The all to common words of the junkie "I can stop any time I want to". I have been on the mp3 bandwagon since the late 90's, ripping all my CD, and a few that weren't, to my computer, I have always loved books on tape, but I never really got into pod cast until just over a year ago.
Lets face it the early pod casts were really horrible with bad audio quality production quality that sounded like they here done by guys living in there parents basement or schizophrenic nut jobs randomly ranting with out any ability to stay on topic and where generally a wast of time.
Then I met the candy man, ..er woman. at Netdug, the local .Net developers group, Kathleen Dollard did a presentation on linq and some other new .net 3.5 features, and during her presentation she mentioned being on DNRTV.com, and how they had a lot of good videos out there for learning new things about .net. I checked it out, watched a few videos and was really impressed, the production quality was good, the audio and video quality was great, these guys knew what they where doing and talking to people who knew what they where talking about and then the mentioned the Podcast, so i checked it out, I had some grunt work to do so I pulled a few episodes down and started to listen and so began the slows spiral down into addiction. Some of the guests talked about there blogs and some had there own pod casts.
What started with DotNetRocks quickly added hanselminutes, Elegant Code Cast and the dirty pleasure of Mondays, but I was still in control I had to be at a computer to listen to them I didn't have a portable mp3 player, I never felt the need to own one and then woot had two 1G san disk mp3 players for $15 and I couldn't say no.
Now I could get a fix any time and any where! the 30 min drive to work was now filled with the wisdom of the guru & rock stars of the development community, and juvenile geek humor, until today, I didn't get a chance to update my player last night after I ran out of shows last night on my way home. I had to drive for 60+ min with only the radio to listen to, with the lame humor of the morning DJs, the 5 Commercials for every 3 songs with most of them in the suck category, the detox was horrable, how did I live before?
Am I a junkie? Probably, but it's a lot better then listing to the radio!
Friday, February 20, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Drinking the Kool-ade
I had a conversation the other day that really made me think afterwords, "Have I drank the kool-ade?" and if so, how deep am I drinking it.
Speaking with a fellow developer the other day about system administration and I found myself talking up power shell vs him saying to use php. Now as a UNIX/Linux guy at heart I found myself in a really weird spot of talking up a Microsoft scripting language. This is a really weird spot for me, I don't like windows as an OS, the file system is lacking, and the lackluster/non-existing scripting.
VB is horrible and bat is limited at best, you can install cygen or UNIX services for windows to use bash, awk, sed, php, perl, etc. these are ok, but your still limited in how well you can access system level stuff.
Of all of the scripting languages you can install on windows perl and php (yes i know there is ruby and python, but I'm talking well established old school languages) are the most robust, I like php, I used it a lot back in my java days to do the light front end stuff and then used the java servlets to do the Hervey work (I have never liked jsp), but like perl I think php is being used for stuff it was never intended, system scripting being one. Php is a web language and for simple web applications it's a really good one. Just like perl is a really good system scripting language, it never should have been used to do web programing, yes a lot of people did it, myself included. And now here comes power shell, a real shell environment, with a very powerful programing environment, including the ability to use system .net objects and dlls, and has a very perl like syntax. now there is the ability to do system scripting and easily integrate into anything on your computer including Office apps like Word, outlook, etc. if you really wanted to, and it would be wrong if you did, you could create a Word doc, from a scripting language. For me this is really cool, finally windows is moving in the right direction.
This got me thinking about other kool-ade as well, having worked with both java and .net to be honest, I like c# .net more, java is a really great language, solid OO and very versatile with it's platform independent design. On the other side the first c# development I did was on Linux using the mono project and it's also a solid OO language. It may not be as platform independent, but using the LAMA stack you can run asp.net web apps on Linux servers, and yes I have done this, .net has it's short falls, the GAC is not a comparable to java class path. It's a pain to administrate, things never update like they should, it really is horrible. On the other side .net may be a managed code, but it doesn't have the oppressive wait of the java virtual machine around it's neck. Java may have a lot better/more frameworks, but .net is moving that direction very fast. In the end they both have there strong points and there week points, so it comes down to personal preference, and to be honest there very similar to work in, I like c# better, on Linux or windows. the language syntax is very similar, but where it's different, I generally like c# better.
Have I drank the kool-ade? maybe, but keep in mind, Microsoft isn't the only one selling Kool-ade, the java community has there own stands, and all the ruby developers seem to want to do is sell it. In the end I would like to think if I am drinking the kool-ade, at least I'm trying a little bit from everyone.
Speaking with a fellow developer the other day about system administration and I found myself talking up power shell vs him saying to use php. Now as a UNIX/Linux guy at heart I found myself in a really weird spot of talking up a Microsoft scripting language. This is a really weird spot for me, I don't like windows as an OS, the file system is lacking, and the lackluster/non-existing scripting.
