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 :)