Friday, January 14, 2005

Still alive and kickin'

You may ask yourself "What the heck is that Bob Powell up to these days?" It's true that I've not paid attention to the Blog much because my work has just gone crazy and I've had months of pretty intense stuff going on and no time to report on other things.

I'm writing a book. This is not too surprising I suppose but what will really blow your socks off is that it's a book for Visual Basic programmers.

As a self-promoting guru I get vast amounts of mail from people who ask for help on every subject, not just Graphics, and I have seen a dire need for a book that explains how to create a correctly object-oriented architecture for VB users. So many people come from the VB6 world and discover that although VB.NET is syntactically similar the principles of software architecture in an object-oriented system such as .NET is a mystery. Consequently they make the most fundamental mistakes and create truly horrible applications that are beset with faults.

The book is entitled "Object Oriented Programming for .NET" and is presented in both VB and C# but with the emphasis on the VB angle.

The "day job" is keeping me well employed doing exiting things with public-address advertizing systems. I must say that there is rarely a boring day.

Keeping an amount of churn in the GDI+ FAQ and Windows Forms Tips and Tricks also puts a load on.

Finally WellFormed is on my list of important items and I'm working on a new system that will deliver content to subscribers via the web. I originally hosted the service with a provider who shall remain nameless but which SUCKED! and cost me too much money and time. Now WellFormed.NET is on Brinkster but the application that serves the content is even more work for my thinly spread working day. I have a prelim version working but it has bugs that I just don't have time to chase at this second.

I suppose being over-employed is better than being under-employed :-)