Chris Taylor

Nostalgia

Sitting this evening talking to my wife, I realized that she had never seen any of the Microsoft Operating Systems prior to Windows 95. This got me all nostalgic and I am in the process of installing a virtual machine with DOS 6.22 and Window for Workgroups 3.11. I might even have an old Visual Studio 1.5 lying around some where. Ah the good old days……

Launch of a new site

For some time I have been working on and off on a library of routines. These routines range from specialized collection classes, statistical functions to an enhanced windows forms DataGrid that supports data bound comboboxes and datetime controls.

I have decided to make the library publicly available. And to that end I sat today and created a new home for the library on the web. If you are interested you can view it at http://www25.brinkster.com/taylorza/vulcan.aspx. Initially I am only providing the Red-Black tree, but as I get time to clean-up the code and do some documentation I will provide more of the library.

The real fun part was building the site, now it is nothing special or original for that matter. But as I have previously mentioned front-end type stuff like HTML is not my forte, so for me to put this site together was quite a lot of fun and a 4 hour exercises with the content and layout of the site is entirely XML driven. Soon I will register a domain and make things more official, but first I am hoping to get some useful feedback both on the library and the site itself.

Introducing Me

Hi,

I will take the road most often travelled and use this opportunity to introduce myself and what I hope to achieve with this blog.

I have spent the better part of the last 12 years as a C/C++ Windows developer tackling all aspects of the software development process. My current focus is on the Microsoft .NET technologies but I keep an open mind and explore this technology on “other” platforms in the form of the SSCLI (Rotor) and of course Mono.

With this blog I intend to provide insights into some of the more obscure features in .NET, most of the material I cover will be taken from answers that I have provided on various support or community platforms such as the Microsoft news groups, www.asp.net forums and SADeveloper, to name a few. Helping others is possibly one of my favourite pass times, I honestly find that helping others has enabled me to hone my skills and realize my own shortcomings as a developer, empowering me to further improve my skill set.