Januar 2007 - Posts

• My First 14 Days With Genome

  I wrote an entry on the Genome Team Weblog about my first 14 days with Genome. Posted Jan 29 2007, 01:10 by Dirk with no comments

• The Start Of A New Chapter: My First Day at TechTalk

  Today was my first day at TechTalk. To put it simply: I am mightily impressed by the lengths they go to make me feel welcome and at home, and to make me settle in as fast as possibly. This process didn't start today, it actually started a week and a half ago: TechTalk sent me a list of phones to choose from, so my company mobile phone would be there for me on the first day (for the record, I chose an HTC S310).  One week ago, a developer from TechTalk contacted me to tell me he would be guiding me through the first days/weeks at TechTalk.  A couple of days later, they asked if I wanted to come along to the TechTalk team event in March. When I arrived today, everybody and everything was ready for me.  I was given my phone, a computer, an office place. I was shown around and told the tricks of getting food and drinks.  They even had a Startup Kit with lots of useful information (what to find where; whom to ask what) with color photographs and names of all employees.  And to top it all, they have a soccer table! There's going to be lots to learn, and one of those things is Genome, TechTalk's own Object/Relational Mapping product. TechTalk is the third company I work for since moving to Austria, and I can honestly say that today was my best "first day at work". Posted Jan 16 2007, 09:30 by Dirk with no comments

• The End Of A Chapter: My Last Day At Gritsoft

  Today was my last day at GRITSOFT Information Services GmbH, the company I worked for during that last 3 years, 9 months and 2 weeks. My contract actually doesn't run out until Monday the 15th, but my boss graciously agreed to let me go today.  Now I have a couple of days to close the chapter in my mind before I start with my new job. Those who read my blog regularly know that my boss and I didn't always see eye to eye on how to develop software.  Nevertheless, I want to repeat here what I told him and my colleagues in person today: thank you for the cooperation. I learned a lot, and I hope I was able to give a lot back. So in keeping with the title and tagline of my blog: so long, and thanks for all the fish! Posted Jan 12 2007, 05:02 by Dirk with no comments

• Annotated Link Round-Up

  Another link roundup, but this time I'm experimenting with adding some annotations and comments as to why I find a link interesting. TFS Deployer: sounds like an insteresting add-in to Team Foundation Server that can automatically deploy a build if it is of appropriate quality. SQL Server Hosting Toolkit: a very promising toolkit to get the database schema and data of your super-duper new web applications into the database of your hosting account. WPF/E Pad: sort of like a WPF/E version of XamlPad.  It has an interesting sidebar with open documents. Building Consensus: Some tips on how to build consensus, or how to diplomatically get your way while everybody else believe they get their way too ;-).  Lots of Headology, and also some qualities that I aspire to possess but am not quite there yet.  I like the Admiral's Pipe, though. WPF Pie Menu: I'm always looking for ways to improve the user experiences.  The writings on the wall tell me that Pie Menus will be the next big thing, and here's a promising screenshot of a WPF implementation.  I can't wait for it to appear on GotDotNet or CodePlex. XHTML Validator in IIS7: a walk-through of how to enable The Joy Of Code's XHTML validator as an httpmodule in IIS7. Writing Good Scenarios: this might be helpful to me.  I can envision what I want quite clearly in my mind's eye, but when it comes down to expressing it in words, I most often get stuck with "well, you know ...". Posted Jan 08 2007, 11:55 by Dirk with no comments

• Applications >= Markup

  I finished reading Part 2 (Markup) of Petzold's book Applications = Code + Markup.  If Part 1 was interesting, Part 2 is very intresting. Lots of interesting stuff like data binding, templates, styles, animations, ... I still haven't done any coding, I just read the book as it is without a computer present. I know some people (was it Petzold? I can't remember) liken this to watching a TV programme about fitness while eating popcorn, but I don't see this as a real disadvantage. I have a quite fertile imagination, and I feel it helps me to absorb, analyze and digest information when I think about it without a computer present. If there's a computer, I will probably get trapped into little details.  If there's no computer, I can think about the big picture, about the fundamental philosophies behind what I'm reading.  Once I grasp that fundamental idea, everything follows from there. But now, I can't wait to find a bit of spare time to immerse myself into the Wonderful World of WPF!  This is all so exciting - WPF is the answer to (some of) my prayers: many were the occasions when I was thinking "how would I do x in Windows Forms" and answered myself "I'd need to do this, and that, and that as well, and don't forget about ...".  The result was very often that I didn't do it because it would simply take too much time.  And now there's WPF, where lots of stuff get easier.  A button should glow when the mouse hovers over it, and that glow should fade in slowly and fade out a bit faster when the mouse leaves?  Try that in Windows Forms without a big development team and while keeping your sanity.  In WPF you just use a few styles, trigger and animations. Posted Jan 07 2007, 05:12 by Dirk with no comments

