The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Busy, Busy, Busy

by Leave a Comment

I was doing really well with posting more regularly, but I got bogged down in loads of work recently.

Learning WPF is really a lot of fun. I’ve done the Microsoft learning courses and have started through Charles Petzold’s gigantic book on the subject (called Applications=Code+Markup). I’m really convinced that WPF will make a huge change in the way we use software in the future.

I’ve also taken on a contract (starting next week). I’ll be working for a London consultancy building MIS applications for another investment bank. I’ll give more details later (just in case it falls through at the last second).

I wasn’t looking for a project, but a friend called me about this one and it really took my fancy. I must be getting geekier–I wasn’t interested until he told me about the technologies they’re using. My CV wasn’t even up to date. I’m very excited about it.

So, in addition to the offshoring projects–I’m back into London to do some coding myself.

TDD and the London DotNet User Group

by Leave a Comment

A week ago, I attended the DotNet User Group in London. I had never attended any of these events before, so it was a nice experience.

This developer event was held at the Microsoft House in central London in a room called the Swimming Pool. This room looked like an indoor pool with the audience sitting in the pool on pool-coloured carpet.

There were two speakers at the October meeting. The first speaker talked about a Dev Express object obfuscation application that was mildly interesting.

The second talk was about Test Driven Development. I’ve read about TDD before and tried to use Nunit many times, but because most of my applications were very much database-driven, it was difficult to write unit tests for (should I create and delete a record?). This meeting helped clear up some of my confusion about the issues. It was a very good talk.

I’ve written before about how beneficial the developer events are. This on was different that a lot of the other events hosted at Reading campus–it was less formal but appeared to have more die-hard developers in attendance.

If you get the chance, I highly encourage you to attend one of these events.