December 2003 - Posts

• Everybody's gotta find a home sooner or later

  Last week, while ranting about a significant piece real estate I was able to capture a few jarred thoughts.  Today I read some text which uncovered more emotions that lay within me in the same way that a seemingly quiet stream can contain a savage undercurrent.   This undercurrent was spawned from the un-mediated enactment of trespass upon my property - my domain - with neither consent nor due consideration.  In the days and weeks following this act, I sought to discover what value was added?  On reflection, I discovered that there was indeed some value added.  The slap that I received when the sugar was replaced with the more addictive, additive enhanced pills, was a timely one.  It was certainly enough to make me start to ask questions and to seek the origins of my favoured sugary sweet.  What I discovered was that it wasn't the sugar to which I had become inclined to love but, instead the meat with which it is usually served! I guess that the moral here is that, whether you accept it or not, ultimately, while you choose to eat for free, you are at the mercy of the host and, no-one should think themselves entitled to a free meal. Posted Dec 23 2003, 09:43 PM by digory with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Rants

• Debugging time should be measured

  UPDATE: Changed title from “The dangers of debugging“ to “Debugging time should be measured“ because it's a mistake to give the impression that cleansing a computer program of ones bugs and defects is an evil act. One of the things that I'll be trying to do next year is to encourage other developers that I'm associated with to spend less time "on the debugger".  I read a couple of blog entries this morning which extrapolated out some of the facts and figures associated with debugging; one of particular interest was this one: Cost of Debugging. My preference for a development day is something more like this: first 3 hours PLAN (Work out how to do it) next 3 hours IMPLEMENT THE PLAN (Code it) final 2 hours FIX THE IMPLEMENTATION (Debug/Test it) Posted Dec 22 2003, 07:30 AM by digory with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Rants

• Improving Incrementally

  I've been fortunate enough to have received plenty of great advice and feedback lately in relation to my blog entries which - of course - leads one to further contemplate the meaning of life :-)  The feedback I received for my post about Code Library for .NET was great and, I'll follow-up on that later - especially now that I have discovered just how cool it really is! My entry about "managing the development process" received some really useful links to other blogs and, it's after reading some of those that I thought that I'd write this entry... During the development phase of the past 2 months I've been busy; busy as in 'not enough hours in the day' type of busy.  I've worked late, I've worked early, I've worked Saturdays and Sundays yet still, the stack remained in-tact. Throughout this period one thing never got better: my table tennis game!  I've known what the problem is - I just don't know the correct way to swing and strike the ball.  I've tended to either flick at the ball with the wristy motion of an Indian leg-spinner or worse, I'd use too much elbow.  To be fair, I haven't played much table tennis in the past but the thought of being bad at anything involving a bat and ball just horrifies me :-) Anyways, now that the application has moved into test and time is a little less stressed it's a good time to run through the task stack and ensure that all priorites are correctly allocated weighted.  The first glaring item in the stack which needed a priority re-rating was my previously mentioned table tennis technique.  After lunch, I grabbed one of the guys for whom I'd done a peer review for this morning and managed to get half an hour of quality training in. The penny seems to have dropped for me now, and I'm confident that I understand what the correct technique is.  Now it's just a matter of ensuring that I can iron out my old habits and getting to the point where this improvement becomes adopted by my sub-consciousness and I can spend tim identifying the next area for improvement. Oh well, so much for the rant... as I was saying, there's been plenty of great feedback for which I am very grateful :-) UPDATE: In my haste to get this entry out I forgot the important part (important part follows)... This is a good time to reflect on the project and take note of things that were good/bad/indifferent so that, for the next project I can make incremental improvements.  What I'm planning is that we'll spend the next day or so looking at our source code and making sure that the comments are useful, check variable scope, etc then, a couple of days after the defects start being logged, we'll sit down as a team and reflect of the development phase.  It will be interesting to see what parts we think were good and bad. Posted Dec 17 2003, 01:01 PM by digory with no comments Filed under: Rants

• On your marks, get {BANG} set, go. Woops, missed the start again!

