I started talking to someone on the train on the way home from the MSDN event, about 5 minutes before I got off. He happened to be on his way back from some VB.NET training in London. He used to be a contract COBOL programmer, but having moved to Uckfield, found there's not much COBOL work in Sussex.

As I've said previously, I like talking tech with other programmers, so it's a shame I didn't speak to him earlier on the journey. Still, Uckfield is a small place...

I learned some things about pronounciation today. Some acronyms are spelt out, and others are turned into words.

WSDL is pronounced "Wizzdull".
WSE is pronounced "Wizzy".
UDDI is NOT pronounced "Uddy", but as spelt.
ASMX is pronounced "Azumex".

Best of all is WSE-WSDL, which is of course "Wizzy-wizzdull".

I also came across some new words:

Performant
Assistive
Idempotent
Eviscerate

Went to the MSDN event today. On the whole, it was really good. Got up really early:



although some people seem to do that every day. I'm usually asleep then. Anyway...

The speakers were all good, and all have weblogs, and all pronounce things strangely (more to follow). The first session (David Gristwood) was an architectural view of web services, which was expanded on in the other sessions. There was quite a lot of time spent talking about WS-* standards, and how they're either superseded or unfinished, and nobody's really using them yet. If the earlier ones are superseded already, then how long before the unfinished ones will be?

The second session (Mike Pelton) was about smart clients, which I'm sure I'd seen Tim Sneath talk about at the last MSDN event I went to in Brighton. Smart clients (for the benefit of Lawrence) are Windows programs that automatically check for new versions, and download them.

The third session (David Gristwood again) was about Biztalk 2004, and how to integrate web services using "business rules" in a flowchart style diagram, rather than writing code.

After a surprisingly good free lunch (got a cheese sandwich and an apple in Brighton), was a session with some code. Benjamin Mitchell managed what seemed like the only working demo of the day, and he wrote the code for it in the session. The demo was a publish/subscribe web services model, and was only a few lines of code (with WSE included). As the slides will be available soon, but the code probably won't be, I took photos.



n.b. I can appreciate how nerdy that is, and I'm almost ashamed of myself.

The last major session was a detailed look at security in web services. Whether it was the surprisingly good lunch, or that the speaker (Mike Shaw a.k.a. Dr. Security a.k.a. .NET Security Dude)
sounded rather like Griff Rhys Jones, or that I'm not using web services yet, I struggled to keep up with this one. It was very detailed, comprehensive and useful, and when I get to do security in web services, I'll wish I paid more attention.



Finally there was a little tiny overview of Indigo, which could have been a whole other session or two. It probably is another session or two in a whole other event, which is why there was only a few minutes today.

The best quote of the day: "InfoPath is to BizTalk as Outlook is to Exchange".

Went on a Glassmatix product training course today with one of my developer colleagues, learning how be an end user for the product I'll be working on. It was interesting to see how it worked, but it was much more interesting talking to a body shop estimator who uses Glassmatix and Audatex (a competitor's product) every day.

He told me that estimates used to take less time to produce than they do now, as there's extra information (e.g. imaging) to process. I also learned that the insurers are keen to reduce the value of the estimates so they can (presumably) pass savings onto customers, and body shops need to ensure that the value isn't reduced so much that they lose money on repairs. A lot of time and effort goes into negotiating a fair estimate that both repairer and insurer are content with. These seem to be the big issues in a body shop estimator's average day at work.

Clearly I have heard the view of only the body shop estimator, and not that of an insurer. The insurer will use the software in a different way, and have different concerns and objectives.

I was just putting a "Save" icon in an application, and I started wondering just how long the standard save icon will be a floppy disk. My first computer had only floppy disk drives, no hard drive, so obviously the icon had to be a disk. Now however, I guess that nobody saves directly to a floppy drive, but saves to their hard drive first, and copies it to floppy. Or USB drive. Or burns it to CD. Or emails it. Some people don't even have floppy drives any more. They're going the same way as LPs and audio cassettes.

So the floppy icon is out of date, but to change it would be madness. I can't think of a single application that doesn't use it. What could it be changed to? Everyone recognises it, and most users would struggle to save anything if it looked like, say, a hard drive.

Developers of Windows programs generally copy the look and feel of Microsoft Office or Visual Studio, for two reasons. Firstly, they look cool, and secondly, everyone using Office will be comfortable with similar programs. Microsoft have have turned the icon indigo recently, and we'll all follow.

So when will the floppy disk change? When Microsoft changes it.

