Aussie .Net

Finally got to Friday night. I has been quite hectic the last couple of weeks at work, but today we managed to get through most of our defects so is suggested to give the dev team a rest for the weekend. I got to do a bit of development during this week and it was actually quite fun to get my hands on the code for a bit and try to organise things the way I wanted it. Today I started on writing some code that handles some business rules that are central to most of our solution and unfortunately all of the developers that needed to use it earlier seemed to come up with each their own solution on how to do it. When we initially started I thought there could be a small risk for something like this happening and of course it had to happen! Still it is interesting that you have a team of four devs that works right next to each other with the same set of specs and still they don't notice how they need the same logic for more than 8 weeks! I think it just shows how important it is to get developers a good walkthrough on the project they work on and it is important to pull the developers away from their cubicles once in a while to 'force' them to tell what they are doing and get some more interaction and sharing going on.

The release date is end of March so we still got a few weeks to go but at least I can relax a bit more now. It also gives me a bit more time to go home and play with what really interests me: Vista and wpf. I want to developer a seed data generator for work using wpf and over do it with some cool graphic things - just for the fun of it :-) I am also trying to get some time using the new 5308 build of Vista and it is quite nice apart from some driver issues with my 7800GT video card and X-fi sound card...quite annoying that every time I shutdown it has to be with a BSOD because of the buggy sound driver! I just keep hoping a new driver will be available asap; If so Vista seems to perform quite well.

It has been quite an interesting ride the last few months. In October I was very lucky to be offered an architect position in my company. I quickly joined my new team and got started on my first project.

It is quite different from my previous role as a senior .Net developer. I started on a project which is heavily data driven; We have maybe 6-8 transactional tables while we have around 25 seed data table which stores everything needed to control the business rules for the mid-tier and client. Also any type of message, regular expression, constants etc. are stored in the database. Basically no literals are allowed in the client code.

Surprisingly it works quite well but it does takes some time to persuade the developers that they must use these things. Once they understood the approach it worked quite well. The only problem is that the turnaround time for fixes increases because a fix often requires changes in the database.

We are now getting close to the time of release and it is getting quite hectic at work. Unfortunately we have a couple of guys who thinks that coming to work means you spend the first half an hour surfing the net and a break is required every 1-2 hours with more surfing. It kind of stresses me as I can see a large amount of defects and nothing is done about it. So we had a chat with them yesterday and hopefully it will help... time will tell.

Wow, Its almost a month ago I initially created my blog. Guess time flies when you are having fun. -But what fun did I have...hmmmm?!
I have started looking for a car now. Have been looking at Alfa and Audi and even tried a BMW Z3. Now I am back looking at alfa and think the right model is a 147 for me. Nice small car and still not too slow and very nicely equipped with nice features such as dual temp. zones etc. The car is also fairly quick so I can' wait to get one now and am looking forward to some fun filled driving.

Oh, the Avalon/Indigo is here for beta 2 - woho!! :-)

I live and work in Sydney where I spend most of my days working with .Net developing all sorts of applications such as ASP.Net applications, Windows forms, MSMQ, Web Services, Enterprise services, windows services etc.

These days I don't have much time at home as we are very busy at work. We have spend the last few days getting our applications ready for deployment and because we now have to support multiple versions of our solutions we had to make quite a few changes to our code base as well as our MSI for deployment.
Our applications run in a standard web farm and we have a separate MSMQ Server with a couple of windows services running to support async. operations. To support parallel versions running on the same servers we are now creating a new web site for each release and go in via a new port on the server. Also because of a long and 'patchy' history of the development of the solutions most appsettings were located in the machine.config file. we are now moving these out to the different applications, but to minimise our work for our web applications and web services we have created a virtual root folder under which all our apps sit. So for each release we will have a new virtual root with new settings which will then cascade down to all the web apps and web services for each version of our solutions.

Unfortunately we haven't found any easy way for versioning of our windows services and we have to rename the service names to incorporate the version number in order for us to run multiple versions of the same windows service. Oh well. It's all getting there and we should be ready tomorrow with the last changes and the users can start testing.

I recently downloaded the new Vs.net 2005 Beta 2 that I now spend my nights trying out. Such as shame that Indigo and Avalon doesn't work with Beta 2 yet...can't be bothered going back to the CTP version of vs.net 2005. I had a few problems with that version as the items in the toolbox wouldn't show up till I removed a folder under my user in documents and settings.