Changing Address

I have moved my blog to wordpress, offers a number of benefits over and above blogspot. I can now be found at http://netflings.wordpress.com

See you there.

End of an Era

After almost 10 years with Finetix, it has come time to say goodbye. I started at Finetix as a c++ coder, and leave as a Partner. It has been a ride, I have had the honour of working with some great people, and wish to thank everyone I have worked with for making my time at Finetix a pleasurable one.

Needless to say that this has been a hard decission to make, leaving a firm that I helped build and direct, but it had to be made. I wish Finetix all the best for the future.

What next you may ask? I need time to chill and reflect, I will be doing this from my upstate home, enjoying a couple of cool beers whilst watching the world pass by on my deck. Certainly the 10 years has given me much to think about, both from a technology perspective, and also a process perspective, some of which I will blog in comming weeks.

PInvoke'd

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/pinvoke.asp

Until Microsoft provides a complete wrappering of the Win32 API, you will find the need to hook into unmanaged code, and for all those of you out there that will need to integrate with unmanaged C/C++ code, like analytics libraries and device drivers, then the above url is a must read.

SPOIL'd

A great article on Database Persistance, ADO.Net and Stored Procedures,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/SPOIL.asp, I have been going thru a little mental battle between the ideas behind Hibernate and other alternatives like DAAB, as far as I am concerned, all are fairly good alternatives, depending on your view point. I dislike hibernate more because it is very heavily configuration oriented where as SPOIL, utilizes Custom Attributes to provide the binding between C# and SQL. I have also been watching the LINQ discussions, this is yet another approach to bringing the database and the .Net environment closer together. I for one would like to only have to deal with one language, and not the minium of two at the moment, i.e. C# and TSql, SQL92 or equivalent.

There be trouble in them hills

Even the management at Microsoft are not without their share of criticism, check out the following article, http://internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=183702795

No matter how small or large an organization is, there will always be individuals that will look to sling dirt, sometimes this is necessary to force management into taking action, other times it is just for the sheer pleasure of dishing the company.

Now what does a company do when met with such an attack? You can ignore it, and hope it goes away, or you can take action, by re-assuring the public that there is no merit to the views, or you can react by acknowledging that there are elements of truth and look to work with the employee's to resolve the issues. Now it will be interesting to see the road that Microsoft will take this time around.

Dr Who

For all those Dr Who fans out there in, Sci Fi channel has just released this

http://www.scifi.com/doctorwho/

It is finally in the US, about time to if you ask me.

WinForms on Speed

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/03/WindowsFormsPerformance/default.aspx

For all those trying to squeeze more and more performance out of the UI.