I've had a hard day trying to get IE6 to place a footer at the bottom of the window, no matter what content is above it. Eventually found somewhere that the following has to go at the end of the style-sheet. I'm still stuck with non-scrolling content, but that may not matter in this case.

html
{
    overflow: hidden;
}

body
{
    height: 100%;
    overflow: auto;
}

There's loads of new stuff in .NET 2005, and I've had a great day playing with it. I've been looking at master pages, themes, site-map XML files, cultures and localization to create an ASP.NET "template application" that can be used across different products.

I'm half way through thinking about which application components will use which technology, and where to put everything. I love having so many new things to learn about, and the challenge of working out the best way of structuring the application.

I've just published one of my personal projects, the new Octopus Jam website. Octopus Jam is the band I have been drumming in for nearly five years. I've got a weblog on there too, because I quite enjoy writing this one, and I want to make the site a little more personal than just the marketing puff.

XForms looks cool and everything, but I've found only one processor so far, and that runs as an IE6 plug-in. I'm not sure that I would want to prescribe IE6 and a plug-in to the users just to fill in forms. Maybe some kind of do-it-all-on-the-server approach might be better, but then there wouldn't be any XML being posted from the client, which kind of defeats the object. I've got some more thinking to do...

I've spent the last couple of days reading, and it has been very interesting. Yesterday I read about XForms, and today I'm reading about ASP.NET master pages. I'm looking forward to using them, particularly at the same time.

I recently completed an aptitude test, which went rather well. I made sure that I read the instructions really carefully, and asked how I would be measured (lots of answers, with as many right as possible). The first part was questions like:

"Anne is taller than Belinda,
Belinda is taller than Clare,
who is the shortest?"

Clare, obviously. After a few of these, I spotted a pattern. The objective was to work out the order of the three people, and pick the one at the specified end. Never the middle one. The middle one was always mentioned twice in the question, and had to be or there wouldn't be enough info to work out the answer. The middle one would never be the answer to the question, so I could eliminate it straight away.

I saved time by reading the first part of the sentence, the double name and the question bit. In this case, "Anne is taller than Belinda, Belinda, who is the shortest?". It wasn't Anne, or Belinda, so it must be the other one, Clare. It didn't save a lot of time, but I got a few more done than I would have done otherwise, and that was the objective after all.

Last night I played badminton for the first time in years. I used to play singles, and last night it was doubles. The second match I played was with a guy called Patrick, who knew all the tactics and rules. If you hit the shuttlecock low over the net, then move to the front middle section to be ready for the poor return. If you hit it higher, then both move to the side to prepare for the smash. It's really fast, so it was quite hard to remember whilst actually trying to HIT the thing. It's going to take practice.

But still, another patterns thing. I guess I instinctively spot patterns in life, and I do find them interesting and useful.

Was half way to work this morning before I realised I was heading towards my last job. Luckily it's not too far from my current job.

I'm going to the MSDN web services day on 30th November. Apparently the contents include 'The "Zen" of Web Services' and 'The Road to Indigo'. Sounds rather Wizard of Oz, but the previous events I've been to have all been good.

I've changed industries as well as changing jobs. There's plenty to learn about car repairs, estimating, insurance companies, paint and mechanics. There's plenty to learn about procedures and conventions. There's plenty to learn about Glassmatix design, architecture, file formats and source code.

As well as the source code, I have identified 114 documents that need reading; so far I've read 14. The development standards document is excellent, in that it focuses on reuse, promotes FxCop, NUnit, NDoc and SourceSafe, and just so happens to insist on using the curly brace style I prefer.

Just heard the editor of the Times on the radio: "..the objective is to be objective.."

A little about the company I now work for. The company is called EurotaxGlass, which was created when Glass's merged with Eurotax in 2000. Glass's is most famous for Glass's guide, the trade car price publication, but more recently has created some fine software for the auto industry.

I will be working with the Glassmatix team, designing and implementing the next generation of the product, and maintaining the current version. Glassmatix is an "advanced computerised repair estimating and authorising system".

That's the end of the first week, and it's been great. My new colleagues are friendly and helpful, the development procedures appear to be well thought out, thorough and useful. The products seem well respected in the industry.

Finding out a bit more about the product I'll be working on. Induction program is really good - today I was learning about the re-use policy, and component sharing between products. The internal support team are very helpful, and very quick. I'm going to like it here.

Started my new job today. It's good so far. In what way? Firstly my PC has a processor 3 times faster than the PC I used at my last job. Secondly, I installed Whidbey, as that is what I will be developing with.