Personal

Becoming a Better Developer

Ryan Farley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:52:03 GMT

I mentioned before about my return to blogging on ryanfarley.com and my renewed passion for programming. I've found myself moving from blog to blog reading things that continue to inspire me. I read a post from Justice Gray, titled "How I am becoming a better developer, part 1 of infinity", that was mentioned on an episode of Hanselminutes. This was a great meme, and although I'm late getting to the table, I wanted to post some thoughts I have on becoming a better developer as well as some goals that I've made for myself.

The following list are some things I am doing to become a better developer:

1. Find/Rediscover Your Passion
I've always believed that to be a great developer you have to have the passion. What is passion? You know, it's that itch you get as you sit on the couch with your wife (or your husband) watching crappy reality TV and you can't break your thoughts away from sneaking off to write some code. It's that desire you feel to know all there is to know about your language, the framework, emerging new technologies, etc - just because it is fun to know it. It's that code that is always in your head, just dying to get out. You're not content with put in 8 hours a day writing code, you just have to find that extra time to do it just because you enjoy it. So, how do you rediscover that (or find it if you've never had it?). I think the rest of this list will help with that. I'd recommend starting with Hanselminutes show #72, Be a Better Developer in 6 Months. Then, make some goals for yourself.

My goal: Keep doing the rest of this list to keep the passion. At the end of the year, add new goals.

2. Remove Distractions
There's always things to get in your way of improving yourself and staying focused on your goals. If you work at your home, like me, turn off the TV, shut the office door, establish a "work mode" that separates itself from "home mode". I find it helps to turn off notification sound from Twhirl (or whatever Twitter client you use) as well as other distracting notifications. I found that my eyes would automatically shift to the bottom right corner of my monitor every time that "ping" sound would occur. I think part of "removing distractions" involved establishing routine to some degree. Instead of doing things like going through subscribed RSS feeds periodically throughout the day, disrupting your focus on real work, have a set time at the beginning of each day to catch up on that reading. Then you can stay better focused the rest of the day.

My goal: Keep the TV off. Make work time a little more "formal" to stay focused. Establish a work mode routine and stick to it.

3. Listen to Podcasts & Read Blogs
A long while back, I would listen to DotNetRocks, but I stopped and that time got replaced with other things. After hearing about the start of the HerdingCode podcast on Twitter, I ended up giving it a try and loved it. I was feeling interested in the topics they were talking about and found myself wanting to dig into the topics discussed after the show. It was great. I've known of Hanselminutes for quite some time from Scott's blog, but never really gave it a try. So, I threw a bunch of episodes of that and DotNetRocks on my Zune, as well as the Deep Fried Bytes podcast that was starting up around that same time. The result was not exactly what I expected. I was expecting to enjoy listening to these, but it ended up in more than just that. I was feeling inspired. I was feeling excited and couldn't wait to jump into whatever the topic was for the show. Maybe the reason why I thought it was so great is because I do work out of my house. The rest of my development team lives in another state. Being able to hear development related discussions like these is just not the sort of thing I hear around my house (but we're working on that, hehe). The same can be said for reading blogs. There is always just so much to learn. I've never had a problem with keeping up with reading blogs.

My goal: Listen to a new podcast each morning (weekdays). I've started getting up earlier than I would have to give myself enough time to do a 30-45 minute power walk each morning. The fresh air does wonders, but it also gives me dedicated time to listen to a podcast while walking.

4. Blog
I've taken the first step here with reviving my ryanfarley.com blog. My belief is that, while you can learn a lot from reading from other blogs, you'll learn 10x that by writing posts yourself. The process of thinking through a topic enough to write about it is far more valuable than just reading about that same topic. Any time you can "teach" others, you'll end up growing as a developer by leaps and bounds. This has been my experience throughout my entire career, and I do love teaching others.

My goal: Keep posting reularly on this blog (and my CRM Developer blog too). I'm not going to set a specific number or anything, I'm ok with just saying "regularly" :-) Feel free to contact me and give me a push if "regularly" seems "less-regular".

