Creationism

The universe is complex.

Far too complex to have been produced by random processes from nothing.

It is just not possible for more-complex things to evolve from less-complex things.

There must have been a creator.

The complex universe was created by a creator.

[logical continuation...]

The creator must therefore have been more complex than the universe.

The creator is very complex.

Far, far too complex to have come from nothing...

...

ReSharper - Awesome, Expensive, Slow

ReSharper (R#) is great. The refactorings and code completions and cleanups and warnings are truly awesome. I now really want all the code that I work on to pass with few or no warnings. But I am going to have to uninstall it for two fairly mundane (i.e., should be easy to fix) reasons:

1. It totally has screwed up all of the keyboard shortcuts. Even after flipping back to all VS 2005 shortcuts there are some things that don't work, and worse, there are many nice features of R# that are no longer available at the touch of a button.
2. God damn it's slow! Not on a new file, or a small file. But on big old files that have lots (200 or more it seems) warnings. Each time you make an edit to the file it re-analyses it which takes a looong time. (7000 line file, 280 warnings, 15 seconds)

These should both be reasonably easy to fix:

1. Don't frig with the shortcuts! Give me a list of functions for which you would like to add shortcuts and I will assign them. Maybe this is doable by the end user - I'm sure that I could eventually get my old studio shortcuts working again, but I am not paying US$250 for a tool only to spend hours repairing the damage it has done.
2. Let me disable the automatic analysis of the current file. Maybe in that nice little coloured box at the top of the colour bar there that had a hand icon but does not seem to actually DO anything.

I have used R# for a couple of days now, and I love it! You have a convert people! But I CAN'T use it like it is.

Web 2.0 style guide

Orange! Light green! Dark blue! Light blue!

Very faint diagonal or way off-centre circular gradients.

Dark text on light same coloured background.

Dotted (light coloured) borders (and horizontal rules).

Shiny glass or gel (jelly!) looking buttons (that are not usually buttons) and text.

Text sitting on a shiny table and all manner of other (3d) surface effects.

Big bold headlines. Often multiple down or diagonally across the page.

Smaller (gray) body text with lots of white padding.

Many pointed stars.

Cute icons.

No underlined links.

Digg this, post on reddit, blog this, tag on del.icio.us, etc., etc., etc. buttons.

I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad, just what I have been noticing.

Implementing IExceptionHandler

When using the Enterprise Library Exception Handling Block, there are (at least) two things that you have to do to get your custom handler to work that I missed when I looked at the docs. Specify CustomHandlerData as the ConfigurationElementType for the handler class:

[ConfigurationElementType(typeof(CustomHandlerData))]

public class WatchdogHandler : IExceptionHandler {

...

Provide a constructor that takes a NameValueCollection:

public WatchdogHandler(NameValueCollection attributes) { }

Final note.

I have had weird problems with the Enterprise Library Configuration tool. When I first created the handler class it would not load the assembly in the tool. It said that no class that implemented IExceptionHandler could be found. When I fixed the problems with my class it still would not load. Frustrated, I created another handler class from scratch (no other classes in the assembly, no other bits of code lurking around to cause problems) and that one loaded. Then, magically, the other class loaded as well!? Perhaps it was after all the closing and re-opening of the tool that it started to work, but I am not convinced.

Phrases which flip my “no-longer debateable” switch

For the bible tells me so.

If you have nothing to hide, what is the problem?

I'm not a racist but...

It's just a theory.

Others that just make my sigh and shake my head:

Anything that is described as having an infinite number of configurations or settings.

That [insert mechanical device here] totally breaks all the laws of physics.

Item: Ninjas, two score. Check.

Is there any problem that could not be solved by 40 Ninjas? Didn't think so.

Ninjas: not just for breakfast anymore.

No, that's not it, try again.

If there is only one valid entry for some field in an interface, why don't you just put it in for me?

I was using this form created by someone here today, it is a form for our overtime: “Please enter the date for last Saturday” Uh... okay. I guess that was the 22nd of April. 04 22 Bzzt! No sorry that is not the correct date. Please Enter the date for last Saturday. Oh yeah, it is the 21st. Bzzt, that date is too far in the past. Are you serious? The only date that I can enter is 28th April? Bingo.

Well bugger me. If you will only accept one value, and you know what that value is, why don't you just put that in there!? And why can't I enter a date from a past week? It is not an automated system, this gets sent to our HR department for manual human entry into another system. She asked me to resubmit my form from 2 weeks ago. Sheesh. I can see why you would want to make sure that someone selected a Saturday (the start of our billing week), but why force a single Saturday? The people in HR know what they are doing, I am not going to be able to slip in old forms just by putting in an old date, if they are not expecting them they are not going to process them.

If there is really no date selection, don't ask me to select one.