Welcome to my little place on the internet. Up until now I’ve been on the “consumer” side of blogging, so this is new territory for me (side note: I actually loathe the word “blog”, and I’ll always endeavour to use a better word in its place). If something requires clarification, or you have feedback to provide, just leave a note on the site or email me directly.
About Me
After growing up in Adelaide, I graduated from university with a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems) and Bachelor of Maths and Computer Sciences in mid-2008. I’m now living in Sydney and currently working for nsquared solutions. The other details aren’t important right now, but if you want to beat the details out of me you’ll need to buy me a beer at a social event or something.
Background
Right now I’m wearing a .NET developer hat – this may change in the future, but for now that’s where the bulk of my experience lies, so I’m going to start off this blog (ugh, last time, I swear) by sharing my experiences in the .NET world. I mostly did Java through uni, with a bit of C and C++, perhaps I might touch on that a bit too, depending on the rust levels. My professional .NET adventures started when I did some part-time ASP.NET work while at uni, and while ASP.NET remains my core competency I’ve branched out recently to do work with Live Services, WPF and Silverlight.
Goals
A lot of the software developers I know and read recommend having your own blog space – writing skills are a completely different domain to writing code, and demonstrating a concept or API function to someone else is completely different to understanding it yourself – and I want to give back to the community and contribute to the body of knowledge available regarding .NET and software development.
There’s a whole bunch of new and updated tools and technologies coming out of Redmond recently, and with Win7 and .NET 4.0 on the horizon this is a very exciting time for anyone who is interested in playing around with new stuff. Specifically, I’ve been playing around with the Microsoft Extensibility Framework a bit over the last few days (got some basic samples, but needs some polish to finally be an awesome F5-style demo) and ASP.NET MVC continues to catch my eye (after wrapping up a WebForms project I’m going to put some time into that). Silverlight (in particular some of the v3 features) look to be blurring the lines between web, RIA and client applications. And Virtual Earth and Live Framework continue to evolve and grow, with updates and new features that seem to have been lost in the noise of other product announcements.
In addition to talking about .NET I hope to branch out more into the practices and concepts that are associated with software development, software engineering or whatever-you-wish-to-call-it-when-people-build-software. This is a young field, which is rapidly evolving, and there are many, many ways to get from A to B. I do not have all the answers right now. But over time, hopefully I can pick the brains of others in the industry, dissect opinions and articles from others, and add my insight and opinions to the process wherever appropriate.
I’ll also include some non-work stuff as it happens – because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Code Samples
While I agree with the sentiments of others - that we need to do more to improve the quality of code in use everywhere - many of the samples that will appear here will not demonstrate best practices initially – most of the ideas I have in place currently are around proof-of-concept work and demonstrations of specific features.
As concepts grow and evolve, my personal goal is to turn these samples into standalone applications - wherever there is a genuine interest in the community. Of course, some of these may be purely for fun or for mad-scientist-esque purposes, so not all of these will achieve greatness (or even mediocrity). So if something you see here fills a niche, let me know and perhaps we can organise some collaborate so that we can critique and refine and continue to drive interest and make the world a better place, one line of code at a time.
As others have said far more eloquently in a recent discussion on this, we need to do more around outlining what the sample includes and, more importantly, emphasize what the sample does not cover. Is there value in giving a sample the kid gloves treatment to protect that someone who does the F5-oh-look-it-works trick before using it elsewhere? Where is the point where the sample needs to satisfy the necessary requirements that production code is held to? Is there a happy medium? Can we even define succinctly what a “good sample” should constitute?
The only thing I’m sure of is that a samples should clearly define what it is not demonstrating.