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It's been a long weekend

Literally, it was a three day weekend here in the land of Oz - Queen's Birthday or something?  I got hamstrung working through my latest article but was helped out of the mire by a couple of good friends, thatnks :-)

The writing process is something that I would really like to understand better; the art of telling a good story doesn't necessarily come naturally to me as I often find myself just throwing words down on the page.  One thing that does save me though is that I write articles in much the same way I write code.  I start out by listing the items of the story at a high level - kinda like psuedo-code - these items get turned into headings and sub-headings.  After that I just fill in the "meat" of the article underneath each of them.  This way I can never really get too far off track :-)

I did receive a nice piece of advice from Scott Mitchell (http://www.DataWebControls.com).  He said that, after each paragraph he stops and reads it as if he were reading it as someone with limited experience about the topic; he then asks himself what follow-up questions would that person have?

That piece of advice really helped me to slow down and focus on getting my article written - one paragraph at a time.  Thanks Scott!

I also read quite a lot of the blog that Jeff Prosise maintained while writing "Programming Microsoft .NET":

    http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/prosise/blog/default.asp?page=1

It's a real "under-the-covers" peek into the writing process.  Jeff is speaking in Adelaide next month and I really hope to be there to here him speak.

My rant.
I just read AngryCoder's latest blog entry about C# vs. VB. 

    http://www.angryCoder.com/blog/entries/20030605.html

I certainly haven't been around for as long as that person has, but, I can say this... there's never been a better time to be writing Visual Basic for a living!  If  you are a VB programmer and articles such as this one make you want to jump ship, I'd just say "hang in there", things are pretty good in the VB camp and it's only going to get better.

4 Comments

  • C'mon Darren - we _know_ you're under NDA, but you can't make statements about how much "better" things are going to get for VB.NET developers without giving us a few more juicy details. :-)


    Seriously, if VB.NET got edit & continue I think it would be a compelling reason to switch. Generics are cool (C# 2.0), but edit and continue would probably be a clincher for me. I lead a sort of double life with my .NET programming, writing about the same amount of VB.NET and C#. There are pros and cons to both languages, both in the area of language features and in the area of tool support, and I really don't prefer one language over another. I agree with you that VB has never been this good - inheritance, multi-threading. At the same time I don't see any reason why a competent VB.NET developer shouldn't be able to read and understand C# pretty easily. Same framework, just a different "skin" on top of the MSIL.

  • Glad I could help out, Darren. I am going to be soon tackling a few magazine articles here, and your comments have inspired me to share my experiences in a blog of my own. :-)





    Thanks!

  • I now have a Weblog of my own: ScottOnWriting.NET





    Thanks! :-)

  • When in doubt, throw it out. ,

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