Makes you feel a little warm and fuzzy with announcements like this…Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community.

Hat tip to Keith Combs and Steve Clayton

Just saw this post by Steve Clayton about how engaged companies are with their customers.  I work for HP so I’m always interested in how our company compares with the rest.  It’s good to see we’re on the list and not that far down.  We need some improvement I think.  Especially since blogging is still not openly encouraged within HP and the blogs are hidden under the “Newsroom” section of our website.  Kind of obscure.  Although there is another HP communities site that my expose it more.

Enjoy!

So my first step in understanding .Net coding standards is to understand what’s out there. So time to use the handiest tool available, Web Search (Google and Bing). WOW! Maybe it’s just the way I chose my words, ok so it always has to do with that, but searching on “.Net Coding Standards” returned over 30 million hits on Bingand 417,000 on Google.

Ugh, where’s my coffee? Ok time to narrow it down because I’m not crazy. Let’s just focus on the to some of the top ones. I like ones that are formatted for HTML or in a downloaded document. I’m also looking for more complete ones, not ones that just focus on one topic of the standards. Remember, I’m not here to invent the wheel, just to find the best ideas for designing and constructing a wheel. Then to understand each aspect of the wheel to determine why it’s important to have that standard. Here we go…

We probably need to start with the big one. The one from Microsoft. Design Guidelines for Class Libraries.

Clint Edmonson has a post on NotsoTrivial.net containing free VB & C# coding standards. I like his quote…

"It doesn't matter what the standards are, as long as you have them and everyone agrees to adhere to them!"

Lance's Hunts Whiteboard has a C# specific download.

For those of you that have spare cash and don’t want to pollute the air with the ash from burning it, you can buy one from CafePress.com I think I’ll stick to the free ones, especially after reading this.

Michael Flanakin has one that is pretty decent set of standards on his blog, but I just wish there was an index so I could jump between the sections.

A quick scan shows this one by Paul Yao and David Durant, shows great detail in the use of Hungarian format. That will come in handy I’m sure when we get to that section.

And finally some insight on internal coding standards from Brad Abrams at Microsoft

Ok that gives us a pretty good list. I’ll use/refer to the above as well as some of my internal corporate documents as we work my way through this arduous task. Let’s dig in, and ask a lot of questions.

Happy Moon Landing!

I’m on a project where the coding quality has been in question and there has been a lot of scrutiny on the coding style and format of our code.  Our customer has a set of general set of coding standards that they require all suppliers to follow.  We as a .Net team also have our own set of standards.  Probably every where you go you’ll find similar coding standards documents.  Some people have even adopted personal coding standards. Do you have any?  Do you hold your code to a set of standards? Are they documented?

How many of us really know our coding standards?  How many of us follow them or work to improve them?  Are your standards documents just some bytes taking up disk space on your network or SharePoint site?  Frankly, this exercise with our customer has made me ask myself, how much do I really follow the standards? 

Today I’m beginning a challenge for myself.  A challenge to re-read our coding standards, research other industry coding standards and to understand the reasons behind them and to determine which of them make sense and which don’t and to understand why.  I will try to include some of my knowledge here on my site, for my reference and possibly yours, my friend.  Let’s do this together, if anyone’s out there.  Let’s understand why we have standards and fix the ones that are just wrong.

…

I’ve fallen in love with reading my RSS feeds directly in Outlook.  I use it a lot to keep up on my favorite blogs and web sites.  However my employer recently switched my exchange host and I had to migrate over to a new domain and set of servers.  Everything transferred over find except when it came to my RSS feeds.  It appears that they’ve been duplicated every feed now has two folders.  Ugh!  Now it’s time for some clean up.  Time I’d rather spend on other things.  Ah well, it at least gave me something to post.

Later!

In my effort to find a better deal for our digital subscriptions (TV, Phone, Internet) I called Charter Communications to see what they had to offer.  My goal is to increase my benefits without significant increase in monthly cost.  Our current cable package is very basic and being a Tigers fan, I would like to be able to see a few more games, so a sports package is important.  I also have three kids and It would be good to have some quality options for them. but being a Christian, I don't want to sacrifice my values, or those I'm trying to teach my children.  Hmm, quite a list.  So back to my call to Charter.   They were able to find a package that interested me.  It included their Cable Big, Internet (5Meg) and Telephone.  It was for $89.99.  Only about $20 more than I'm spending now.  It's worth considering, but not before I check with the competition.

Recently, my wife wanted to upgrade our AT&T phone package, so I started doing some research into different plans and packages to find out the best deal.  Since I was a little slow in getting all the details, we decided to just upgrade the phone to the AT&T Complete Choice package. But I'm not satisfied with just that, I wanted to look a our total costs for all digital services and find out what options are really available and see if there are better deals.  I've kindly referred to this as our Digital Priceprint.

Our current suite of services

• Charter High Speed Internet 5mb - $29.99
• Charter Basic Cable - $9.99
• AT&T Complete Choice - $30.00

So there you have it.  All told we pay about $70/month for the total package (Internet, Phone, TV).  Probably not a bad deal, but is there a better one out there?  I'm off to find out.  I'll try and keep you up to date on the progress and the end result.

Well it's been a long time, but I finally have a blog site up again.  I'm now using DasBlog.  I was a bit frustrated trying to get it setup until I found this post at The Renegade Diaries.  I enjoy the relatively inexpensive cost of hosting at 1and1.com, but am sometimes limited by their settings and limited amount of control I have.  At some point I'd like to use a host with more control, but not until I have established this site for a bit.   Here is my list of things I'd like to do with this site.  I'm recording it here, so at some point in the future, I can refer back to it to see if I accomplished any of these.

• Get a better theme  I'm currently using the "Business" theme that comes with DasBlog, but I'd like to make it more my own.  With custom side blocks and more information.
• Explain the title.
• Add a tag cloud.
• Post regularly.  Starting out with a once a week goal, then get more prolific and post 3-4 times a week.  Not sure if I'll ever be a once-a-day poster, but we'll see.
• Promote my blog.   It doesn't do much good to blog if no one reads it.  Although, it is a good place to journal, I'd like to make this a useful site with information useful to more than just me.
• Build a list of respected fellow blogger's.
• Earn a little money through the site.  This will give me some motivation to continue as well as some extra toys I can play with.
• Add older archive posts.  Believe it or not I tried this before, using some PHP code (postNuke now called zikula - boy I've lost touch with that one)
• Post an about me page.
• Continue to keep this list up to date.

Ah.  The dreams of a geek with a new toy.  Let's see how well they come to realization.

Enjoy the day!