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Paul's Imaginary Friend

Paul Bartlett's continuing adventures with C# in particular and .NET in general


From imaginary friend to split bloginalityApril 25 2007
In the very unlikely event you're subscribed to my "old" 'blog then this will not be news to you, but here goes anyway:

Well, much as I have enjoyed my time 'blogging over at the 'dojo, I've decided it's time to start posting here again. My reasons are as follows:

  1. The 'dojo is a .NET-related site, and though no-one has complained I'd prefer to post my off-topic stuff somewhere else
  2. I'm in good company in adopting this approach: Sam Gentile no less, and Geekdojo's very own Adam Field
  3. Now that I'm working for Google I'd really like to get to know the products as well as I can
  4. The only reason I initially left was the lack of an RSS feed, which has long since been added
So from now on I'll do most of my 'blogging right here, but continue to post anything .NET-related over on the 'dojo as well. I have some WPF stuff that should hopefully be in a fit state to share pretty soon.



me @ google.comMarch 20 2007
After a week getting used to life in the London office, I'm now in Mountain View for my orientation, and it appears I'm in very good company. I get the feeling this is going to be a very interesting job...aggbug.aspx?PostID=117642
StuffMarch 5 2007

A bunch of miscellaneous stuff:

  1. I don't recall who put me onto this, but I'm enjoying Jessica Hagy's amusing/insightful diagrams over at indexed
  2. I've been impressed by the WPF-based reader that Conchango have put together for the Daily Mail newspaper here in the UK (via Tim Sneath)
  3. I've also taken a look at Channel 4's new "4oD" (4 on Demand) service, but have yet to try out any of the freebies
  4. Gadget-related:
  • I have just got a pair of Sennheiser PCX250 headphones, which seem pretty good so far
  • I have a Linksys NSLU2 on order, which looks like a fun piece of kit
  • and I'm thinking about the Terratec iRadio as well, but I guess I'll wait a little...
And I'm in the middle of downloading the latest Orcas CTP, of course (I probably should have gone for the VPC-based version straight-away, especially now VPC2007 is free to download, so I might end up grabbing that as well and decid
Idea of the day #3: Developing software with Alf, Bert and CharlieFebruary 21 2007

Well, it's been rather a long time since the previous installment in this mini-series - almost two-and-a-half years in fact - so I hope this one is worth the wait...

In the project I've been working on I've struggled with naming components. People either inferred too much from the names, or they ceased to have the correct meaning as time passed, or a combination of the two. And just to make it worse other teams complained no end if we kept changing them. In the end we started using code names, with no real meaning at all, and that seemed to help a bit.

What I'd like to propose today is taking this one stage further and using people's names. The examples in the title are taken from the puzzle books of my youth, but there is precedent as well in the naming of hurricanes and other strong winds. The advantages I see are:

  1. Like with other code names, people cannot lazily infer meaning but must take at least a cursory glance at the code and/or documentation, which is likely to give a much more accurate idea of what a component does
  2. Components will start to acquire a "personality", so that people are better able to judge where functionality really belongs
  3. Another aspect of that personality is that it ought to be more apparent when to "retire" a component and "hire" a new one as opposed to "retraining" an existing one

Am I going completely mad, or

Outlook 2003 calendar annoyanceFebruary 20 2007

I like my calendar in "work week" view, but when I press the "Calendar" button from a meeting request, Outlook does the following:

  1. Switches my calendar to "day" view
  2. Leaves it like that

The first of these is just about defensible, as arguably it's easier to see what's happening. Though in fact I often end up switching back to "work week" view in order to see if I can shuffle things about.

The second is just plain rude.

Rant over, for now at least... But if anyone (Adam maybe?) knows of a way to stop this happening then I'd be more than happy to be educated.

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