It's Like Strunk and White Had Never Been Born

I’m working my way through some Microsoft Official Courseware this evening to prepare for an upcoming course, and I’m just despairing at the long-winded, content-free garbage I’m so often saddled with when teaching the official curriculum. Here’s a direct cut-and-paste from a section on .NET remoting:

When a client requests for a remote object on the Application server, the Web server first authenticates the client’s identity. After confirming the identity, the Web server uses the client’s identity to request the Application server for the remote object on behalf of the client. The Application server then confirms the identity of the Web server, which is the identity of the client. After confirming the identity of the Web server, the Application server provides access to the remote object. In this model, the Web server impersonates as the client and requests the Application server for the remote object. As a result, the model is called the impersonation model. In the impersonation model, the Web server executes the client request on the Application server on behalf of the client.

To get the true periphrastic awfulness of it, read it out loud. This is supposed to teach you something?

I guess this will be yet another course where my job as an instructor is to rescue the students from the courseware; to machete a path through the verbosity to hopefully reach what it actually means and why should you give a damn.

If only I could lock all these folks in a room and make ‘em read Joel Spolsky or Philip Greenspun till they see the error of their ways.

On that serendipitous note, I see Joel’s just come out with The Best Software Writing I which I’ll have to AmazonPrime into my eager hands this week.