web Forms. These are valid reasons for sticking with mature technology that isn’t going away anytime soon.

The other arguments however fall into the FUD category. Having just deployed a good size site built on ASP.NET MVC it works just fine for large projects. My team was definitely more productive using MVC than we would have been using Web Forms. Developers who are looking for more control over what is output to the page and a more agile development style should learn more about MVC.

When it comes to debating the merits of Web Forms and MVC the MVC camp is just as guilty when it comes to the religious wars that technology debates seem to turn into. Those who have made the switch to MVC really can’t understand why someone would stick with Web Forms and the limitations they impose on the developer. MVC developers see the page lifecycle and server controls as limitation while Web Forms developers see them as benefits. So what is really going on is developers trying to protect their ego’s by denigrating the choices others have made. This is basically a variation of the Emacs versus vi text editor wars.

It was nice to see someone of Scott Guthrie’s status in the community telling everyone to use their heads and try and use reasoned arguments and not go around blowing your stack at people who happen to disagree with you.

Update: Ian Cooper has written up a fantastic MVC or Web Forms comparison following up on Scott Guthrie’s article. Ian Cooper does a really great job summing up the argument for MVC and where Microsoft web development practices are going.

Jeff’s complaints showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how distributed source control works. Joel tried to explain to Jeff that in a DVC system forking or cloning a repository doesn’t mean anything unless the fork sends a pull request to the master repository to include its changes. Unfortunately Jeff couldn’t get past the way that github displays project forks on the network graph. If Jeff had spent some time becoming familiar with git and the concepts behind DVC systems the whole conversation wouldn’t have taken place.

Usually Jeff explores a concept in minute detail which is one of the reasons his blog became so popular. In this instance though he perform his usual exploration of a subject and it really showed. I hope he takes some time to become more familiar with DVC systems as they are a real boon to modern software development.

I found a workaround by using GroupBy, First, and Select like so.

var distinct = collection
       .GroupBy(c => c.FilterProperty)
       .Select(c => c.First())

I wasn’t going to go anywhere near another Wheel of Time book because from my point of view the wheels had come off it a long time ago. No one involved in the Wheel of Time had lived up to their responsibilities not the publisher, author, or editor. The storyline got so out of the author’s control it had gotten up to eleven books and the end was nowhere in sight. When I heard that the author Robert Jordan past away after completing the eleventh book I figured that I would never read the conclusion to the story. However Robert Jordan knew he was ill and found another author to finish the series.

Brandon Sanderson had a written a stand alone debut novel Elantris and followed it up with the Mistborn Trilogy. I ended up reading all of Sanderson’s books and I loved them all. Sanderson is an imaginative writer who brings new approaches to the fantasy genre. If I hadn’t enjoyed reading Sanderson’s books as much as I did I would not have bought “The Gathering Storm”.

With Brandon Sanderson authoring the story now this was the Wheel of Time as it should have been written since book four of the series. There is much less of the overly verbose world building that plagued the Wheel of Time series. The female characters aren’t the one dimensional caricatures Robert Jordan turned them into. Brandon Sanderson did what needed to be done in “The Gathering Storm” he pared the story down and moved the plot forward.

The plot focused much more on the main character Rand something that has been missing from the storyline. Robert Jordan included so many minor characters in the books he wrote that giving them story time meant less time for the characters who drive the plot. Reading a Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan had become an exercise in frustration because he wasn’t moving the plot forward. Sanderson balanced the story very well by developing the main character and the main supporting character’s stories. I read “The Gathering Storm” in a week and loved every minute of it.

“The Gathering Storm” isn’t the final volume of the Wheel of Time because there was no possible way to wrap up a story as big as the Wheel of Time in one volume. There are two more books to follow after “The Gathering Storm” and I am now looking forward to reading them and finally finishing The Wheel of Time.