Tuesday, July 13, 2004 - Posts
Has anyone come across the Windows/MSN messenger .NET libraries. I've been looking for them tonight without any luck. Am I experiencing a brain brown-out or what?
I'm looking to pass messages between programs using Messenger - allowing for ad-hoc group message broadcasts and such. Any ideas on this? The Messenger approach seems to be the most logical, but I'm open to any approach - as long as I'm not installing something MSMQ on all the machines.
Thanks,
-Steve
A good friend of mine, Bob Gross, and I worked on a project together several years ago. Since then we’ve been on different projects and we haven’t had the opportunity to work together. Bob’s helped me on an application I’ve been distributing for several years now and we recently had some thoughts that change the way this program can and will work. We’ve decided to work together on the application – now we just have to decide how we’ll license the software. Will it be shareware? Will it be open source/community driven?
I’m really looking forward to it – downright excited to get started. Working with quality programmers is always a joy and I should have thought about this sooner. We’re collaborating via email and going golfing – perfect time to mentally white board outdoors. In the process of doing requirements, I’m reviewing the book Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers and some other requirements titles, I’m amazed at how waterfall based the texts are. I wish there was a requirements book that maps to the TDD approach. As we’re tackling this task, I’ll be blogging some of these findings. I really don’t like writing specs, but every once in a while it’s good to put on a different set of shoes and walk a few miles to stay acquainted with the issues. I’m taking a different approach to spec writing that I think will be interesting to grab and talk about.
The application is based on fantasy football in particular but all fantasy sports in general. I guess my dream job is writing an internet-based fantasy sports application 20 hours of the week, writing about football for fantasy football freaks 20 hours of the week (during the season), raising my family and doing karate 4 nights a week. Oh yes, and working at home all but one or two days a week. When I find that job, I’ll be sure to blog it!
I found an application called
WebScrape by Allan Wilson that takes a web page, searches for matching data using regular expressions and formats the data into an RSS feed. This app is pretty cool and takes a configuration file as input - it's written in Python.
Here are some links to the RSS2.0 spec and a link to an article I found on the topic. The RSS2.0 spec is public, but unfortunately the article is premium content on http://aspnetpro.com - a username/pwd is required to view it. The article is very timely for a project I'm working on. I'm tracking this information more for myself than anyone else, but if you find it useful...
RSS 2.0 Spec
asp.netPRO article
I finally received Code Complete 2 in the mail from Amazon yesterday and spent a few hours reading it last night. From what I’ve read so far, it’s every bit as enjoyable and insightful as the original. The 1st edition used to be my favorite book, but the content has become dated in the last 10 years. McConnell’s writing style is simply the best I’ve seen in a programming book and he now includes C# and Java examples throughout the book – the 1st edition had Pascal along with C, Basic and pseudocode.
If you’ve never read Code Complete, go buy the 2nd edition now. In fact, if you've read the 1st edition, buy the 2nd edition now. This book is that good!
He takes a good look at coding practices and not only discusses good and bad coding approaches, but gives you an understanding of why bad coders should be flogged. Ok - he’s not that severe but his writing style leaves very few ambiguities. For example, he discusses testing and touches on the role of TDD – although he keeps the approach more universal and jargon agnostic. He dives into proper interface factoring among other topics that didn’t exist in his first role. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to topics. Even my wife identified the book when it came and said “you used to talk about that book all the time and now he revised it? Great!”
I used to ask any candidate with more than 2 years of experience if they read Code Complete – I think this question goes back on my list. I always ask about books in interviews – any candidates that can’t talk intelligently about the last 3 books they have read get a “no hire” from me. The original had so many fundamentally sound coding practices that it was pretty revered in the 90s. I’m glad to see Steve McConnell brought it back!