Graduating…

My younger brother John graduated today from the University of Ulster, at the Magee campus.  It felt very strange to be at the graduation ceremony with my folks; the last graduation I was at was my own, back in 2005.  Actually, the  two ceremonies were separated by exactly 5 years; it feels considerably longer.

The ceremony was graced with the presence of James Nesbitt, the UUC’s new Chancellor, who had the right mix of gravitas and humour.  An honorary doctorate was awarded to Colin Bateman, a local crime fiction author.  I’ve never been a fan of his books, but his acceptance speech was quite humorous.  There was a lovely moment when a degree was awarded to the parents of a student who sadly passed away before graduating, and the entire assembly rose to give them a standing ovation.  I actually really enjoyed being there, and I’m very glad my brother invited me.

Today’s ceremony in Derry was in direct contrast to my own graduation at QUB.  The ceremony there came across as very smug, and was incredibly tedious.  Some nobody from industry I had had never heard off before, and have never heard of since, was awarded an honorary degree, and he preceded to bore us to death in his acceptance speech (think Father Ted acceptance’s speech on winning the Golden Cleric…).  People who graduate from QUB have the nasty habit of looking down on anyone who went to to UU; after speaking to some of my brother’s friends today, and hearing about some of the work going on at the UU, I can’t see why.

Automation, and Gaining Time for Fun Stuff…

 

In a recent post, I foolishly promised to get up at 5am every morning to work on personal projects and to write more blog posts.  Dear reader, do you really need to ask how many times over the last two weeks I have welcomed daybreak by typing away on my laptop?  Yeah, that's right, not once.

This won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me- I’m just not an early riser.  However, I am still committed to spending more time on my personal projects.  So over the past week, I have tried to use Launchy, the open-source program launcher, as much as possible to automate the routines actions that I repeat daily, and that just eat up mouse clicks and keystrokes.

One common action that I do often in work is to use Outlook to setup calendar appointments (shared with my Google Calendar using the Google Calendar Sync), and to send myself email reminders. 

I took a look at the Outlook shortcuts to automatically create a new email message, and added the command below in the Runner plugin (see previous post for details of adding commands)

Name	Program	Arguments
Email	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\OUTLOOK.EXE	/c ipm.note

I then wanted to extend this to create new email messages to be sent to specific email addresses, i.e. my own webmail account.   To do this, you simply change the arguments to be ‘/c ipm.note /m <insert email address>’.

Similarly, the argument to create a new appointment is ‘/c ipm.appointment’.

So, by simply typing ‘Email-Reminder’ into the Launchy window, I can create a new mail message to send to myself.

Expect a number of other posts in the near future around scripting and productivity.

The Weekly Links 9

This is the 9th post in an ongoing series of weekly roundups of links useful to developers.

Tools

• SteakyBeak – Is an advanced logging module for web apps that will log each request to your web server and also provide a easy interface to view these requests. Base on the ever useful NLog logging framework.
• PowerGUI Visual Studio – Quest have released a version of the PowerGUI IDE for PowerShell that integrates into Visual Studio.  Other options to develop and execute PowerShell scripts in VS include the VS Command Shell, and PowerConsole.
• TOAD Extension for Visual Studio – Again from Quest, a extension to manage Oracle databases within VS in the same way as SQL Server databases.
• Enterprise Localization Toolkit – An oldie but a goodie.  A colleague in work (Thanks, Mike!) came across this framework from Microsoft for resource string management via a database.
• Posterous – the easiest way to blog.  Create a beautiful looking blog with the minimal effort.  I’m seriously considering switching to use it… Watch this space.

Information

• VS 2010 Productivity Improvements, Part III – Somasegar, the Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, continues his series of posts looking at the new features available in Visual Studio 2010.  Check out the earlier posts – Part I and Part II.
• MSTest vs. NUnit with Visual Studio 2010 & TDD – The ‘Bare Bones Coder’ compares his experience using NUnit and MSTest in a TDD project.  A well written post, but I’m including it as much for the beautiful image s/he includes as for its content.  Also, the post reminded me of a StackOverflow question I asked (and answered) a while back on switching between the two different testing frameworks.
• On Pair Programming – Andrea (AKA roundCrisis) takes a look at pair programming, and points out where it can wrong.
• Clean Code and Clean TDD Cheat Sheets – Download a couple of cheat sheets to help you with your TDD and keeping your code clean of crud.
• Introducing IIS Express – Another local blogger, Andy Poots, highlights the release of IIS Express.
• HttpModule – developing outside the product box – Ciaran, writing on the PointyHeads blog, has an interesting post on two uses of  HtttpModules to solve SharePoint issues.
• Announcing www.pexforfun.com – A post highlighting the new website to introduce developers to the Pex, an automated White box testing framework for .NET.
• Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 – Guidelines from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team.
• TryParse vs Convert – A comparison of the two techniques as applied to parsing query strings.

Events

You can now check out developer events in Northern Ireland using my calendar.

There are no developer events in the coming week.

