Speed of light

The odometer of my car just went over the one light-second mark this morning. :-)

What's it all about?

First of all, a little bit of history. Since the mid 1980's I've been very active on newsgroups and forums run by CompuServe and Microsoft. In fact, since I became a self employed consultant. I give out a lot of information freely and I've always made an effort to explain the principles behind my answers rather than just paste a link to somebody else's answer or tell somebody where to look in the help file. Furthermore, I maintain a web site with comprehensive articles, extensive code in both C# and visual basic which is used as a resource by literally thousands of engineers all over the world.

I discovered many years ago that helping people out for free can be advantageous because people often contact me afterwards and offer me contracts, both short and long term, and even fulltime employment in their companies. As a consequence, I am able to make a living through the Internet and those forums and newsgroups which I frequent are often the primary point of contact between me and my clients.

Whenever I post in a newsgroup my signature carries links to my website, articles and products. This has always been the case. Furthermore, I often post announcements to my products and services which are clearly marked as such and are easily filtered by those people who do not wish to see such announcements by the simple expedient of a filter that removes the subjects tagged with a ANN: prefix.

Recently, I was given the MVP award by Microsoft, largely for my work on the newsgroups but significantly, for the content of my website and my advocacy of Microsoft products. This is to say that my practices are certainly not incompatible with the Intent of the Microsoft public newsgroups. Indeed, I am somewhat surprised because having been recently singled out by members of a newsgroup because of "unacceptable practices" I looked back through the newsgroup archives to discover that there are numerous announcements for commercial products from other MVPs and companies which have drawn no comment whatsoever.

One thing I will not do is to be drawn into a public flame argument on a newsgroup. I have a comment section on this blog and anyone is free to put whatever they like on there.

MSDN style documentation

I've been an advocate of inline documentation for source code for many years. In a previous incarnation as Director Of Engineering at stingray, I hassled my poor teams relentlessly for good source documentation. I was very pleased indeed when I saw that C# provided built in XML documentation and quite liked code comment reports generated by the visual studio IDE.

For the last week or so, I have been involved in heavily documenting a project that has taken me almost a year to complete for a client in the UK. Although I had already used the bill in XML documentation for the C# based classes and have generated the code, and report pages on several occasions I found them lacking and to be honest, I think my client did too. After revisiting all the documentation and beginning to document several of the visual basic classes and examples in my project using the VBCommenter from the GotDotNet site. I discovered the absolutely superb nDoc project on the SourceForge site.

nDoc enables you to produce MSDN style documentation in the form of .CHM files and web sites that look absolutely fantastic and integrate with the standard MSDN help files for such information as inherited members and so on.

Someone asked me the other day if I would put help files on the site for xray-tools so as an experiment, and because I've had to make a change to the tool recently, I have read on the documentation for the RectTracker control and put it up on my site.

New article posted in GDI+ FAQ

I've just posted an article on the GDI+ FAQ on the subject of colour saturation in images and how to adjust it using the ColorMatrix class.