Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I came across something that grabbed my attention the other day.  I was working with a Silverlight application and had bound TextBox controls to two separate decimal properties of a ViewModel class.  I was using the default formatting for display and was quite perplexed when I found that even though both properties had the same value, i.e. 100, one TextBox displayed 100.00 and the other 100.0000.  After doing a little digging I found that the root cause of this behavior is that decimal types in .NET carry not only a value but that value's precision as well (apparently since .NET 1.1).  To see this in action take this case: decimal d1 = 100; decimal d2 = 100.00M; Console.WriteLine( "d1: {0}, d2: {1}, Equal={2}" , d1, d2, d1 == d2); The result will be the output "d1: 100, d2: 100.00, Equal=true" which is to say that the two variables have equal values but different preci...

EOM Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog .

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I've been playing around with xaml technologies for several  years now and it's given me the utmost respect for truly good UI designers. In the era up to and including Win Forms I'd always thought of myself as a competent UI designer but xaml has change all that.  Quite simply there are so many options available in xaml UI design that I've realized I just don't have the aesthetic sensibility to create top tier UI any longer.  My hat goes of to the many many designers that do.

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . When I first started developing software professionally I remember occasionally finding older code and thinking "how could someone design something so poorly?" I've been writing software for the same company now for more than a decade.  A few years back I first came across a piece of code I'd personally written years before and realized that someone looking at that code right then would probably think the same thing.  I knew the code in question was not badly designed.  At the time of its writing it was well thought out and fully met all requirements.  The "problems" arose over the following years as the landscape in which that code lived changed dramatically.  In those years the company grew several times larger, the application increased in complexity by orders of magnitude, multiple new technologies had to be integrated and industry tr...

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . This week my job duties shifted significantly.  I've gone from doing primarily hands on development to researching development issues for upcoming projects or current problem processes and then presenting possible solutions to the project's shareholders.  In practical terms this means I'm spending a lot less time actually coding and a lot more time in meetings.  I see this as a positive move for our company because, at this point, I believe I'm more valuable acting as a resource for our development department than as one of the resources of our development department.  My quandary is that I already see I'm going to miss actually developing.  I enjoy the intellectual challenge of designing and then implementing software solutions and I can see now there's going to be a lot less of that in the days to come. Ah well.  At least there's...

Programming, a good craft beer and some down-tempo music. Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog .

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I read an article a while back written by an senior developer at Microsoft in which he advocated that EVERY serious developer should blog.  It was some time back so I don't remember the details but I remember being convinced the idea was not entirely without merit.  So here I am. Tonight I'm watching Scott Guthrie's keynote presentation from the Silverlight Firestarter event that was held this week.  He lead off with a demo of SAP's new Silverlight application (which blew my doors off) and now he's into the future for Silverlight, i.e. version 5.  If you're a developer working with LOB applications and you haven't generated an interest in Silverlight you should definitely look at some of the media from this event.