5. Learn a New Technology Each Month
For me, this is something that without questions comes out of listening to podcasts. Since listening to podcasts, I've found that I really love SubSonic, ASP.NET MVC, LINQ, & WPF - which are all things I never really took the time to get into before. The problem is that there are just so many things I want to really learn well and I need some focus or I won't learn enough of any of them. Along the same lines as this, I've established at my company weekly developer meetings. We take an hour or two each Thursday and do some internal training. This has been a great way for me to stay focused and current on new things with a dedicated time for me, and my team, to improve ourselves.

My goal: Take the time to learn a new technology every month. Create a side-project using that technology as a reason to learn it. Stick to planned, weekly, developer training sessions with the development team at my company.

6. Get Involved in an Open Source Project
On the Hanselminutes episode #72 that I mentioned earlier, Scott and Carl talk about how the best thing you can do to be a better programmer is read. Not reading books, but reading other people's code. I'll take that one a step further. Not only does reading other people's code help you become a better programmer, but getting involved in writing the code as well will take you even further. While recently migrating my .Text blog to Subtext, I dug though probably most of the Subtext source (and was very familiar with the .Text code that it was forked from). I learned quite a bit looking at the code and a huge benefit of that is the ability to jump in and contribute to the Subtext project.

My goal: Pick an open-source project to contribute to over the year.

7. Seek out Local .NET Groups or Nerd Dinners
This one is a big one for people like me that work by themselves in their home. I mentioned earlier that the rest of my team all work in another state. I work out of my home and have a lot of online conferences and meetings as we work on projects together. However, I don't get the social "geek" atmosphere with my co-workers (except when I go out of town to meet with them - which is great). I've never really taken the time to get involved with the other local Arizona geeks. Just having the ability to network with other local .NET geeks and have meaningful conversations about programming topics would do wonders for keeping the passion and focus.

My goal: Seek out my local .NET users group and attend as much as possible. Take the time to meet up with others at local nerd diner meetups.

Well, there you go. My thoughts on ways to improve myself as a developer and my goals to do it. Wish me luck.

How I Got Started in Software Development

Ryan Farley — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:02:08 GMT

A meme that has been circulating lately online with .NET developers that I've enjoyed reading asks how you got started in software development (started by Michael Eaton). I just got through reading posts on this meme from Phil Haack and Joel Ross, so I decided to post my own story.

How Old Were You When You Started Programming?
Let's see, I was probably 10 or so when I first got turned on to the whole idea of "code" that made things work on a computer. My dad brought home an Atari 800. This was a different machine than the typical Atari console. This was one with a keyboard of all things. It didn't even come with a joystick. It had a whopping 1.79 MHz Rockwell processor with 48K RAM. Really, who could handle such power? It had a 5.25 floppy drive, which I never used as much because it was too limited in size. Instead, it also had a cassette deck that I would use to load up cassette tapes with games written in BASIC that I would exchange with some friends of mine who also had Atari 800 computers. The thing about the 800 is that it didn't necessarily have a Microsoft flavor of BASIC and instead had an Atari home-grown version of BASIC. Anyway, I had to learn how to run these games that I had on my cassettes that were basically all Atari BASIC source code. I ended up figuring out I could open those files and spent many afternoons reading through them and making tweaks to make the games more interesting. I'd then load it up on a cassette and deliver the modified games to my friends. What fun.

