June 2012

Of Google Calendar and my Phone

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 29/06/2012 - 19:56

Like many, I live in a busy household with lots going on. With a wife, two kids and a cat, we're probably less busy than some - but it still sometimes seems like a challenge to keep up.

Riding the Wave of Email

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 20/06/2012 - 09:03

Staying on top of the never ending tsunami of email can be a significant challenge at the best of times, let alone when you work in an organisation that treats email as it's very lifeblood.

Inspired in part by a comment made by a friend, I though it might be useful for me to detail the techniques I've been using to stay productive and avoid burial by email. These techniques have been pulled from a wide variety of sources over the course of several years and are not presented as a prescriptive "You should do this" but rather as "I found these helpful - perhaps there's something here you can use".

Visual Studio 2012 RC Woes

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 17/06/2012 - 16:40

I'm a little bit jealous of those of you playing with the new Visual Studio 2012 RC - for me it won't install at all:

[img_assist|nid=584|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=center|width=393|height=512]

I'm hoping there's a simple solution, though Google hasn't served me well in this case. I've posted a question to the MSDN forums - fingers crossed!

The Trap of Discarding information

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 13/06/2012 - 09:14

Here's a code gem I found yesterday ...

try
{
    ...
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    var message = ...
    throw new InvalidOperationException(message, ex.InnerException);
}

This is clearly an attempt to add context when an exception happens - but it does so by throwing away some of the best available diagnostics.

Sigh.