• You Need A Budget Pro (Microsoft Money, I Can't Live With You, Now I Can Live Without You)

  No, this is not the title of a Jim Steinman song.  It's about my love/hate relation with Microsoft Money, and about You Need A Budget Pro, my new love. What I love about Microsoft Money is that it allows me to determine exactly how much money I have in each account, including my cash money and on my Quick Chip.  What I hate about Microsoft Money is that I spend several hours every week entering all transactions, switching between accounts every time and even switching between Money files.  What I love about Microsoft Money is that it's possible to make a budget, and observe how good (or bad) I'm adhering to it.  What I hate about Microsoft Money is this budget starts over from scratch every month, even if I spent way too much money last month.  In general, what I hate about Microsoft Money is that I invest a lot of time in it, and I get way too little return on that investment.  But what else could I do?  Quicken isn't much better, and there are no other decent programs around. Or are there? I first heard about You Need A Budget half a year ago, but I was reluctant to do my finances in a spreadsheet.  Moreover, I though that it would be easy to build my own spreadsheet.  But of course I never got around to doing that.  Sometime in November, I was (once more) fed up with MS Money, and surfed to the YNAB site again.  And lo and behold, there was You Need A Budget Pro, a smart client program with all the functionality of YNAB.  It is even written in .NET (2.0), so how could I resist? I bought a license right away, trusting my gut instinct that YNAB Pro would be what I expected and trusting the 60 days money back guarantee.  I thought that I would use MS Money and YNAB Pro side-by-side for one month, and then look back and decide which program to continue with.  After day 1 of this test period, I decided to ditch MS Money. What I love about YNAB Pro is that I only spend a couple of minutes every day entering transactions.  There's only one register, so no switching between accounts and figuring out in which account to enter the transaction.  What I love about YNAB is that differences between the budget for a month and the actual spending (positive or negative) are carried over from one month to the next.  What I love about YNAB Pro is that it was surprisingly easy to let go of my "I need to know exactly how much I have in each account" mind-set.  The trade-off between not knowing that exactly and spending much less time was a surprising no-brainer. There's only one big feature request I have: don't give in to Feature Bloat.  There are few things worse than a good program that gets overloaded with (almost) unrelated other functionality.  So please add only those features for which there's a real demand (like an integrated calculator). One other thing: YNAB Pro saves its files in XML, so in theory I could make a little program that reads the CSV file that I download from my bank and writes those transactions into the YNAB Pro file. Posted Jan 01 2007, 12:54 by Dirk with no comments

• The Madness Is Over

  We survived another New Year's Eve and thankfully, so did the cats without any apparent psychological damage.  I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Vienna people seem to delight in setting off fireworks to celebrate the turning of the year.  That in itself wouldn't be so bad (apart from safety issues which I won't bother to discuss in this post) if people could restrain themselves to set off of those fireworks at midnight and not a second earlier. Unfortunately, we've been hearing fireworks cracking since christmas, and last night was an almost continual barrage that started at 17h00 and went on for hours.  Vienna sounded like a war zone for a couple of hours. It's bad enough for us humans, but we at least understand what's going on and know that it will stop soon after midnight.  Our cats don't have that advantage. They cringed with each explosion, especially Sammy who doesn't like loud noises as it is - he was in almost total panic last night.  The poor cats. My new year's wishes: no fireworks next year. About my new year's resolution: lose weight, sleep more, eat healthy and drink less coffee.  Or in other words: In other news: The next and last Harry Potter book will be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows James Brown Is Dead (does anybody outside of Belgium understand this joke?) Saddam Hussain was given the easy way out.  Funny though that one Iraqi official said "he looked very broken" and some relatives said "he was so brave".  Did they witness the same event? Posted Jan 01 2007, 10:58 by Dirk with no comments