Tom Richards .NET Weblog

This may have been obvious to others but ...

I have misunderstood one of the basic concepts of C#: reference types and pass by value.

I know that this is explained in the elementary C# texts but I made an assumption about pass by value and ignored the rest.

When reference types are passed to methods "by value" only the handle is passed by value.  The handle references the object out on the stack.  The called method is free to modify the object at least via the normal public methods and properties.  Makes sense, I guess.  But I was confused by the last Chris Sells multithreading in winforms article.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnforms/html/winforms01232003.asp

Any way, me dumb but learning.

Coders, Programmers, Developers, Engineers and .NET Development

I mentioned before that one of my responsiblities at work has been to create a nightlybuild and deployment process.  The tools are in place but all mostly require access to the build machine.  The tools are all console .net apps that may or may not be scheduled. 

The deployment tool was written to either "push" the bits from the build machine or to "pull" the bits into a server.  The QA group has decided that it prefers the push mode.  So they have to have access to the build machine.  We use terminal services to connect but are limited to 2 connections, which is a major inconviences.

So, I decided that I would write a web based application to deploy.  Of course, by default the ASPNET user can't copy files to just any server, so I set impersonation - works ok, but the copy needs to be in a worker thread.  The thread doesn't have rights to copy files.  This may not seem like a problem to some but I haven't really delved into asp.net security - the perferect opportunity.

I changed the title of this post while writing.  A programmer or whatever came by my desk and ask for me to rebuild and deploy his tool that failed the build last night.  I got to thinking about the various levels of people here and where I've been before.  Some want others to fix their problems - not their job.  Others tried to understand the process or at least the tools being used.  I am barraged by VS.NET, VSS, etc.  basic questions by some.  Others just get the job done.

Anyone can see that a lot of .net is new to me but I am trying to learn - trying to find a niche I guess.  We have people who are way above me in .net skills others who just want their UI to work.  The UI codes even have the UI designed by the analysts. 

.NET seems to make it both easier and harder to write applications.  This company has built a framework so that the ui programmers don't even need to understand the underlying application - just wire up the UI.  At the same time the application is a lot more sophisticated.

Anyway, I've never really understood people who just try to get by in this business.  I find that I've had a constant struggle (usually a lot of fun) in my career(s) to learn new stuff.  Personally I've not had a choice.

First entry

This is my second attempt at starting a web log.  The first used Radio but I didn't really get into it for some reason.

I think that I reach a certain level of frustration and need to express thoughts somewhere - I really have no peer-to-peer contacts at work.

I didn't know whether to call myself an old timer or an old fart, both fit.  I started my career, way back when,  as an EE doing analog circuit design but quickly got into embedded stuff using 8080s.  Lots of embedded development followed then there was a decision (mine) to try Windows and C++.  Programming kinda clicked when I started learning OOP. Lots of C++ stuff followed, some embedded some not - proud of some things others ?

I have been "doing" .NET for about 2 years, pretty much since I wrote my first C# hello world.  I started using .NET to make a living shortly after.  I soon realized that I could be pretty productive very fast.  It's also pretty easy to write very bad programs.

My major job at my current company has been to write a set of tools to build and deploy a fairly large .NET application.  The application currently has > 250 projects.  It was obvious that we could not create a giant solution file - the dependencies between projects seem kind of random.  I first wrote a chunk to figure out the build order.  The rest is pretty easy, I create makefiles from each .csproj file and build using nmake.  This all works fine.

Now I have discovered Nant.  My build tools all use Nant to build and I would like to convert the last build stage of the nightlybuild to use nant build files instead of nmake files.  I found a xsl stylesheet to directly convert .csproj to .build so this should be hard to change - I really need to learn XSLT.

My goal in changing things is to get out of the nightlybuild maintainance "business".  I'm tired of it and want to move on but as long as parts are my own custom stuff, that won't happen. 

I am also rebuilding the app to use .NET 1.1 and deploy on Win 2003.  A bunch of new issues, mainly with security.

Anyway, I am thinking alot about what I need to learn in order to get to the point where I would be confortable selling my self as a .NET developer to someone else.  I have been trying to press my friends for "education" project ideas but probably will fall back on rebuilding an old project.

What I need for a project would be:

Interesting enough to work on on my own time

• involve .net security - a really weak point with me
• engineering related - get some data from hardware (sim'd), process and pass it on
• webforms , winforms, pda, etc...
• webservices - async calls, compression
• ... there's really a lot more here.

A long first post, somewhat .net related as requested.