  I'm just coming to the end of my first project for a new company that I started with 3 months ago and I feel that I'll have a lot to blog about in regard to project management and task-oriented disciplines.  We got to feature complete and I did the first, full build of the app. tonight; tomorrow the application goes into "test" so, I'll be eager to see how close we got :-) NOTE TO SELF: I'd love to find some blogs that focus on project management to learn how others tackle the task of development and managing a development team.  I'm especially eager to learn about how to improve the "getting started" part of a development project as I think that's where I can get my biggest wins in the future. Posted Dec 16 2003, 09:03 PM by digory with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Rants

• Code Library for .NET

  Today Paschal pointed me in the direction of "Code Library" which is a tool that stores code snippets and images etc.  The site contains a nice overview of the features and compares them with other code library tools. I installed the product today and, although the UI was very sexy, I found it to be quite "buggy" (read: it didn't work).  I'm quite prepared to accept that the bugginess could be linked to the fact that I'm not using it correctly so, I'll persist for a bit longer with it :-) Maybe it's the developer in me and that, deep down, the idea that I may one day have enough time to complete DevBuddy persists :)   Posted Dec 16 2003, 08:08 PM by digory with 11 comment(s) Filed under: Tools

• CreateDate - create a DataTable with some data in it...

  I'm sick of writing this function so, I'll just park it here :-)   Private Function CreateData() As DataTable Dim dt As New DataTable("TestData") Dim dc1 As New DataColumn("Id", GetType(Integer)) Dim dc2 As New DataColumn("Name", GetType(String)) Dim dc3 As New DataColumn("BirthDate", GetType(DateTime)) dt.Columns.Add(dc1) dt.Columns.Add(dc2) dt.Columns.Add(dc3) Dim names() As String = {"darren", "peter", "robin", "phil", "wayne", "rob", "doug"} Dim theDate As DateTime = New DateTime(1968, 7, 22) For i As Integer = 0 To names.Length - 1 Dim dr As DataRow = dt.NewRow dr("Id") = i dr("Name") = names(i) dr("BirthDate") = theDate dt.Rows.Add(dr) Next Return dt End Function Posted Dec 16 2003, 07:44 AM by digory with 3 comment(s) Filed under: VB.NET, Code Snippets

• Generate Amazon Links Quickly and Easily

  To generate Amazon links quickly I use this tool:     http://www.erobillard.com/snippets/amazonlink.aspx Here's how to get there: Goto Eli Robilliard's Blog ( http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/ ) Scroll (waaay-)down to the links section titled: "Blinks to Self" Click on the link titled "Amazon Link Generator" One of the useful features of this tool is that it remembers my Amazon Associates ID so that I don't have to :-) Posted Dec 13 2003, 08:38 AM by digory with no comments Filed under: Tools

• Goodbye cruel world

  While browsing the web tonight I learned this interesting titbit: It is estimated that only less than one-third of people who commit suicide leave a note. One obvious reason for this is that people who are about to commit suicide may not have much energy, whereas writing a note may require much thought and emotional resources.   Don't worry, while I'm not thinking of committing suicide, I can relate - wholehartedly - to the sensation of being sapped of energy and emotional well-being - you see, I'm quite busy at the moment. I'm not just busy with the mundane things such as keeping my job, family and sanity in-tact, there has also been a reservoir of information pushed at me by a snivelling little device called an "aggregator". Let me start at the beginning... Recently, it seems that Microsoft has instructed every person in their company to blog; not only that, they have also issued a decree which states that: "thy shalt blog at weblogs.asp.net". The noise level at asp.net had been getting quite excruciating up until then but now... Now, NOW... it's uproarious. Now I'm inundated with information about Content Management Server, Yukon, XAML, Whidbey, you name it; I'm told about it! Until I can think of a better way to filter the noise I'm afraid that I shall have to abstain reading from this place :( Further Reading HOW TO WRITE A SUICIDE NOTE Tips on Writing Your Suicide Note Posted Dec 10 2003, 10:17 PM by digory with 18 comment(s) Filed under: Rants

• SqlDataReader.Dispose( [I think]true ) ;

  I've finally started doing some application development again (it's been a while), and had to construct a bunch of DataTier methods and classes.  I did lots of data access but, one of the things that I noticed was that I didn't use a single data reader!  Maybe I'm missing something, and maybe (likely) I've just constructed a poor app. but, I just couldn't think of a single place to use one. I wonder how often those things do get used? Posted Dec 06 2003, 02:07 PM by digory with 9 comment(s) Filed under: VB.NET, C#, Windows Forms, Web Forms