Goodbye Last.fm, Hello Jango

No doubt I coming late to this party, but a colleague shared Jango, the advertising-supported Internet radio website.  I immediately feel in love with it.   A nice clean website, easy to navigate, and a great selection of artists and tunes.  I’ve just finished uninstalling the Last.fm dektop client; it is history.  If I need some tunes now, I just have to click on the Jango bookmark.  Which I have just done, and I’m now enjoying some Stone Temple Pilots.

The Weekly Links 8

This is the 8th post in an ongoing series of weekly roundups of links useful to developers.  This post is effectively a roundup of links from the past months – apologies for the delay in posting!

Tools

• ApiChange Is Released! – APIChange is a command line tool that allows you to execute queries on against your compiled .NET code base. The main use of the tool is to determine the impact of each API change, such identifying all users of a specific type.  A useful alternative to the commercial NDepends offering.
• Chirpy – A Visual Studio 2010 Add-In for handling JavaScript, CSS, and DotLess files. 
• The Best Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, Power Commands and Extensions – Scott Hanselman catalogues his favourite VS2010 extensions.
• OutlookSpy – A tool to allow developers to explore the Outlook object model.
• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools – A set of templates and extensions that provides additional functionality to SharePoint developers.
• FxCop 10.0 – An insane jump in version number for the Microsoft static code analysis tool.
• Soluto – LifeHacker has an article on this Windows freeware tool that tracks all the applications in your system boot process, and tells you exactly which ones are slowing you down.

Information

• WatiN Screenshot Saver – Brian Shroer describes how to use Watin, the impressive automated web testing framework, to create a screen capture tool. 
• Observable Collections – Steve Wellens gives an overview of a collection in the .NET framework that is new to me.
• SP 2010: How to create a PowerShell Snapin Cmdlet – Tobias Zimmergren has a two part series on creating a PowerShell Cmdlet for SharePoint 2010 (Part 1, Part 2).
• SOLID Examples – Following an ongoing series of articles on the SOLID design principles at LostTechies.com, the various code samples have been brought together as a CodePlex project.
• Start Learning Ruby with IronRuby – Kazi Mansur kicks off a series of blog posts on IronRuby with a look at creating a development environment.
• The Power of Func<> – Jason Sonmez gives an introduction to the Func generic type.
• TechEd 2010 North America – NI’s very own Martin Woodward blogs about his TechEd presentation on Team Explorer, and he also links to a number of other presentations relating to VS2010/TFS.
• How to select open source libraries - Daniel Marbach gives a breakdown of the different criteria to use to select an open source library to use.
• .NET Logging Tools and Libraries – A site dedicated to cataloguing the various logging libraries available to .NET developers. My personal preference is for NLog, though I have recently become interested in using PostSharp, an AOP framework for logging.

Miscellaneous

A few more random links:

• Let Me Google That For You – The ultimate answer to dumb questions.  Simply copy the question into the search box, git the required button, and it will generate a http://lmgtfy.com/ link for you to email back to the waste of space who bothered you with the query.  Even better, kill time by monitoring what search terms are being entered in real time - http://live.lmgtfy.com/
• Script Junkie – A MSDN site dedicated to the serious web developer.  Courtesy of Simon Phillips.
• The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever -  Exactly what it says….

Events

You can now check out developer events in Northern Ireland using my calendar.

There are no events in the coming week.

Normal Service Resumes

Folks, apologies for the dearth of posts over the last few weeks.  It has been a very busy couple of weeks, both in work and personally.  I have been involved in a challenging project in work, that has required some additional hours. That, on top of my daily commute, meant there has been very little free time to spend blogging.

 

On the plus side, it has meant that I have had to take look at what I want to do with the blog, and I can see that changes are required.  For a start, I will be blogging more often in the future.  That is not a wish, but is a promise.  I will be taking a leaf from Jason Bell’s book, and will be getting up early to specifically spend time on the blog and personal projects.  There will be more posts on my personal projects,and a lot more code samples. 

There will still be a weekly roundup of links, but I’m dropping (for now) the jobs summary.  There will also be more time on spent reviewing developer tools.  I’m also considering a series of articles on SharePoint 2010.

In terms of personal projects, I’ll be able to post an announcement this week on my first major project. 

Absolutely Lost…

I was late comer to the Lost TV series.  In fact, it wasn’t until some time in September 2007 that I actually watched my first episode.  It was while I was working in Dublin, and staying at a hotel in Dublin.  It was a miserable night, and I only watched it while waiting for Battlestar Galactica to come on. As this particular episode (The Brig) was a climatic one in Season 3, I hadn’t a clue what was going on.  But I was impressed enough to go back and watch Season 1. 

 

From the first 5 minutes of the pilot episode, I was hooked.  Over 6 seasons, we have been treated to the most compelling TV.  And now it is all over.  I thought the last episode was bit long, and could have benefited from some editing. But I still cried at a beautiful and elegant end sequence.  And now I’m absolutely lost for some stimulating TV to watch.  Glee and Sons of Anarchy are decent– but Lost they’re not.