How Did You Get Started In Programming?
Well, I was always fascinated with computers and loved the days of tweaking Atari BASIC games, but the need to attract the opposite sex took over and I picked up the guitar. Let's face it, Nerds back in those days were....just Nerds. Not like the way things are today. The fact that I could read BASIC code did nothing to impress girls. Playing the guitar on the other hand, that was the ticket. So, I focused on my artistic side and grew out my hair. I didn't do too much on computers until I was a Sophomore in High School and took a introduction to programming class. It was really supposed to be a basic "computers" class, but the teacher was a real nerd and turned it into something that would allow those who wanted to geek out to focus on programming. Keep in mind, this was only about 1984, so programming classes were not that common. I hadn't really done anything like that since my days on the Atari 800, and I remembered how much I loved it. I spent a lot of time with that teacher and learned a lot of how to write basic constucts, all still in variations of BASIC. Still, my artistic side was more interesting to the girls, so I kept that as my focus. I started college as a Graphics/Art major. Eventually, that changed to Computer Science and I've never been happier (by this time, computer geeks were no longer the dorks with tape on their glasses). While in college I got a job with CellularOne. It wasn't a "real programming" job, but the company didn't really have anyone in IT who knew how to program. Most of my department's processes we're crazy long and redundant. I ended up spending most of my time on that job writing scripts that ran through AIX sessions to improve the business process and automate tasks. That started to consume too much of my time as other departments would start asking me to write scripts for them as well. In the end, I got fired for it. Instead of doing what I was hired to do I was spending all my time on the job writing scripts for many departments in the company, even for IT. Needless to say, getting fired for that was just the confidence boost I needed to go find a job where writing code was my job function. These answers are getting long, I might never finish this. I better pick up the pace.

What Was Your First Language?
Atari BASIC, if you can count that. From there I learned other flavors of BASIC - Color BASIC, Commodore BASIC, GW-BASIC, QBasic, QuickBasic and finally Visual Basic. My time with Visual Basic was great because I was finally able to develop complete, self-contained and deliverable programs. However, it was short lived as I got turned on to Pascal. Borland's Delphi started to gain traction and I jumped the Visual Basic boat for Delphi. I loved Delphi. I was a big fan, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Still, I was a minority with it. In order to keep working with other developers I had to keep my VB chops up to speed. When I switched to a Computer Science major in College I started using C++ (and some Lisp, Ada, and Assembly as well). That is what taught me to appreciate formal style and structure. After .NET made it's 2000 debut at PDC I quickly moved to C# and have LOVED it ever since (I actually own the domain CSharpIsLove.com). I still use plenty of Javascript and VBScript too, but that is not by my choice.

What Was The First Real Program You Wrote?
I'm not sure I can even remember that. Should I make one up? :-)

What Languages Have You Used Since You Started Programming?
Oops. I already answered that one (see "what was your first language" above).

What Was Your First Programming Gig?
Well, I still consider my first real programming gig as the job I got fired for writing code. My first real programming gig that I actually got paid to write code was the one after that. My dad's company had a CRM system and he would complain to me that the consultant that they were using always seemed to be running behind. So, I called him up and mentioned that his customers are telling me that he needs help. He and I teamed up and I've been programming in the CRM industry (CRM = Customer Relationship Management, although it was considered SFA, or Sales Force Automation back in those days) ever since.

If You Knew Then What You Know Now, Would You Have Started Programming?
Absolutely. Although I probably would have started doing it professionally much sooner. It was easy and fun to do it as a hobby. I loved doing it, however, the idea of making the move to doing it professionally was a little intimidating at first. I held off way too long looking for real "paid" programming jobs too long because I thought I wouldn't know enough. Turned out, I knew way more than most when I finally did get a real programming job.

If There is One Thing You Learned Along the Way That You Would Tell New Developers, What Would It Be?
I'd have to agree with what Joel said, get involved in the community. There is so much great info out there, so many great minds to learn from. Don't let the fact that you might not be as experienced as others out there stop you from getting involved (blogging, participating in forums, etc). The developer communities online is about the greatest thing that will help you grow as a programmer as long as you have the passion to be involved and learn from others. Sticking your neck out to help others is an excellent way to learn for yourself as well.

What's the Most Fun You've Ever Had ... Programming?
It's all been fun. I do actually love the late nights writing code. Going to bed and I just can't stop writing code in my head so I have to get back up and type it out. I do have to say that the first time I knew a program I designed and developed myself was in production, and actually solved real business needs, was a pretty cool feeling.

Good memories. So long and thanks for all the fish. If you still wanted to read more about me (but really, isn't this enough already?), you could see my about page.