VB is horrible and bat is limited at best, you can install cygen or UNIX services for windows to use bash, awk, sed, php, perl, etc. these are ok, but your still limited in how well you can access system level stuff.
Of all of the scripting languages you can install on windows perl and php (yes i know there is ruby and python, but I'm talking well established old school languages) are the most robust, I like php, I used it a lot back in my java days to do the light front end stuff and then used the java servlets to do the Hervey work (I have never liked jsp), but like perl I think php is being used for stuff it was never intended, system scripting being one. Php is a web language and for simple web applications it's a really good one. Just like perl is a really good system scripting language, it never should have been used to do web programing, yes a lot of people did it, myself included. And now here comes power shell, a real shell environment, with a very powerful programing environment, including the ability to use system .net objects and dlls, and has a very perl like syntax. now there is the ability to do system scripting and easily integrate into anything on your computer including Office apps like Word, outlook, etc. if you really wanted to, and it would be wrong if you did, you could create a Word doc, from a scripting language. For me this is really cool, finally windows is moving in the right direction.
This got me thinking about other kool-ade as well, having worked with both java and .net to be honest, I like c# .net more, java is a really great language, solid OO and very versatile with it's platform independent design. On the other side the first c# development I did was on Linux using the mono project and it's also a solid OO language. It may not be as platform independent, but using the LAMA stack you can run asp.net web apps on Linux servers, and yes I have done this, .net has it's short falls, the GAC is not a comparable to java class path. It's a pain to administrate, things never update like they should, it really is horrible. On the other side .net may be a managed code, but it doesn't have the oppressive wait of the java virtual machine around it's neck. Java may have a lot better/more frameworks, but .net is moving that direction very fast. In the end they both have there strong points and there week points, so it comes down to personal preference, and to be honest there very similar to work in, I like c# better, on Linux or windows. the language syntax is very similar, but where it's different, I generally like c# better.
Have I drank the kool-ade? maybe, but keep in mind, Microsoft isn't the only one selling Kool-ade, the java community has there own stands, and all the ruby developers seem to want to do is sell it. In the end I would like to think if I am drinking the kool-ade, at least I'm trying a little bit from everyone.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Becomeing a better Developer
Listing to a Hanselminutes a while ago the subject came up of how to become a better developer and this got me thinking, what am I doing to become a better developer? I read blogs, listen to Dot net rocks and Hansel minutes, I go to the occasional Netdug (Boise .NET developers group) , read Visual Studio magazine (mostly skimming it), I went to code camp, and I started a weekly training session at work where every Wednesday we watch video tutorials, but is any of this really making me a better developer?
At this point the question would really have to be is how do you tell if your becoming a better developer? So I look at some of the things I have done in the passed and what I'm doing right now
At this point the question would really have to be is how do you tell if your becoming a better developer? So I look at some of the things I have done in the passed and what I'm doing right now
- running asp.net application in Linux with mod mono and using mod_aspdotnet with Apache, but this is more operations stuff.
- using Ghost doc and Sandcastle to document my code, and using Component One's free spellchecker
- using Resharper and the VS refactor tools to make my code better
- creating unit tests and sort of doing test driven development
- playing with IOC and DI, and just using interfaces
- refactoring existing projects to make them more maintainable and better performing
- using tools like FXCop and Style cop to do code review
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Inversion of Control
One of the things I have been trying to learn for a while is inversion of control (IOC) and dependency injection (DI). I tried to playing with spring.net and I just couldn't get it to work. The other day I downloaded Castle project and played with Castle Windsor, and found it rather easy to use, or at least it has better examples.
I have now started working on a project using IOC and DI to create the base framework for my personal development.
The first step I'm working on is the Data Access Layer and data objects. I'm building a generic data request object that I can use to request data from MySQL, Oracle, Sql Server, XML file, or a web service and using IOC I can change the data source by simply changing a config file, and the rest of the application will never know.
when I'm a little further along I'll post the some of the code. All of this on my way to learning how to create better, more testable code, working my way to doing agile Test Driven Development.
I have now started working on a project using IOC and DI to create the base framework for my personal development.
The first step I'm working on is the Data Access Layer and data objects. I'm building a generic data request object that I can use to request data from MySQL, Oracle, Sql Server, XML file, or a web service and using IOC I can change the data source by simply changing a config file, and the rest of the application will never know.
when I'm a little further along I'll post the some of the code. All of this on my way to learning how to create better, more testable code, working my way to doing agile Test Driven Development.
Who am i and how did I get here?
Seeing that this is my first entry, let's get some things set strait or crooked, depending on your point of view. I finally decided to start writing a blog to rant and rave or babel aimlessly about what interesting things I might be doing right now; this could be anything from new things Ive learned about software development to my plans to topple world governments and set up puppet governments I can control from the shadows, it all depends on what I feel like doing today.
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