The Naked Flame

Wow, I have seriously neglected this site. I guess my experiments with sleep hacking have taken their toll on my consistency.

Anyway, today I fly up to the Gold Coast for tech.ed Australia, which starts tomorrow. Really looking forward to the experience, although I hope I will be a little better prepared for the onslaught than I was last year.

I hope to be able to keep up some form of blogging schedule from the event, if for no other reason than to keep a log of what I found interesting there.

I have specifically been learning WPF so that I can catch a few sessions on that too. Impressive technology. Also looking forward to find out whether the complimentary Visual Studio is a full version or if it expires. *fingers crossed*

I have been meaning to start doing some research into the best possible tool chain to use for my own development for some time now, and dammit... it's time to actually do something. So, to start gathering my initial thoughts, here are some of the main components I want to try and include.

• C# .NET IDE (VS Express probably)
• Source control (SVN or Git most likely)
• Continuous integration
• Unit testing
• FxCop / StyleCop (altho there may be some rules I do not agree with)
• Bug / issue tracking
• A blog (this one probably)
• A wiki (added here, hopefully)
• ??? the unknown ???

Now, my main concern is going to be in finding a way of making this all integrate 'just right'... not sure how hard that is going to be, but really... if it's not automated, it's not done.

Today my brain is not happy... think bad... hurt. I am trying to get my head around all the intricacies of ASP.NET at work, because I have been nominated to abstract away some of the mess that seems to happen in most of our web applications.

This is after I have for the last two or three years tried to resist installing ASP.NET onto my workstation because I was busy enough already, and the first time I tried it with Visual Studio 2003 it seemed a bit... flaky.

Now the time has come to catch up, so I thought I'd try to absorb as much of the lessons on the ASP.NET website as possible to get a broad feel for how it all works, and what the benefits and drawbacks of the new MVC system are.

Where I went wrong was in trying to save some time in the learning. Windows Media Player has this wonderful feature where you can speed up the playback of media without turning the voices into chipmunks (I guess it does some fancy FFT footwork to get that going, but I'm not curious enough to discover the details). By default it supports a 1.4x-speed mode that is remarkably easy to follow for the typical podcast or screencast.

I was in a much bigger hurry though, and I think I watched about 10 hours of material at 2x speed, and now it feels like my brain is oozing out of my ears. It isn't so much that the material was too tough to follow at double-speed, but it is remarkably tough to keep up with a speaker at twice normal speed.

I think I'll lay down now and have a rest... another 10 hours to come tomorrow.