Public Class GeoffAppleby

It was a good day, then it went bad

I had a great day today. For many reasons, but mostly because it was productive.

The project I'm working on is really coming together. I can't talk about my work too much, not because it's all top secret government  work, but simply because it's commercial, and I don't to get in any trouble. While i can't talk specifics, i can talk stuff. Currently, I'm working on something that is way cool. An asp.net custom control that almost exactly emulates the winforms property grid. It's close - on an object with about 20 or so properties, I'm within 3 pixels of the height, and it looks identical. I've got custom type converters sorted, and expandable object converters were dealt with today. it's pretty sweet. the only condition is that the object must support a specific interface to handle setting new property values back (i didn't want to get too much dependencies reflection in there) and to handle the custom uitypeeditors that throws up a custom form I'm going to have to demand an equivalent uitypeeditorsashtml method of some sort, so it can provide a custom web page equivalent, but other than that it's looking awesome.

My team leader (Noonie) is on holidays for two weeks. It seems that i've been delegated his replacement while he's away. I can understand how this happened - my team only has three people, the two longest serving of which are myself and Noonie. I figured that I'd be the one people asked questions of, but i realised what was happening when someone came up and while asking team leadery time stuff called constantly called me Noonie during the discussion.

So now i've been told that I'm coming along to a meeting on Friday. This will be interesting, considering that while I'm 'head' of the coders (there's two coder groups at work - the current division being the db guys (sql - yick!) and the asp/asp.net and winforms coders (yay!)) i've only been there for about 6 months, and of our 3 major systems (not including the prototype we're doing at the moment) I'm an expert in 1.75 of them.  one of our systems i have absolutely no idea about except that it uses a database, and 3 of the tables it uses were copied into a database for me to write this current prototype. but i spose they think that's enough.

The big boss also came to visit me today. Normally when he has any sort of technology or 'can we do something like...' related question he comes to my team leader. i guess until he retires, I'm going to be considered second Noonie :)

So anyway, things are good. Rory (the other guy in my team) is the main asp.net developer. he's got some stuff really kicking ass at the moment. once he gets my propertygrid in (and marks it with a big fat red pan - hopefully i self taught myself web custom controls adequately)  it gonna kick some butt.

And then i came home, have dinner, and catch up on some recent blog entries.

There's two things i've read tonight that got me upset.

First, this news article on betanews (via Scobles Link Blog). Corel have bought out Jasc, the makers of Paint Shop Pro. Not happy. Paint Shop Pro rocks. Corel doesn't. Say no more.

Second, i got all excited at this blog post with the idea of free stuff for watching interesting movies (well, web casts, to be precise). They're offering a copy of VB.net, a book, and a couple of cds, just for watching some webcasts. I thought this was great, and I'd been wanting to watch some of them too. And what happens? Only open to people in the US or Canada.  Bah!!!! Why the hell do us foreigners always miss out? Why can't Australia get some mega sweet deals too? Microsoft, are you listening to me? What about you, aspnetwebcasts?

No, i expect not. But that's OK. I'll still watch the web casts. But I'll be grumpy when i do, OK?