A new Level of Geekdom and a Childhood Dream

Ryan Farley — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:30:00 GMT

My son, Trapper, just had his 9th birthday party this weekend. I had my friend, Neil (kungfootrooper.com) come, who just completed his new Darth Vader costume to give the boys something to gawk over. Even though I knew it was my fiend Neil underneath I can't even describe how powerful and awe-inspiring it was to be in the presence of Darth Vader. Neil is a big guy and makes a really menacing Darth Vader. It was an indescribable feeling and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood dream to stand next to Darth Vader, up close and in person.

The picture does not do it justice but it will be a memorable experience. Thanks Neil. BTW, Neil just recently marched in the Rose Bowl parade in CA as a Storm Trooper and even got to meet George Lucas. Neil is documenting it on kungfootrooper.com.

Top 30 Popular Posts

Ryan Farley — Thu, 25 May 2006 18:41:00 GMT

I started this blog in August of 2003, almost 3 years ago. I've made 176 posts in those 3 years. I don't post too often to my blog because I'm not all that big on posting stories about my kids, wife, dog, etc - although those do come in every now and then. Anyway, even when I have lulls where I am not posting as much, my traffic seems to stay pretty consistent. I'm actually amazed at how much traffic I get, especially when I consider how often I get around to posting (big thanks to all the visitors over the years).

Some of my posts have apparently been useful :-), so I thought I would post the top 30 most popular posts I've made over the years (based on total number of unique views to the posts).

1. Set Focus to an ASP.NET Control
Setting focus to controls in your ASP.NET application is a part of giving your end users the feel that they have come to expect. Making your web applications act more like Windows applications is a key to success (IMO). While setting focus to con...
Total views: 371,568 - Posted on: 21-Dec-2004

2. Using the Web Browser Control in your C# Applications
It can be a powerful thing to display dynamic HTML in your C# applications. It can give your applications a modern look and feel and can make displaying data in non-standard ways easy with some simple markup. We have the web browser ActiveX control that wr...
Total views: 232,037 - Posted on: 23-Dec-2004

3. Writing to Your .NET Application's Config File
There's likely been times that you might have thought that it would make things convenient to write back to your .NET application's config file. The framework provides simple methods for reading from the config file, but gives you nothing for writing value...
Total views: 197,345 - Posted on: 13-Jul-2004

4. Tips for SQL Server Identity Columns
Tips on allowing inserts to identity columns and also for reseeding the identity value for a table....
Total views: 117,941 - Posted on: 19-Dec-2004

5. Multiple Monitors rule
I love multiple monitors. I can't even imagine trying to work without multiple monitors and don't think I could ever go back to a single monitor....
Total views: 96,533 - Posted on: 7-Jan-2004

6. Unable to Start Debugging on the Web Server
I hate that, and it seems that every time I (or a co-worker) gets the error “Unable to Start Debugging on the Web Server” on a machine when attempting to debug an ASP.NET project, I have to scramble to remember what to look at. Here's a few things that has...
Total views: 91,037 - Posted on: 23-Aug-2005

7. Stop Hijacking my Browser!
Often in applications you have the need to launch a browser window to a specified URL. I recently evaluated various RSS readers where links to blog posts could be launched in an external browser window. What I found was that most of these applications woul...
Total views: 90,029 - Posted on: 16-May-2004

8. Determining the Control that Caused a PostBack
Many times you might need to perform some action on an ASP.NET postback based on the control that caused the postback to occur. Some scenarios for this might include a form with many regions, each having it's own CustomValidator and the ability to perform...
Total views: 69,089 - Posted on: 11-Mar-2005

9. Solving problems through programming...and why the Skype API sucks
I love to take the approach of solving computing problems through programming. Sometimes it backfires and I over-complicate the problem (I have been known to prematurely generalize from time to time). But usually I bask in the greatness of being a programm...
Total views: 60,149 - Posted on: 14-Jan-2005

10. Enabling XP Themes in your .NET Applications
When you build Windows applications in .NET, by default your application will not have support for XP Themes, or Visual Styles. It is an easy enough task to do, and I think it goes a long way in giving your application a complete and professional look & fe...
Total views: 49,397 - Posted on: 5-May-2004

