Cook Computing

John O'Connor blogs about his Programmer's Retirement. He may feel like that but I certainly don't feel the urge to throw the towel in, even though I have passed John's 40 years old threshold. In fact the main problem I have at the moment is working in an environment which has too much legacy code and not enough movement towards new technologies (though at least I'm one of the few doing mostly .NET work). I thrive on learning and using new stuff and tend to go a bit stale when I'm doing the same old thing time and time again. This is perhaps why I've not blogged much recently but I can feel the old enthusiasm returning now that I've started a personal project involving web application and SQL programming. I wouldn't go quite as far as paraphrasing the famous quote by Samual Johnson:

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

but there are always new technologies coming along in the software world which are interesting not just because they are new but because of the way they address old problems in exciting new ways, and you can only really join in the excitement if you are implementing applications using the new technologies. As for brain cells dying off, most of us have plenty to spare and anyway with experience you tend to be more efficient in your work, producing code which has a lower maintenance overhead. A key thing I now look for in designs is simplicity and not the baroque complexity that can result from youthful over-exuberance. I hope to work as a developer for at least another ten years and even if I manage to retire then I'm sure I'll remain involved in software development in some way.

Omar Shahine has written a tool called Send to smugmug for uploading photos to, you guessed it, the smugmug photo site. Omar used XML-RPC.NET to implement calls to the smugmug XML-RPC API.

I saw Sara Ford's post last week and was meaning to blog about it, then was reminded when I saw Craig Andera's post, the topic being the guidelines feature in Visual Studio which is very useful if you have a fetish about code line length. When configured this feature displays one or more vertical guide lines in VS edit windows (see above posts for snapshots of what it looks like). I always code to a max line length of 80 columns and so I now use the following settings:

For VS2003:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor
REG_SZ value "Guides"="RGB(128,0,0) 80"

For VS2005:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor
REG_SZ value "Guides"="RGB(128,0,0) 80"

This places the guideline between columns 80 and 81.

One caveat: according to a comment by Sara on her own post:

It will work on Visual Studio .NET 2003 and should work on Visual Studio .NET 2002, but use at your own risk on either. I tested that it does work on 2003, but very little, so i can't ensure product stability using guidelines there. And i have *not* tested it at all on 2002, but the notes i have say it should work there.

If you encounter an issue on any version, let me know.