Being Refactored

I’ve been playing around with LINQ and WPF for a few months now, and have found it interesting that more companies (and recruiters) are not looking for people with WPF experience. Maybe it just hasn’t taken off yet (even though it’s been in Beta for over a year), but WPF has a lot of benefits over ASP.NET, and these are enumerate here quite well:

Reasons For Choosing WPF Over ASP.NET For Our Very Large Project

One drawback I see is that direct connections to a database are not allowed in Xaml Browser applications – these apps perform their database I/O via web services. This actually isn’t that much of a drawback, since having a webservice layer between the datalayer and the business layer is usually a good practice (especially when a CIO/CEO) decides that the entire company needs to switch database platforms! This practice also reduces the possibility of SQL injection attacks and other forms of site/database hacking.

I had written a sci-fi book back in college, which has been collecting dust for the last 15 years or so. Anyway, I’ve recently printed out a copy and started reading it, just to see what it would take to rework/polish it up to get it into a “sell-able” condition. I figure if I’m going to spend months writing and editing something, I might as well go the extra mile and try to sell it (capitalism is very natural – embrace it!)

After reading through the first couple of chapters, I can see that many of the subplots will need to be changed (or at least updated to follow modern technology). Some of the plot’s settings take place in the future (about 2009), and considering that it was written in 1991, technology and it’s effects on everyday life have changed dramatically from even 15 years ago. For example, cell phones, fast PCs, and the Internet played little or no part in the futuristic settings of the story, simply because they were not widely used at the time the book was first written.

Some of the subplots are quite silly now, but hey, when I first started college in 1991, I knew everything, and now I know much, much less… 🙂

Something I’m guilty of is having too many projects going on at the same time, and then jumping from one project to another without following through as much as I could. For example, I started up a small web-business using one of the open source content-management systems, got everything in place, and found that I didn’t have the time or the money to get it off the ground. So, the websites and the business-model sit there, just waiting for some attention.

And the book-writing software and article submission module? The first version of the book-writing software is finished, but needs some cleanup and the styling. The database of the article submission module is finished, and most of the code is generated. While playing around with LINQ last week, I was able to refactor the code to use the LINQ queries instead. So those will be soon regenerated too… 

Both projects are nice to work on while sitting on the couch with the TV playing reruns of “Seinfeld” and “According to Jim”. Like I said before, too many projects with too little time.

I’m in the middle of editing two books I wrote – one was finished a few months ago and the other was one I wrote early in college. Since I had written it over fifteen years ago, I had no idea where the disk was (or if it was even on a disk!). In this day and age of frequent change, I found that I had gone through a lot of computers and email addresses in that time.

Fortunately, I had saved some of my college files on a floppy disk (remember those?!?!?), and found it a few weeks ago in an old box of computer junk. The book was in Word Perfect 5.0, and I had to spend a couple hours cleaning it up and reformatting it (since Word Perfect went out of mainstream use ten years ago!).

My goal is to have both books edited and ready for publishing by the end of January, and then the publisher-shopping process begins! And while that process is underway, I hope to start working on the book series/framework that I’ve wanted to do for the last two years, but wanted to get all these other projects out of the way first.