Effective Thoughts

Good reference to an article on writing custom rules for FxCop.

Woohoo, look at all the cool services we provide! We're awesome! Did you see all the companies we've worked for? We won awards too! Weeeaaaaahhh . Wrong. You just missed the boat, pal. What does a consulting firm do? They solve problems. How do they solve problems? Occasionally they leverage products but for the most part, consulting firms solve problems with smart, experienced, motivated people. The industry-accepted term is intellectual capital. So, what's the most important thing to a consulting firm? Well, cash flow and profitability rank number one but where does cash flow come from? That's right: services. And who executes on those services? People. When is the last time you got a call like this? "Well, I was searching the Internet and your firm came up so I thought I'd give you a call." Never happens. I expect anyone handling calls for a consulting firm wouldn't even know how to route this call. Business operates on relationships. If I'm a c...

Lately, I've been refactoring a C# WinForms application that ported from VB6 via a commercial converter. Let's just say the resulting code wasn't pretty. As a result, I've been refactoring the heck out of it. I'm down about 3000 lines of code to date. Nice. This morning, I decided to change the namespace. I used Visual Studio's refactoring tool to perform the rename. Love it. Then, I start getting this error: I search everywhere. There's absolutely no evidence of this previous namespace in the code. Where is this guy? Finally, I re-read the error more carefully and decide to check Project Properties. Yep, sure enough, the StartUp object is still using the old namespace: Ok, so I'm operating a little slowly this morning. My bad. However, how come VS.Net couldn't have included Startup object in the rename refactoring? Further, how about throwing the Monday morning developer a bone and simply direct me to look at the Startup object. Appreciate it.

This is a cool write-up on a topic I just submitted for Day of .Net : Silverlight Twitter client. I swear I didn't see this beforehand! Ironically, I used to work at Clarity . Great firm.

Blackle is a low-power-consumption custom Google search engine. Creative.

A colleague was just hunting for Code Metrics analysis under VS 2008 Pro. No esta aqui. It's only included with VSTS. Here's an excellent VS 2008 product comparison Rob Caron alerted us to from his blog a few weeks back.

Bender just Twittered this: AT&T is bringing free Wi-Fi to all 7,000 Starbucks ! Woo hooo!