Ernst Kuschke

Yesterday was a real quiet day. So quiet, in fact, that I got bored enough to turn into my 14 year old self... I went and bought myself a skateboard to try out at the skatepark around the corner from me. Since I was so good back in high school, I went straight at the 15-ft vertical ramp.

I dropped in and fractured my wrist. That's something you don't want to do in this industry... If any of you ever have a sunday like that, go buy a good book and some hot chocolate. I sure wish I had.

Ever had trouble finding that eluding Microsoft KB article? Google doesn't always pick up the latest ones...

Add the following key to your registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\mskb]
@="http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=%s"

Now when you want to find, say KB 822690, just type the following into Internet Explorer's address bar:

mskb 822690

VOILA :)

How meaningful is tech certification these days? This graph from ITWeb's 2004 salary survey suggests that getting a certification will set you up to start earning. That conclusion is however, in my humble opinion, a wrong one.

Though a certification can certainly improve the look of your resume, it will not (and should not) on its own warrant you a job. This is because the value of certification is greatly depreciated by the the way training is done at many certification centres. Students are spoonfed exactly the right info to pass exams. So-called “braindumps”, where one can download questions and answers to actual exams, are scattered all over the net, and some training centres make very good use of these.

Although many students actually work hard and earn their certification, a prospective employer has simply no way of knowing how an encumbent's certification was earned, and thus has to take the certification with a grain of salt. This is sad.

I'm slowly losing my hair. (They've already turned grey). Here's a quick summary of our current project:

:P

The release dates of Whidbey (I guess I should start calling it VS2005 :P) and .NET 2.0 is coming closer. If you'd like to see what it's all about, attend the .NET 2.0 Trailer that SADeveloper has on 1st July.

More details:

Date: Thursday, 1 July
Time: 18h30 for 19h00
Venue: Spar Training Centre, Pinetown
Speaker: Ernst Kuschke
Topic: .NET 2.0 Trailer
SubTitle: Generics, Partial Types, and plenty more...

Oh, there will be refreshments too, thanks to (once again!) Microsoft ;-)

I got such good news on Thursday, that I, too, have to blog it out ;) Microsoft is giving me a ticket to Tech Ed Africa. I'll be blogging as much as possible about this event.

(Thanks Kaylash!)

About a month or so ago I was involved in a raging debate regarding the return-values of methods. To me it seems that, generally, opinions still differ considerably in this arena.

Anyone that programmed in C++ would be used to the fact that a function-call would always return an integer value (zero for success) to indicate the state of its operation. In the COM world we got used to the infamous HRESULT way of returning information. But hey - the .NET classes return either an object structure or nothing on a successful call. (OK, it returns a void) To indicate anything but success, an exception is thrown. This is the general behavior of managed code written at Microsoft, with the exception of a few of the Managed Direct3D functions.

Let's look at a simple example - which do you prefer out of the following two?

public string GimmeInfo(int InfoOn) {
    try {
        return this.MyCollection[InfoOn].Info.ToString();
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
        throw;
    }
}

public int GimmeInfo(ref string Info, int InfoOn) {
    Info = this.MyCollection[InfoOn].Info.ToString();
    if (Info.GetType() == typeof(System.String))
        return 0;
    else
        return 4;
}

Typical arguments for the first are:

1. It's much cleaner to read
2. Unanticipated Behavior (exceptions down the call stack) will still be propagated up the call stack
3. It's much easier to introduce a new exception

Typical arguments for the latter are:

1. Exceptions are expensive
2. Exceptions are just “fancy goto's“

There are, of course, minor “exceptions“ to the rule, like the SelectedIndex properties that return -1 when there is nothing selected.

I prefer the first by miles. What are your arguments for or against either of these?

Thea reckons my blog has been quiet... You'll notice that this started about a month ago - exactly the same time I joined a new company ;) I've been real busy getting my brain into their code, and vice-versa.

NEWS - we're planning a gathering for SADeveloper members based in Durban around the 1st of July - more exact info on this should be posted on the SADeveloper site soon, so keep your eyes peeled. There will be some food and drinks available, thanks to the kind folks at Microsoft. We'll keep the topic a surprise for now; let's just say it will be yet another look into the future.

Brad Abrams chats about the fact that making C# beep isn't easy as it should be. There's one more variation to his list:

:P

Here's another one of those quiz-like things to make you smile. Well... I smiled :)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I truly, officially dispise Visual SourceSafe. We had to demo a prototype to a client today, and I worked till 2am this morning on a certain aspect. Once completed, I naturally checked it into VSS.

This morning I was quite happy (although tired!!) knowing that everything is in place. We have an automated process that gets the latest versions of certain pieces of code in the morning before work starts. I wasn't at all happy when I realised that my code was corrupt. Luckily I realised this before recompiling it, so I still had the DLL I compiled last night on my PC. Quickly runnning this DLL through Lutz Roeder's Reflector got me my code back in about 30 mins... What a brilliant piece of software.

TAKE NOTE - As brilliant as it is, it once again highlights a security issue. With .NET, if you don't obfuscate, your stuff is “open-source”!

I've translated two more of Craig's cool Direct3D tutorials. I must say, the 'IT terminology' is quite difficult in Afrikaans. I feel like a bit of a pioneer sometimes, since I don't think there is an Afrikaans word for exactly every word I try to translate.