A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer
There are certain important life skills that parents are obligated to instill upon their children. It’s our responsibility to make sure that our kids have a have well developed I/O skills, a strong moral backbone, a social conscience and, most importantly, that they know how to program. My 5 year old girl recently started inquiring [...]
How many times have you heard that a tool will save you heaps of time because it automatically generates some sort of CRUD layer for you? Depending on how good you’ve been for Santa you could get a generated data layer, service layer or even an entire application. Great! More time for coffee! Well, yes [...]
I recently conducted an architectural review that involved talking to some guys who spend a lot of time in the Java space. I’m usually only in able to mix with people from the Microsoft side of the tracks, so this was a great opportunity for me to see how “the other half live”. Plus they [...]
I had a rather interesting conversation with Chris Birmele of Microsoft at the recent Heroes Happen launch event here in Perth. We were talking about which version of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite would be the most appropriate for development teams in Perth. I was lamenting that Database Edition had some killer features for us, [...]
Last year I was working on a fairly large windows forms project that was heavily reliant on displaying large sets of information in grids. Most of the functionality in the system was exposed through buttons that had to sit somewhere near a grid. There were multiple main forms, each built around a central grid that [...]
Has anyone else noticed that the example source code given on MSDN and in most books is really, really bad? Even Fowler’s seminal Patterns of Enterprise Architecture shows direct use of ADO.Net Command objects and string based SQL in the code behind file of an ASP.Net page. Check out the Page Controller Pattern on page [...]
Consultancy is a hard gig. Most companies walk a very fine line between body shopping and offering professional services. An organisation favouring body shopping usually hires consultants for a particular contract; with no long term view on how that employee could be best utilised to grow the company. The organisation often charges clients per hour, [...]
There was a time when I didn’t care for mobile phones. I was one of the last amongst my group of friends to get one, and I didn’t do so until it was absolutely necessary. My first phone was a hand-me-down from my sister who is 4 years my junior, which shows just how long [...]
As I’ve previously mentioned, my recent purchase of an Eee PC has resulted in an increase to the number of eBooks that I’ve been reading. This horrible new addiction has lead to a general shortage of reading material that comes in the format I need. Here in Australia we’re a tad behind the times, so [...]
I love buying PC games on Steam, so much so that I haven’t bought a physical copy of a PC game since Battlefield 2 came out. However, I still prefer to purchase DVDs, CDs and books from brick and mortar stores. Why the discrepancy? It’s simple: I can still enjoy shopping for DVDs, CDs and [...]