Well... tomorrow is the 4th of July and as I type this my new neighbors are popping fireworks because they spent way to much money on them and can't possibly pop them all in one night. ;)
Anyway, so much is happening it's difficult to find time to blog. The day job has me busy with developing a program to generate an excel report which sucks because I don't have VSTO. The target machines that will ultimately run the app are completely locked down and can't be modified, so I have to deploy an executable and dlls that just work. Which means dropping down to Type Library Import... yuck. A side from that I finished my POC (proof of concept) for a future client and they loved it. I built a WPF application that parses Photoshop brush sets and displays all the brushes with in the brush set in a nice Wrap Panel which can be resized, dragged around, etc. Prior to this week long project I had no previous experience with programming against Photoshop's SDK so it was excititng and fun to build something that works with Photoshop 5 - CS3. Also, I bought a Chumby, and Head First Design Patterns. The chumby is going to replace my alarm clock that I've had since high school... so no more loud beeping sound when I wake up. From now on it's the local weather display for the day while the jazz music plays in the background. ;) As for the design patterns book... I literally have not been able to put it down. It's so amusing yet insightful... I love learning about patterns this way, it's actually starting to stick. So far I've only gotten through the first couple of chapters with covering Strategy and Observer, but man... now I think I know them well enough to be able to recognize when to use them. I've already marked a few places in a couple of projects that need to be refactored. One other thing that I'm excited about is hearing about what people where talking about at TechEd 2008 this year. I didn't attend, but what I did hear is that LINQ to Objects is supported in .NET 2.0 SP1 via LinqBridge.dll. Looks like I have more refactoring to do on Monday when I get back to work. ;)
Develop With Passion
-Jean Paul S. BoodHoo
