Why hero coding is bad

      Seems that hero coders are a breed not really respected by their peers, but pretty loved by the project managers... Why? Well, because they are the ones called to save the day when the s..t hits the fan but they are dark and grumpy with their colleagues(this is not always true... :) ).
      We all want to be(come) those mythical geeks that by raising their eyebrows are inverting the bits create monumental masterpieces which makes the world tremble, but unfortunately hero coding is not the answer, at least not for me. Hero coding is more like a drug for programmers, which once tasted is hard to give up on, it's like a drug because we have our big egos and who doesn't want to feel irreplaceable and important to the people around them, to be the ones called to pull insane amount of time and work for that ugly feature never finished and always late?
      As a geek wannabe, hero coding seems to be the answer for quickly becoming a good and respected developer but after doing it for a couple of months and being forced to stop for a couple of weeks, looking back at what I achieved in that time doesn't look too good, and this is not because programming 16 hours a day is not cool, but because hero coding favors an environment in which some important things are lost: code quality, self esteem, each short-cut looks appealing and you quickly forgot things which are important for you: sucking less each year , improve your skills and be near the ones you love.
     Hero coding is followed by a pretty ugly burnout period, which is quite depressing...
     By writing this, does it mean that I'm an uber geek programmer shouting his ego? No, it means that I acknowledge that I have a problem and I must get rid of it...
Until next time, be good...

P.S. "Hi, my name is Adrian and I'm a hero coding addict..."

Google did it again

Well, right now I'm quite speachless, the inovation brought by google with Google Wave is astonishing.

If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, watch this.

If you see me walking around in circles, probably I'm searching for the wave...

Spawning a new process

After a lot of planning and applying all sorts of design patterns, we finally got it right. We are proud to announce that a new process is going to be spawned somewhere around mid October. Until then I’ll show you a demo of her in all it’s glory.

I will do my best to make an uber geek from her… :) Welcome to this world my daughter and I’m already proud of you. Now I will go and buy a shotgun to keep all the boys away :)

YUI Library

      I spent the last two weeks working with Yahoo User Interface Library, better said with the Datatable control. After having nightmares with the Win Forms version, I was pretty scared about it, but even if the learning curve is high, the library is nice and it integrates nicely with jQuery and Ajax Pro.
     I strongly recomend it to all web developers, especially to the ones not afraid of some javascript hacking :)

     I hope to have some free time this month to play a little more with this :)

    Happy coding and tinkering,
    Adrian

Romacadamians ++

A good friend is coming back tomorrow to work for Macadamian.
Way to go Macadamian and welcome back Bela :).

The pain of converting an ASP web site to a web application

       Microsoft confused a lot of people when they changed the solution type for web sites in VS2005. After this they realized that this was nowhere near perfection so they reintroduced the web application model (the one which have the solution file) in VS2005 SP1 and VS2008.

      The problem this caused is that in certain situations we must convert some legacy sites from the web site model to the web application one. There already exists a pretty good tutorial for this, but it's minimizing some pretty important steps.

      If you need to convert a web site to the web application model you must be really careful with the step in which you add the required namespaces. First of all, this will take a while depending on the size of the site, secondly it creates some issues not easily found at first:

• If you have Register directives like this one:

<%@ Register Namespace="FancyControls" TagPrefix="cc1" %>

you will need to add  the assembly property:

<%@ Register Namespace="FancyControls" TagPrefix="cc1" Assembly="SiteControls" %>

otherwise your controls won't be recognized and you will get "Element not known error" message.

• You must update the javascript code which is calling Ajax methods in order to add the required namespaces.

This process is pretty painful, I will update this post if other issues pop-up.

Good luck at converting.

Reading List

With so much information around is pretty hard to stay focused and concentrate on what you are studying, at least I'm affected by this :(

In order to solve this, the following reading list I hope will help me stay focused :)

Some of them are already read, but it will be good if I will read them again from time to time.

So here it goes:

1. CLR via C#

2. C# In Depth

3. Head First Design Patterns

4. Code Complete

5. Pragmatic Programmer

6. The Mythical Man Month
7. C# 3.0 in a Nutshell
8. Refactoring

9. Test Driven Development By Example

More to come.

Happy reading.