Seasons Changing
Today one of my Tobin Titus is packing up for his move to Microsoft. At the same time, another good buddy, Chris Williams is moving to Greenville. Although I live in Augusta, I spend most of my time here in Greenville. Chump Change , since I know you're reading this, please make good on some of your threats - I'm up here enough that you can't plausibly claim I'm hard to find. Anyway, Chris is going to work at Tiba Solutions and he'll be a great asset there. Hopefully we'll be getting together later today to chat. However I'm in both Greenville and Redmond so often, i'll be seeing a lot of both of them.
I realized I've neglected my blog for a while. Well, it's because I've been working on a few top secret projects with Microsoft that are keeping me busy, coupled with some contract work with Mark Dunn and Eric Marvets, coupled with my day job, coupled with my Speech Server book, exacerbated by the fact I have been utterly unable to get broadband access at my crib which is about 40 minutes away from where I work. When I get home I'm on dial-up and while it works in an emergency, it's about as fast as my GRPS connection running on my KJam.
Let me digress into writing since I've gotten some experience in it. What do you think the hardest part of writing is? Content? Relevant examples? Cool code ideas? Well they all take some work to do correctly, but I'd have to say the most difficult/frustrating part is dealing with Formatting and Screen Caps in particular. One one project, I had 20 some Screen caps. I had to redo all of them. Each publisher has different formats and I'm not enough of a graphics guy to really understand the nuances. But I sh1t you not, getting screen caps and formatting correct can be about the hardest part of writing. (Well, depending on who the publisher is, getting paid and reimbursed may be the hardest part, but that's not the case with anyone I'm working with NOW. Besides, not getting paid for money owed over 6 months late really isn't that big of a deal is it?)
Everything I'm working with now is like a dream come true. Apress is a dream to work with, I couldn't speak better of them without having Jenna Jameson as my product manager. Eric Marvets has been my point of contact through Dunn Training and has been amazing. We even have group meetings with Microsoft Live Meeting, which totally rocks. We're also using Source Offsite for this and although my inital experience with it was horrific, things seem a lot better here.
I've been doing a lot with Microsoft as well but really shouldn't be saying too much about it. Suffice to say if you ever have an opportunity to work with Microsoft Learning or Grandmasters , hop all over it. Yes, I'm biting off a lot, but at least I'll probably be able to buy that Porsche Boxster I've wanted by the end of the year. Fortunately I'm too damn busy to spend anything so things should be good when it's all over. If you're interested in getting involved with Microsoft Learning or MS Press, let me know privately and I'll put you in contact with some people. Same goes for writing a book. Just remember the golden rule, it's all about the screen cap.
So I have been going to work, going home, writing, going to bed, waking up, going to work, going home, writing, loop. The upside is that currently I may be the most informed developer on the System.Configuration namespace in the country, maybe universe. And at this pace, I'm going to be the next John Robbins when it comes to System.Diagnostics. Hell, just hanging around Jeffrey and watching his technique gave me more than a few new ideas. No, I'll never has his game at debugging, but I may be able to come close at least with respect to Debugging .NET Framework 2.0 apps. And I'm quickly earning guru status on Globalization.
With respect to System.Configuration, there's a lot there and a lot to blog about. I have to change the examples I've used so not to violate anything, but I promise a few articles on the pretty kick a33 new features associated with handling Connection Strings available with the 2.0 Framework.
If I have some time today, I'll post some of the Configuration stuff. Many find it a lame subject, I don't, particularly if you're using Remoting. But even if you're not, the enhancements in 2.0 are so many that it's honestly something you really should take a look at.
Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze some time in this week to blog some more, I've got a ton to write about.