11. On the Subject of Dates in T-SQL
While we're on the subject of dates in T-SQL, I never liked getting the month and year for a date and sticking an '01' in the middle (then casting it all back to a datetime) to get the first day of the month for a given date value. Then you do the same to...
Total views: 42,317 - Posted on: 15-Feb-2005

12. Determining if a Date is a Weekday in T-SQL
I was reminded of a SQL function to determine if a date was a weekday or a weekend I wrote a while back when I saw the requirements of a project a colleague was working on. You'll see this requirement fairly often in many business applications. A company m...
Total views: 40,265 - Posted on: 14-Feb-2005

13. Awesome web.config Changes in ASP.NET 2.0
There are some really cool changes coming in ASP.NET's web.config files that I am really excited about. I'll just point out a few that I've used (I hate going back to 1.1 because I can't use them). The web.config file in ASP.NET 2.0 allows you to set a lot...
Total views: 40,145 - Posted on: 8-Jun-2004

14. Setting the Value of a TextBox with TextMode=Password
When the TextMode property of an ASP.NET TextBox is set to Password the value set in the Text property will not display at runtime. This can be a pain, however it is actually by design to prevent the unmasked password from being displayed in the HTML sourc...
Total views: 36,984 - Posted on: 18-Dec-2004

15. T-SQL Olympics
OK, there is not an Olympics for T-SQL - but there should be. A friend of mine and I were talking the other day about “gold-medal” T-SQL we've come accross. The one that wins the gold for me is the code I found a long time ago on SQL Server Central from Ma...
Total views: 36,617 - Posted on: 25-Oct-2004

16. T-SQL: SET vs SELECT when assigning variables
Do you know what the difference is between using SET and SELECT when assigning varaibles in T-SQL? Well, there is a difference. I came accross a great article by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi from the UK that describes the difference between the two....
Total views: 36,204 - Posted on: 1-Mar-2004

17. Interacting with the Web Browser Control
In my last post, I outlined some ways to make the Web Browser control more useful in your C# applications, to include things such as printing and setting the text or html of the browser dynamically. That is all good, but in a typical application it does li...
Total views: 35,885 - Posted on: 27-Dec-2004

18. Disabling the Windows Close action
There are times that you'll see a Window that has a close button in the titlebar, but it is disabled. This is often found in applications where the dialog/window changes it's status past a stoppable point so the Windows close action is removed so the user...
Total views: 35,796 - Posted on: 12-Apr-2004

19. Creating a IWin32Window from a Win32 Handle
There are times when you are integrating your .NET applications with other existing applications that you cannot modify and is possibly even non-.NET application. This can often result in problems integrating your .NET application's windows with the other...
Total views: 35,465 - Posted on: 23-Mar-2004

20. In Search of the Perfect RSS Reader
For the last year or two, I've been switching from reader to reader. While each one had features that I loved, they all seemed to fall short on one thing or another and I was never really 100% pleased with any of them. I went from SharpReader, to RSSBandit...
Total views: 33,384 - Posted on: 14-May-2004

21. Flattening Out Data with One of the Coolest SQL Tricks Ever
Not sure why, but I seem to be on a T-SQL kick lately - so here's another T-SQL post. One of my favorite T-SQL hacks ever is one that can flatten out data by taking a value from multiple rows and concatenating the values into a single string....
Total views: 33,281 - Posted on: 17-Feb-2005

22. Dynamically Loading Master Pages in ASP.NET 2.0
One of the cool new things introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 is Master Pages. Master Pages give you the ability to define a master page layout and look that is used throughout a site to give a consistent look & feel to all pages. Any updates or changes to the look...
Total views: 33,156 - Posted on: 16-Jun-2004

23. Communication between applications via Windows Messages
At times I'll build a suite of related, but separate applications. Even though each application is a separate executable, I like to be able to integrate the applications so they can work together. Sending messages between your applications is a great way t...
Total views: 31,548 - Posted on: 10-May-2004

