Honours
As some of you are aware, I am completing my Honours this Semester (yay!). As such I have spent most of the past couple of months scrambling to get data together and actually write the Thesis. I draft is available on my Live SkyDrive (this is the submitted draft. It’s 76 pages long, so you may want to wait for the final edition).
Through doing my honours I have had a few thoughts that I had wanted to share, but couldn’t find the time to put together those posts into a cohesive blog post, so over the next month or two, I’ll see how many of them I can remember\be bothered to write. They’re going to include some rants on Java, Matlab, Curtin and coding in general.
Microsoft
Leading on from Honours, I have managed to get myself a job over at Microsoft in Seattle. It is a graduate position with the SQL Team, working on Managed Providers (namely the System.Data.SqlClient namespace). At present, the job is pending on my getting a Visa (which is pending on my graduation from honours).
More info as it comes…
.NET
Given that I now have (in effect) a week break before my only exam, I have spent a little time working on both the JetLoginTool and P3SS. I’ve been reading a few of the CLR Inside Out articles from the MSDN Magazine, and have been attempting to utilise them in order to reduce the memory footprint of the JetLoginTool and harden P3SS. One of the more interesting things that I found was the Dispose pattern, which I have now been adhering to tightly (and have seen the JetLoginTool drop about half of its memory usage).
Which leads me to my first real rant of this post:
Dear BCL team: Please ensure that everything that implements IDisposable does so implicitly.
There is nothing more annoying than attempting to be a responsible developer by calling Dispose() (when necessary), only to have to delve through the MSDN to double check that the classes you just used that look like they should have unmanaged resource (or a managed-wrapped unmanaged resource) do actually have a Dispose() method (e.g. the TcpClient class). Then, once you have found out that it does implement IDisposable, you have to typecast first so foo.Dispose() becomes ((IDisposable)foo).Dispose().
Right, that enough for today – hopefully I’ll have time to do the Java rant next…
