How did they patent this..

I bring you yet another fine example of the US Patent office.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Serialization&s2=XML&OS=Serialization+AND+XML&RS=Serialization+AND+XML

Working Hard..

It's been a while since I posted to my blog, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have been busy working. For the last few months, I've been racking up around 60 Hours a week. This is on top of Football training twice a week, Football game once a week, and indoor cricket once a week.

In addition to this, I just purchased a house... So in the small amount of extra time I've had, I moved house.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking, how much time do other people spend working?? Do most people just do their 37.5 or 40 hours a week??

Let me know!!

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2?

Wow, is this for real?
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience/

I can't wait for this.. :)

Is Canberra not important enough?

I finally got around to reading this months MSDN flash (which looks great by the way frank) and noticed that there is another MSDN Update happening in April.

Time to sign up....

Hang on, where is Canberra???

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Canberra has a fairly large development community, based around delivering services to a heap of government departments. Some of these people even have input into technology procurements. Surely this is a market that has just as much importance as Perth and Adelaide??

Anyway, I just thought I'd let people know that I am a little disappointed by this.

Time to climb back into my shell and get some work done..

ZoomInfo

I was just over at New Scientist when I stumbled on an article about a new web crawler, which has been developed by a Recruiting company. Basically, you can enter your name into the search box, and a few seconds later you have a resume, created from information available on the internet.

I have to say I was somewhat sceptical, how could they create a resume for me?? Anyway, I went over and gave it a try, and my results where as expected.
"No Web Summaries were found for Eddie de Bear".

Anyway, I was not going to let that stop me from givin git a good test, so I entered a few names of high profile people and was very suprised about the results.

For those of you like me, there is actually a link that allows you to build your own online resume, the only problem is they need your credit card details....... For verification only.... I guess I'm just going to have to try to get my name all over the web instead..

ZoomInfo

I was just over at New Scientist when I stumbled on an article about a new web crawler, which has been developed by a Recruiting company. Basically, you can enter your name into the search box, and a few seconds later you have a resume, created from information available on the internet.

I have to say I was somewhat sceptical, how could they create a resume for me?? Anyway, I went over and gave it a try, and my results where as expected.
"No Web Summaries were found for Eddie de Bear".

Anyway, I was not going to let that stop me from givin git a good test, so I entered a few names of high profile people and was very suprised about the results.

For those of you like me, there is actually a link that allows you to build your own online resume, the only problem is they need your credit card details....... For verification only.... I guess I'm just going to have to try to get my name all over the web instead..

GMail and my PDA2K

As I have written about before I have an iMate PDA2k (same as the XDAII) that runs over EVDO/CDMA. One of the many reasons I got this was so I could check my GMail account from work (It's not allowed due to policy...).

Anyway, I was somewhat disappointed when I first tried, and I got redirected to a screen telling me that my browser was not supported. That was a little over a month ago.

Anyway, I figured I'd check to see if gmail now supported more browsers... Guess what... It does... Now I can check my GMail from anywhere.

Oh, Yes, I am aware that I could use POP3 to access gmail all along, but that does not give me the same functionality for searching etc.

It's a simple 203 step process

A new article just popped up on MSDN. It's titled "Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System". Basically, the article runs the reader through the process of installing the December CTP onto a single server. This involves using virtual pc to host each of the tiers in team systems.

Anyway, after having a quick scan through the 26 printed pages (it's much easier to just print it), I very quickly realised that the install process still needs a fair bit of work (I'm assuming the final release will be much easier to setup).

203 Steps is all it takes. This figure only includes the main steps. At the bottom, some of the steps have been divided into sub tasks. This would blow the number out even further..

I think I'm going to wait until beta 2 comes out before trying this on work time..

Optional Parameters

Over at Code Project there is a new poll about peoples opinions of Optional Parameters. I for one have always tried to avoid them at all costs, due more to a bad feeling than any good reason. Anyway, some of the arguments over there got me thinking:

Why don't I like optional parameters

After a sleepless night of debate with myself, I've come to the conclusion that I still don't like them.

The reason is simple. Method Overloading, or passing an object (the properties represent the parameters) can be just as effective as using optional parameters. I feel that this feature is really something that is not needed, and possibly has the ability to create less understandable code.

Less understandable... yes, by this i mean a situation where a method changes it's behaviour based on an optional parameter. This is a situation where a required enumeration specifying the exact operation to perform would be much better, and the code would be much easier to understand. An example is below:

    Sub Main()
        Round(1.23, False)
        Round(1.45)
    End Sub

    Function Round(ByVal value As Double, Optional ByVal down As Boolean = True) As Integer
        '... perform rounding    
    End Function

As opposed to this:

    Public Enum RoundingOperation
        Up
        Down
    End Enum

    Sub Main()
        Round(1.23, RoundingOperation.Down)
        Round(1.23, RoundingOperation.Up)
    End Sub

    Function Round(ByVal value As Double, ByVal operation As RoundingOperation) As Integer
        '... perform rounding    
    End Function

Sure it's more typing, but the code as far as I'm concerned is much more self documenting. Let me know your thoughts...

The simple task of washing clothes...

I had a bit of an exciting thing happen on the weekend. Something that has left me marveling at the wonders of technology.