24. Rendering Size (and other things) Correctly in FireFox
One thing that I just can't stand, is when a web page I build looks different in FireFox than how it looks in IE. Well, who doesn't?! The thing that really sucks is that there are things build in to how ASP.NET works that will cause this to happen. So unle...
Total views: 31,325 - Posted on: 6-Sep-2005

25. Returning Objects from Web Services
When I work with web services I want things to work the same way as if I were working with a local layer that returns objects, not data. I don't want my code outside of the service to even see the data, just the objects that represent the data. Who doesn't...
Total views: 27,545 - Posted on: 26-May-2004

26. Disabling Auto-Complete on ASP.NET Forms
Popular browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox support something called Auto-Complete. You've seen this many times. You go to a online form and as you start to type in fields you get a drop-down showing values you've typed in that field before. Th...
Total views: 26,844 - Posted on: 23-Feb-2005

27. Intersection of Date Ranges
A friend of mine called me yesterday about a scheduling application he is working on. His question was so simple, or so it seemed, but it really drove me nuts. Basically he just wanted to find out if two date ranges intersected at all. Simple enough. It wa...
Total views: 24,593 - Posted on: 19-Aug-2004

28. Tricking out the Desktop
Something I have always been a sucker for is tricking out my desktop. I love any kind of tweak or gadget that enhances my pc and the whole user-experience thing. It's one of the many reasons I am looking forward to Vista. I've been a fan of applications th...
Total views: 24,497 - Posted on: 11-Jan-2006

29. Retrieving database independent schema information
Something that I think is often overlooked in the .NET Framework is the cool stuff you can get at using OleDbSchemaGuid to retrieve database schema information. I just thought of this again earlier today when I was reviewing a C# database application where...
Total views: 21,989 - Posted on: 3-Apr-2004

30. Creating Tracking Images for ASP.NET
Often with web applications you want to track traffic statistics to get a general idea of the number of visitors viewing a resource. Whether it be a web page, an RSS feed, an e-mail or whatever, you might want an inconspicuous way to determine that it has...
Total views: 21,725 - Posted on: 10-Jun-2004

Some of these are not as relevant now with .NET 2.0, so I guess I better get back on the bandwagon ;-)

Am I Vain?

Ryan Farley — Thu, 25 May 2006 16:50:00 GMT

Of course, this means I need to be a really good driver now. Hehe.

Introducing the Farley Five!

Ryan Farley — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:13:00 GMT

Well. It's been a crazy week and I wanted to post about it. As I've mentioned before, I do try to keep the content here focused on C# or programming topics. However, a personal post does make it's way to my blog from time to time. This week I added another member to the band ;-)

Introducing, on the drums, Turner Farley - born Feb 9 2006!!

Speaking of kids, I was talking to my son Tate (5) about how he is cursed to be hairy when he grows up and he told me that when he is “old” he won't work, just play video games all day. So I asked him, if you don't work how will you buy food for your wife and kids. He thought for a second and then said “the wife can do that”! Doh.

New blog for MSCRM

Ryan Farley — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:08:00 GMT

For anyone interested or those who work with MSCRM, I've decided to put up a new blog dedicated to MS CRM development. It's still just a wee baby, but I plan to post somewhat regular content there.

CRMDeveloper.com - Ryan Farley on MSCRM Development

I do still plan on keeping this blog up to date as well with C# and general development topics.

Tricking out the Desktop

Ryan Farley — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:52:00 GMT

Something I have always been a sucker for is tricking out my desktop. I love any kind of tweak or gadget that enhances my pc and the whole user-experience thing. It's one of the many reasons I am looking forward to Vista. I've been a fan of applications that trick out the desktop from the norm for years, so I thought I would share a few of my favorites.

(click for larger image)

That's my current desktop on my main workstation - both monitors. I have a patched uxtheme.dll, Desktop Sidebar, LClock, CursorXP, IconPackager, UltraMon, and Konfabulator. Oh yeah, don't forget my ninja stars wallpaper. Everyone knows that ninjas are cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet.

Edit: I've added a larger shot of my desktop as suggested in the comments. Click the image above to see the full view.

