Thomas Williams

Networking (The Other Kind)

One of the things I do really poorly is “networking“, say, among my peers. Too often I either (a) leave these kind of “networking“ moments, or (b) just hang around by myself. Option (c) would be to stick closely with fellow geeks I already know, which is becoming more viable as I gradually meet them. Of course the presence of Option C proves that I must meet some people ;-)

As a result of attending Code Camp Oz and naturally bumping into other humans, I've added some subscriptions (in no particular order):

Rory Primrose, who coincidentally has the exact same anniversary date as me (linked from Geoff Appleby): http://www.highertendencies.com/Default.aspx?LTKey=11

Darren Niemke: http://markitup.com/Blog/

Mitch Denny: http://notgartner.com/

Bill McCarthy: http://msmvps.com/bill/

If you were at Code Camp Oz, I'd love to check out your blog, so please leave something in the comments.

The "Thinking Machine"

Sashidhar Kokku points to Thinking Machine, a AI program that does a graphical visualisation of how a chess program is plotting it's strategy, while you play it in a game of chess. Cool.

Make sure you check the About page on the site for an explanation of the visualisations.

Plugin-Based Architecture in VB.NET Windows Forms

This post is a mental placeholder for me and contain only links to articles discussing plugins in .NET. My task is to take these articles at some stage in the future and create a plugin-based approach to a Windows Forms application, using a central navigation “shell“ (like MMC) which provides services like logging, error reporting, user preference management, and most importantly, the ability to load the GUI from elsewhere. The GUI components - sets of related forms or “pages” - will be compiled into exterior DLLs (that's the plan, anyway). This will be used to manage related but separate areas of functionality (“sub-projects“) and allow the developers (which may not just be me!) to build and enhance their pieces of code in a sub-project. Here's what I've dug up that I don't want to lose track of:

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/extensibleui.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/DynamicPluginManager.asp
http://www.devcity.net/newsletter/archive/devcity/devcity20031015.htm#ni090
http://www.devcity.net/newsletter/archive/devcity/devcity20031030.htm#ni090
http://www.divil.co.uk/net/articles/plugins/plugins.asp

Now off to delete some comment spam. I nearly died the other day when I started deleting this blog's comment spam and was hit with the confirmation message “Are you sure you wish to delete comment 62129?”, and I thought to myself, surely there has not been 62000 comments on my blog...they wouldn't all be spam would they! Thankfully the comment identifiers seem to be allocated across everyone on DotNetJunkies.

Commiserations to all those who have been left several invitations to play online poker. What worries me is that it's a programmer/developer/whatever that wrote code to deploy the online poker invitations, one that crossed over to the dark side...