So for the last few weeks I've been working on several projects.
Project 1) WPF Application that integrates with Creative Suite v 2&3 specifically... Photoshop.
It's essentially a Brush Manager application that allows designers to manage(create/edit) Photoshop Brushset files... otherwise known as .ABR files. This project has been smooth sailing until the requirement came in to support earlier versions of Photoshop... which means I have to reverse engineer the binary file that makes up a .ABR File. Calling all devs that can reverse engineer a binary file!!! I need to know the structure of this file so I can re-create it with my own set of brushes. I've been in a hex editor for the last 3 weeks and all I can do is load it in photoshop with out getting errors. ;-)
Project 2) Silverlight 2 application that is a Wizard style application which will be used by many people. It will be service oriented... I'm still debating whether or not it will be WCF or pure REST with HTTP(S) calls, this will depend entirely on the load test results. Anyhow I'm using Windows WorkFlow to drive it which will be nice... and I have a lot good code to read from a codeplex project I found which goes by the name of Drop Things. This is an AJAX web portal which is built on ASP.NET 3.5 and it also uses WorkFlow. The creator Omar Zabir is one of the brightest devs I've come across (that doesn't work for MS) in a long time. He's got a ton of articles and code samples on how to do a lot of advanced stuff in ASP.NET... lots of great topics such as CDN(Content Delivery Networks), Performance Tips, AJAX Performance Tips, Proper Browser Caching, etc. The code that he posted on codeplex above is very good code as well... I'll definitely be using some of his helper classes for windows workflow in my project. ;-)
Project 3) Day Job- I'm in the second sprint which end on the 30th of this month. So far it's been a lot of refactoring, and performance improvements to an existing asp.net 2.o web site. I'm adding a light weight inversion of control container and using MVP on a few pages to speed up performance as well as bring clarity to the logic, also I'm adding quite a bit of LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to XML. The team is in complete aww of the techniques that I'm bringing in. After the sprint we move to silverlight 2 and that's when the fun starts. ;-)
Very busy right now, but fun busy. This week I start my first day working from home... which will be nice.
-Develop with Passion
Jean Paul S. Boodhoo
