Saturday, October 29, 2005

Great articles about Generics

Like most people, I daresay, the only way I've really been using generics over the past couple of months is for creating strongly types collections with System.Collections.Generics.List's, but I know in my heart of hearts that that's only half the story. Not even half of it. It's more like the first paragraph in the novel of Generics.

There are some great articles about generics and their use up on MSDN (Gratuitously nicked from the excellent VBFeeds.com)

Generics FAQ: Fundamentals
Generics FAQ: .NET Framework
Generics FAQ: Best Practices
Generics FAQ: Tool Support

Not just sharing, I wanted to remember them as well...

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

A grand day out. And a Grand night in!

So I spent my Saturday in the company of a whole bunch of UK nerds this weekend. And oh my, what a cool day! I've never really been to any real developer events, certainly not one that was so fiercely community driven as DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper on Saturday. And oh my what a day it was.

In keeping with my general philosophy of trying to learn new stuff that I wouldn't really have an excuse to get to know about otherwise (i.e. pretty much avoiding anything that I'm likely to encounter in work) I saw some really great people enthusing about some really cool things.

My personal highlights included:

  • Barry Dorrans being very excited about MsBuild.
  • Liam Westley being very quick and cool about SubVersion (Despite the organisers' best efforts to kleep him off the agenda ;-))
  • Ben Lamb bubbling over with the funky new stuff headed up for C# 3.0

Those are just the ones that leap readiliy to mind. I also saw some cool stuff around the CLR in SQL Server 2005, new stuff in the System.XML namespace and many many more.

It was also just really cool to see so many people there, all of whom sort of share a bit of an interest. I've discovered through my travels in the world of the fledgling developer that it's something of a solitary path to tread. Thanls to all the organisers and attendees who made it such a fun day out. No doubt I'll be at the next one.

And then, to cap it all, got home from Reading only to find that Mrs Mawoo had organised a surprise birthday party for me, so there was much beer, merriment and general fun afterwards as well (although I'm ashamed to say I was the first to leave the party. Sat down for 5 minutes, and all of a sudden all of my friends had gone and Mrs Mawoo was waking me up to put my PJ's on. That's what you get for going out all day then trying to party after!)

And last but not least, a big thanks to John who let me scrounge a ride from my house to Reading. And back. Eventually!

That's it for now. No doubt there'll be more coming. I've got a bunch of tech stuff in my head just dying to come out, but so little time to actually write it! Damned commute! Gah!

Just wanted to share.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Non Smokers look away now...

I know it's a particularly anti-social habit, as well as being about the least politically correct thing one can do, but I am a smoker.

Even worse, I don't even have the decency to be a victime of smoking. I dont't smoke 'Because I Can't Help It' or 'Because I need to' or any ligitimate reason like that.

I smoke because, bad as it is, and an unpopular an opinion as it is, I actually enjoy it. Every cigarette is as good as the last, and so on and so forth.

I smoke for the same reason some people eat chocolate. It's nice. It makes me feel good and I like it.

So I've just got one thing to say in this post. If you're a smoker, try a shisha pipe. I brought one back from my holiday in Egypt, and it's a really nice smoke. Bought back 4 flavours of tobacco, Cappucino, Pistachio, Apple and Cola (just to see what it was like). I'm working my way through my Cappucino at the minute, and it's really quite nice. Doesn't taste much like coffee, but it certainly has something about it that's coffee-esque.

Really quite nice. And smoing a shisha's very nice as well. I heartily recommend it.

Apologies for irrelevance, political incorrectness and bad-for-your-healthness.