Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Don't Be An Idiot

When Dwight on The Office was asked what was the most inspiring thing his boss Michael ever said to him, his response was, "'Don't be an idiot'. Changed my life." At first that's funny. Well, let's face it, it's just damn funny. But, sad as this may sound, it should be how we developers face each project, bug fix, enhancement, you name it.


Don't believe me? How many times have you encountered someone else's code (hell, maybe even your own), and asked yourself, "What were they thinking?" How many articles on The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/) have you read that made you question how someone could be so stupid?


Dwight explained, "Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?' And if they would, I do not do that thing." How true...


I've had my share of goofs. When I was first learning .NET, back when 1.0 came out, I misused using statements, bastardized caching, and nulled out arrays of data before understanding what reference type actually meant.


What I intend with this blog is to demonstrate things I've learned when developing. I've had years of experience with ASP.NET, Windows services, and web services, and I've recently taken up WPF and WCF (and always try to avoid WTF). I also would like to expand on some of the most important (and overlooked) tasks for developers - building and deploying. I'd like to cover NAnt, Cruise Control.NET, continuous integration, Windows Installer XML (WiX), ClickOnce and mage, and much more. Maybe I'll even throw in DotNetNuke module development and configuration discussion...

In the end, I think it would be cool to lay out things I've learned, things I've done, and hopefully get feedback on it all. We'll see how far I get.

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