Another free .Net dev tool. Free!

I love it when I get free stuff.

Today's must have VS2008 plug-in is PostSharp
http://www.postsharp.org/
Its a plug-in that enables you to implement AOP (aspect-oriented programming)

What does that mean? How about this:

• Custom Attribute That Trace Entry and Exit
• Custom Attribute That Makes the Method Asynchronous
• Custom Attribute That Dispatches the Method to the GUI Thread
• Custom Attributes That Handles Exceptions
• Custom Attribute That Caches

And, loads of other neat stuff.

This goes in the must have toolkit along with GhostDoc and ReSharper.

(OK, ReSharper isn't free, but its the best £150 you'll spend. Well, maybe not the best, I mean, £150 also buys you

• an hour in a Diamond Star,
• half an hour with Madame Levoisier of Mayfair*,
• a bottle of Krug and a Montechristo #2,
• A meal for two at The Fat Duck, but only if you share (!!!)

but, you get the idea. :) )

*Not that I'd know, I'm just surmising

Tally Ho for King Harry and England!

Well here we are again. As my good friend Marcus would say, new day, same shit.

Boy oh boy are we wading through the deep doo-doo today. CEO up in arms, head of development moaning (!!!) and whose fault is it? Yep, after my glory days of last week ("For once! Things have gone to shit and its not my fault!"), again we revert to situation normal.

This was compounded by my brilliant stroke of genius by accidentally deleting the release directory out of VSS with the 'destroy permanently' flag set. Oops.

Ah well.

In other news, NTP is half refactored, so now its broken. Boo.

The Weekend, and Azotoria

I have decided that the UK transport network suffers from Azatoria :)

Weekend: Not much, read lots of DDD blurb, re-worked the NTP to use units of work (hooray!) and a queued thread manager thingy.

Today, we have the big roll-out of the product which due to poor SQL coding on the part of my predecessor, blows up with an FK violation f you register with the same mobile number twice. Huzzah. Lets hope the customer only registers their test handsets once...

Oh and the ADVFN feed service at home went mad and started sending me error emails at the rate of one a second, so I had to get C to turn it off at the wall :( Oh dear.

All Alone, and DDD

Well I dunno. usually I work from home on Fridays. Half way up the M1 last night I get a call from the boss - we are having a big roll-out of a new product on Monday and they want to test it thoroughly on Friday so she says to me 'you'd better come in to the office tomorrow or it may be bad for people's weekends'.

Well FFS, its not like I didn't deliver the system on time and tested it properly.

So here I am at 08:15 and the place is like a graveyard. Ah well.

In other news! I am teaching myself Domain Driven Design, as the NTP (more on that later) is turning into a big ball of mud :)

Paling Unit Of Work

My good friend and mentor Timothy Paling, he of DDD geekery, has come up with a new paradigm: The PUOW, or Paling Unit Of Work.

How that differs from a normal Unit of Work is anyone's guess. Hopefully when he finds this blog he will comment and enlighten me.

He's a bit clever at the DDD stuff but I intend to catch up fast.

The Martians Attack!

In a recent code review of the latest missive from the Mauritian offshore coding factory, I present you with the reason the partial keyword should be used carefully:

A single class with 15,000 lines of code spread over 12 separate files and with 31 separate include statements in each file.

Oh my.

Automated Dog Zapper

Yawn. 4am. FFS.
Charlie is going off on one. Probably a fox in the distance having a shag. I dunno. I've tried the dog-zapper collar and that shuts him up but I don't really like to leave it on him all night. Maybe some sort of Tazer arrangement on a remote system so I can zap him from bed? maybe under IP control so I can discipline him from work too? :)
Something like this, only with a Tazer?
Did I mention I'm going to Hel?

I give you, Weaver Hill:

(Click to see larger)