WindowBlinds ($19.95) - WindowBlinds by Stardock is nice. It allows you to do about anything as far as the visual style of your windows go. Price is fairly cheap. One of the cooler things about the new v5 is the support for “glass” ala Vista Aero style. However, I don't run WindowBlinds on my main development workstation (but I do on my laptop).

Custom Visual Styles via a patched uxtheme.dll (Free) - The UXTHEME.DLL file in Windows is what provides the support for Visual Styles. The DLL that comes with Windows only includes support for the standard luna visual style known as “Windows XP Style”. Using a patched uxtheme.dll file will allow you to use other custom visual styles, such as the ones available from many different windows customization sites (like these on winmodify.net, I particularly like the Royale Vista VS theme). The great thing about using a patched uxtheme.dll is that you're really just using the same engine for “themeing” that is built into Windows.

IconPackager ($14.95) - This is another app from Stardock. It allows you to change all the system icons on your pc. I've changed all of mine to a Vista icon pack. I love the new folder and other system icons.

LClock (Free) - LClock is just a tiny clock replacement for Windows. Provides a much nicer, prettier systray clock (like mine).

CursorXP ($10) - This one gives you custom cursors, complete with subtle animation and drop shadows. Yet another one from Stardock. It can be annoying if you go too far with this. You have to just select a theme that doesn't overdo it. I like my StarCraft style theme.

Konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets) (Free) - The wonderful world of widgets. There's a widget for just about anything. I use the one for weather, cpu usage monitor, one that rotates images of my kids from my images folder, and one that monitors the Google pagerank of some of my sites.

...and last, my favorite...

Desktop Sidebar (Free) - Desktop Sidebar ROCKS! I've been hooked on this thing for quite some time now. This gives you the longhorn/vista style sidebar without the wait. I use it for displaying new unread mail in my Outlook inbox, my calendar (today's & tomorrow's activities), and more. It is completely skinnable, and while there is a very large collection of skins available online, it is brain-dead easy to create your own as well. Very well built and performs nicely. You can even build your own custom panels for it fairly easily.

There's plently of places you can get new custom styles and themes for these apps. A few favorites are: WinModify, WinCustomize, BelchFire, VisualStyles, etc.

Download the ninja stars wallpaper

MacGuyver - Visual Studio, Tape, and a stick of Gum

Ryan Farley — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 20:30:00 GMT

I've been catching up on some blog reading lately, I've fallen a bit behind. Anyway, a post from Phil Haack has got me thinking. In this post, Phil talks about those projects that we all have found ourselves in from time to time where there is a limited budge and limited time and you just have to crank something out, something that might be mostly crap (or at least just not ideal) but functional, just so you can get things to phase 2 where you'll reengineer everything and do it right.

Ya Gotta Be a Bit MacGuyver

I have been known to prematurely generalize, so I wonder if I would have been able to “look in my pocket, take out a piece of gum, foil wrapper, and loose thread and make it happen“. Isn't it hard some times to bite the bullet and do something that is less than ideal, just to make it through crunch time? No doubt that there are times that it just has to be done, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. I've been in similar situations before. I've made the tough move and built something that wasn't something I was proud of when it comes to design and code, but did bring a sense of satisfaction that I met the customer's difficult timeline, stayed within the customer's borderline unreasonable budget, and ended up with a product to deliver that met the customer's needs and satisfied requirements. Was it the best piece of software ever? Hardly, but the best piece of software wasn't what was needed.

Sometimes, to deliver a product, you need a solution developer, not just a software developer. This consultant was a brilliant software developer, who had hit the high-notes on his pet project. But he could not bring himself to hack together a less than perfect solution.

I think Phil states things right on. It is all about the solution. Believe me, I am all about great design and code that makes drool. The stuff that a developer's dreams are about. But there is a time when you have to be a bit MacGuyver and work the miracle.

You can finally sleep (and pronounce GIF)

Ryan Farley — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:34:00 GMT

You can finally sleep at night, cancel the appointment with your therapist. At long last, you can be assured that you are pronouncing GIF correctly. Whew.

The GIF Pronunciation Page