Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

I'm a simple man so I couldn't think of any way to mix these three (especially since I've cut back on beer consumption as it can aggravate my heart arrhythmia).  However, local blogger David Redding (VP of the Ann Arbor .NET Developers) has found one.  And to top that, he's even weaved it into a wonderful tutorial on C#'s "yield return" feature.  Check it out!

At my current contract, I've done three brand new applications from scratch and have been involved in modifying a couple of others.  Every developer has their own coding style and it can be sometimes difficult to come up to speed on how someone else has decided to code a particular application.  What I've found myself doing more and more is documenting (using XML comments) the private methods of these apps I need to modify.  When I find a method and the name isn't descriptive (to me) as to what it is doing, I jump to it, review the code to see what it's doing and then add an XML comment for the method.  The next I run into a call to this method, Intellisense will pop up my summary description and I won't need to leave my current spot.  This gets me up to speed quicker on how the app is architected and makes it quicker for me to do my modifications.

Yeah, I know.  These days, new thumbdrives are about as exciting as a new tank of gas.  But I thought it was kind of cool since it's coming from the company I'm subcontracting with, SRT Solutions!  SRT is going to have a booth at CodeMash next week and I'll probably be there from time to time.  Stop by and say "Hi" if you get a chance.

I just got an email regarding next weeks CodeMash:

Today, I received my copy of Windows Developer Power Tools.  It was a "thank you" for contributing to the book (<shamelessplug>I wrote an ILDASM section for Chapter 16.</shamelessplug>).  Thank you to Jim Holmes for inviting me to contribute to this project.  It was fun and I really enjoyed it!

I had a short project during the Christmas/New Year's break.  I had to create some CCW's (COM Callable Wrappers) for a client that wanted to replace some existing COM objects with new .NET objects.  The requirement was that the existing COM clients (built with early-binding) would not need recompiling.  They have a product that allows their customers to write their own extensions.  So requiring hundreds of clients to recompile all of their extensions was something they wanted to avoid.

After getting my new phone in November, I started searching all over for information about mobile development.  I ran across the Windows Mobile Team Blog and was fascinated by the articles written by Mike Calligro (or "MikeCal" as displayed on the blog).  I read one and had to read his next, and next, etc...  With titles like "The Emporer Has No Close" and "Paging Dr. RAM", how could you go wrong?  The articles are a fun and entertaining look into the mobile form factor and the issues Microsoft has worked on for many years.

I switched to Firefox about 8 months ago.  That was after using Firefox and IE6 together for a month or two to determine if I liked Firefox.  I haven't used IE6 much since then.