Broken Thoughts

In the times of feudal Japan, a samurai would travel through Japan in Musha Shugyo.  These wandering Samurai are not to be confused with Ronin, or “Masterless Samurai.”  Ronin are samurai who have been expelled by their master, or their master has been killed in battle.  A shugyosha is a samurai who has left his family and school to travel from town to town, taking challenges and learning at various schools to hone their skills.  This time is also used to seek a daimyo to serve.   The shugyosha would carry only a few supplies, their swords (or weapon of choice), and would hire themselves out for food or money.  During this time, the shugyosha would not be protected by his family or school.  The most famous shugyosha was Miyamoto Musashi.

Being an IT consultant is much like the life of a Shugyosha. Being a consultant and being a samurai require a lot of training and skill. There are good consultants and bad consultants, just like there are skilled samurai and unskilled samurai.
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Thanks for the laugh. 

For the rest of you who weren’t there, allow me to explain.  Last night I was on my way home from sword practice.  At one point, the highway turns from 55 mph to 65 mph.  Ahead of me I could see a car dodging and weaving around the other light traffic.  Eventually, I passed him, but apparently it was the unholiest of sins to be passed.  He decided (with one headlight out), to try to block me in where the highway goes from three lanes to two lanes.  I managed to get a head of him, but this only seemed to make him angrier.  It was at this point that he decided to sit in my blind spot.
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As an experienced web developer, I have seen all kinds of crazy login workflows. The security question workflow, however, is the absolute dumbest workflow ever. Not only are most questions geared at public domain information, but how many people are actually going to remember what they typed in for their answer? Also, depending on how good (or bad) the programmers are, if the answer is case senstive, or miss-spelled, you are hosed. I can’t stand sites who use this workflow when there are much better, and more secure ways to allow users to regain control of their account.
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A best practice in .Net development is to have as much of your code in reusable libraries as possible. This cuts down on development time and helps enforce business standards across all applications. One problem however is that sometimes reusable libraries need to have a few customizations. The easiest way is to create a Settings file and set each property through the use of the app.config or web.config.

A more complicated solution is to create your own custom configurations. In my case, I have an enormous library that consists of different parts. I have database tools, data caching, encryption, cookie management, querystring management, Infocard support, email wrappers, as well as several other useful tools. Being a perfectionist, I like to have my settings split out by the piece they belong to. Sure, there is more xml in the config file, but, if I only want to use one section of my code I don’t need to have the whole configuration. Plus, having the configurations split out means I can easily split my library up into multiple DLL’s down the road.
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I once attended a Microsoft Technet Event where they were showing off the new (at the time) .Net 3.0 features. As a self-taught .Net developer, I’m always looking for little tricks and shortcuts and cool things that make my life easier. As I watched the Demo, one thing I noticed was they were using a method that allowed for the use of an infinate number of parameters of the same type. I went home after the conference and immediately began researching what this infinate parameter was and how to use it in my own methods.
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