Update

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

Revisiting The Castle Project (Specifically... Active Record)

A few years ago at my last job an x/co-worker (now friend of mine) introduced me to the castle project. I remember taking a look at it and feeling really stupid because I didn't understand it or it's pieces. Well... fast forward a few years and several development projects later. I came across it again on InfoQ. I'm happy to report that it was better understood this time around... I even found myself guessing(correctly) how a feature would be implemented as the presenter was explaining it. :-)

I really like Active Record because it's built on top of NHibernate a port of the java's Hibernate Core. NHibernate even has it's own query syntax known as HQL which is expressed like the sample below.


Since Active Record is built on top of NHibernate it does a really good job of abstracting away the complexity of NHibernate... leaving you with less to worry about and more power to leverage.
Needless to say I'll be spending a few hours this weekend playing around with Active Record now that I actually understand it. :-)


Develop with Passion
-Jean Paul S. Boodhoo

Solving Application/System Wide Issues With Sysinternal Tools

Last night I came across the following link which led me to a great video on how troubleshooting

MS Windows problems as well as application problems can become much easier. :-)

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=722

Mark Russinovich(The presenter in the picture above) is a god when it comes to solving deep Windows issues. If you've ever wanted to go deeper in to the OS and figure out what really goes on during system crashes, hangs, and blue screens... check out the video above.

Keeping code DRY by using your .NET Umbrella

(nVentive)

Some days the day job is like getting caught in a Seattle rain/thunderstorm without an umbrella. We've all found ourselves writting plumbing code just to get data flowing in the right direction... just so that we can get the product working so that we can move on to the next product/project. Recently I came across the open source project above (which is now on codeplex) and have discovered some really cool additional API's that can be used with the .NET Framework. :-) Some of their API's actually help prevent developers like myself from having to write plumbing code. Everyone always says to keep your code DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). By using free open source API's like this one... we can give new meaning to the term DRY by leveraging the Umbrella project. :-)


-Develop With Passion
Jean Paul S. Boodhoo

More on My 08 Pilot!!

The House That .NET Built (Complete!!)

This completes the series of posts on the new house.
It has been a unique and rewarding experience building my first home... I'd definitely recommend this approach to anyone who's interested in building a home.

Now that it's complete, the real fun can start. Well... sort of.... the lawn is my first attempt a mowing with a push mower, all apart of going green where ever I can. :-)
And in case your wondering... yes... that is my new 2008 Honda Pilot. As I look back on my experiences I realize that I've come along way from that small town outside of Houston,TX.

My passion and devotion to software and .NET has really paid off... which is why I'll continue to push myself to develop faster, higher level, compact code. :-)

-Develop with Passion
Jean Paul S. Boodhoo

I'm on codebetter.com!!

http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung/archive/2008/04/26/altdotnet-spec-session.aspx