After following a link from Kevin Dente to a twitter client called Mixero and installing it I thought I would just list my 2 favourite Twitter clients, why I like them and what I dont like. First of all to those who do not see or understand the value of Twitter, its NOT Facebook and it does not attempt to be Facebook. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has taken the world by storm and clearly if you do not “get it” you may never. I have had friends asking me “What is Twitter?”, “Is it like Facebook”, and I’m like you don’t get it so leave it. I use Twitter for one primary reason, fresh content. I get updates from top Microsoft guys in a quicker way than say through an RSS feed, and Twitter seems nicer than RSS feeds to me. So that is why I keep going back to Twitter, because knowledge is good, and if you know about things its always good.

In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:

• Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
• Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
• Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had

I started this blog about two years ago while I was still working at another company and in that same year I won an award at my company for Innovation. At the end of 2008 I resigned at that company and moved to another company, where I am presently working. I can honestly say that in the year and a half that I have worked at this company I have gained some significant skills, particularly C# skills and web development skills (in particular AJAX). I have gained some SQL Server skills too and I have come to work in a bigger team than I had previously. Being in a bigger team makes you more competitive, and it also makes you more aware of others, but it also exposes people’s weak ego’s. This blog has not had that much traffic, but I didnt see it as a money-making thing, I just wanted a place where I could try and express what I experience, and I think for that purpose I have succeeded.

Here is to another 20 years!

Types in C# and the .NET framework are the fundamental building block of program design, and in C# they are divided into built-in, primitive types, and user-defined types. Generally speaking the user-defined types refer to classes, and classes are essentially made up of built-in types and other user-defined types themselves. Primitive types can also be seen as value types, that is a type that has a value in memory, usually called the stack. This is in contrast to reference types that are on the heap, but actually have pointers to themselves on the stack. C# offers the following built-in types:

• Byte
• Char
• Int16
• UInt16
• Int32
• UInt32
• Long
• ULong
• Short
• UShort
• Decimal
• Double
• Float
• SByte
• Single
• Boolean
• Int64
• UInt64

You all love the Springboks right? Those men in green who do South Africa proud? Well I guess the Kiwis or Aussies or Pommies or…err wait ok dont like the Springboks that much. But I love em and the other night I started thinking about writing an app that will allow me to select a Springbok squad (or two or three) from the Super 14 teams that are currently playing. So what I did is I honestly collected some player and squad information and put it into a database, and the way I did this was to use HtmlAgility to screen scrape player information from www.sarugby.net, and I did it quite easily and successfully got some information and managed to store it. You can see on this page, albeit it might be a bit slow in coming through, that you can search for rugby players here and once you have found a rugby player you can also get the rest of his team mates in his squad. Scary what you can do with a good HTML parser. I then took the information and created a few objects with properties and methods, and then I stored the information. Note that my intention is not to make money! I just liked the code that went into it. And the data that I stored I made available through an incomplete interface here. You can click on the squads to the right, which displays the players for that squad and if you click on a player you see their information displayed. My next idea was to assign each player to one or more positions and then in the left hand pane create icons that represent rugby jerseys, and then make the players you select “addable” to the left until you reach the maximum number of players allowed.

I enjoyed doing it anyway, and I’m trying to do small projects at night to keep me motivated.

I am busy doing a CBT course with the idea of writing MCTS exams and I started by doing some stuff on C# and the .NET framework that focuses specifically on types. The .NET framework is a strongly typed framework and what we mean by strongly typed is that each variable (or type) that you define or create in you’re code must be assigned to a type. C# in particular is a statically, manifestly and strongly typed language. The .NET framework uses the Common Type System (CTS) which means that the type int in C# and the type Integer in VB.NET refer to the same Int32 type in the CLR. It makes sense therefore that in C# you can define types of int as Int32, which means int is just an alias for Int32. Basic/intrinsic types refer to int’s, bools, long, char, unsigned int, unsigned long, byte, short, sbyte, unsigned short, float and decimal. Its important to understand this because memory in the .NET framework is divided into data structures, named the heap and stack respectively. The basic types are seen as value types that are stored on the stack in a Last In First Out basis. Enumerations, structs and constants are also seen as value types. In contrast user-defined types (objects) are stored on the heap. References to the objects are stored on the stack. If for instance you have an instance of StringBuilder called strb1 and another instance called strb2 and you instantiate strb2 be setting it to strb1 then both instances will point to the same reference on the stack. If you then set the value of strb1 it will have the same value as strb2, and vice verse.

I havent blogged much lately but thought it good to change the theme a bit just so I can motivate myself again to blog more regularly. I’ll be focussing a lot more on my development skills and in particular C# within the next 6 months or so. I will also be tackling and completing a few personal projects, and in particular a CV management project that I have blogged about before here as well as another on-going project. There are lots of interesting things to be learned. I also want to focus my skills on program and application design.