It all started when my lovely wife asked me to put on a load of washing. This is something that I have done many, many times before. Just like many of those times, I forgot to do something that really drives my wife crazy, I forgot to clean out the pockets of my work clothes..

I'm sure you are now wondering why I am telling you this. The answer is quite simple..I LEFT MY USB THUMB DRIVE IN MY PANTS. Not only that, I didn't actually notice until I pulled my pants out of the clothes dryer.

The end result of all this actually surprised me. After a complete wash cycle and 2 and a half hours in the clothes dryer, it still works.

IE7 for WinXP

Wow... I was just surfing over at channel9 when I stumbled across an announcement about IE7. Looks like we are getting the long awaited update for IE before longhorn is released.

I wonder what new features we will be getting? Is this limited to security updates and bug fixes, or are we likely to get new features that will revelutionise the way we browse

Partnering with Customers

Development is a costly game. Something that allot of small businesses cannot easily afford. Yet these same small businesses are usually the ones that can benefit most from a system that reduces running costs. What is the solution for this?

Something that I am starting to offer some of my smaller clients. Reduced development costs, for a share in the profits. A partnership if you like.

This on the surface seems to have a few extra advantages.
First of all, if a project really hits the mark, the potential return is greater than the lost income of the initial development. This is good, gut it is also a risk. A risk of lost income if the system fails.

However there is another advantage to an arrangement like this. Clients (business partners) end up being allot more trusting. They tend to allow the developers to make more technical decisions, simply because they also have a stake in the risk.

Is this something that is becoming common in the industry?
Is this a way for an independent software developer to secure a more stable income?

Hit me on the comments, Let me know your thoughts

Security Summit

It's 9:20pm, and I just got back home after a day at the security summit. What a day.

During the day, I managed to catch up with Geoff Appleby and a few other familiar faces. The sessions where awsome, Prashant (I hope that's the correct spelling) doing his Team Systems presentations, Andrew Coates (Click Once Deployment) and Greg Low (Sql Server).

After soaking up all the geeky information I could handle for the day, it was off to King O'Malleys for a few quiet drinks. What a turnout. Darren, Mitch, Geoff, Andrew, Greg and a few other all turned up, and much geek talk happened....

Anyway, It's time for some sleep now, because tomorrow it's back to real work...

I can see my house from here

A friend of mine sent me this link. Anyway, I found my house, I can see my boat, trampoline and yellow wheelie bin...

There is a god!

Well, maybe not. But at last there is this.

For those who don't want to follow the link, the guys over in Redmond have finally solved "The Designer ate my controls" problem. They are going to be releasing a patch for VS.NET 2003, and will also fix the problem in VS 2005 (Whidbey).

This has got to be one of the most annoying bugs of all time.

OMG

I was just reading a blog entry from Geoff Appleby which
contained a link to the new/changed language features in VB.NET. Now as a C#
man, I have kept fairly up to date with all the new features for C#, but I
thought why not see what is coming for VB.NET.

Anyway, while looking at some of the changes, I stumbled across this, which
basically allows a developer to explicitly define the lower bounds of an array
as 0.

Below is an example:

Public Sub declarelowerbounds()

    Dim monthtotal(0 To 11) As Double

    Dim cell(0 To 39, 0 To 19) As Integer

    MsgBox("Total number of elements:" _

        & vbCrLf & "monthtotal (0 To 11) length " & CStr(monthtotal.Length) _

        & vbCrLf & "cell (0 To 39, 0 To 19) length " & CStr(cell.Length))

End Sub

Underneath this example was a little note:

"The lower bound must always be 0, but your code can be more readable
when you explicitly declare it. Specifying both bounds also reminds the reader
that the lower bound is 0."

After picking myself up off the ground, I actually read the whole article,
and it does actually state that this feature is to improve code readability.

I can only imagine that this has been added to VB.Net in order to appease the
masses, I just wonder how long until people start to complain about not being
able to specify a non-zero lower bound..

Disclaimer: Although most of my development is done in C#,
I still do have a few side projects that use VB.Net.

Killing a Process

I was surfing over at channel 9 when I stumbled across an entry where someone was requesting a new method for killing processes. This is what they are suggesting.

I for one would love something like this.. Not as the main tool for controlling processes and the like, but it would be nice :)

Evil... I thought I was just misunderstood..

After seeing how evil (or not) Darren, Mitch and Geoff, I figured I had to set things straight..
I got 57% evil.. That explains some things.. I guess I need to work a little harder :)

Yay for me

Just before Christmas I got a pleasant surprise. One of the local Telstra shops managed to get their hands on a iMate PDA2K EVDO. I very quickly snapped it up.

This lovely device runs over the CDMA network, which meant dropping my existing GSM plan, and taking the plunge. I ended up taking a data only plan.

Now all I need to do is test how well skype will run. Hopefully I can ditch making voice calls all together and use skype with skypeout make traditional landline calls.. Here is hoping it will all work out.

Paint.NET

Here I was reading slashdot this morning, when I cam accross a link to Paint.NET.

Paint.NET is a graphics editor designed to replace MSPaint. Best of all, it's built using C# and the .NET Framework 1.1, and it's free.

Think gimp, but with a nicer user interface. I think I've found a new tool for my desktop, especially for touching up red eye.