Today while talking with a co-worker today we were talking about how more years of experience doesn't necessarily translate into proficiency in the software industry. We came up with the analogy that software development is a lot like sports when it comes to the experience factor. I have been playing hockey since I was 4 years old, which by my math makes me have 23 years experience playing hockey. What that doesn't translate into is a job in the NHL, if you put me on the ice against Alex Ovechkin he would embarrass me.

So why is Alex Ovechkin better than me? Besides natural skill, I would bet that he worked a lot harder and practiced harder than me. His passion for the game is a lot higher than my own. You often hear older hockey players being interviewed and stating the fact that "the game has changed since I last played". It is the same thing in software development, new technologies have come out that have changed the game but you can still be great by practicing the fundamentals.

Over the years I have been getting increasingly frustrated with the time that the project reference dialog box takes to show up when all I want to do is add a reference to a DLL. I haven't touched COM references in years so I have no need for that tab and I very rarely use the .NET tab. Most of the time I just want to browse for a DLL and I hate waiting for the Add Reference dialog to come up.

My lack of patience prompted me to create an add-in for Visual Studio that I called Quick Reference. It has the same functionality as adding a reference to a DLL without the wait time of the built in add reference dialog box. Hopefully sometime in the future this will be added to Visual Studio or ReSharper. I created add-ins for VS 2005 and VS 2008 but you must have version 3.5 of the .NET Framework installed. If you have any problems please let me know at stevenrockarts at gmail dot com

Download here:

• Quick Reference 2008
• Quick Reference 2005
• Quick Reference Zip File (download this if you want to install manually)

A couple years ago a was in a computer book club located in Philadelphia and participated remotely. The experience was great by unfortunately the group lost funding from Microsoft and disbanded.

After gauging a little bit of interest around town I have decided to try and start one here in Edmonton with the possibility of people being able to participate remotely.

If you are interested in participating, please join the discussion at the Google group mailing list.

This blog has been really quiet as of late, as you probably noticed by the lack of updates in your favorite RSS reader. The reason is because I got married this past weekend and have not had time to update over the past month. I will make up for it next month but for now I am going to go and enjoy my honeymoon.

I've been in a bit of a blogging slump. I blame taxes, NHL playoffs and an upcoming wedding for the slump. Bil recently posted a meme about being trapped in an elevator with 2 other geeks. The jist of it is if you were trapped in an elevator with 2 other geeks, who would you be trapped with and why.*

I would choose to be trapped with:

•  Reginald Braithwaite because I like reading his essays and I believe I could have a meaningful conversation about various software development topics with him.
• John McCarthy I would like to talk programming languages and AI with him.
  

* I've actually been trapped in an elevator before for 2 hours with a friend and it sucks big time. I try and take the stairs now.

Via Marc-Andre Cournoyer on Twitter, a reason for ASP.NET developers to switch to Rails: http://www.railsjedi.com/posts/15-Acts-as-ASP-NET-a-Ruby-on-Rails-Plugin-

Sadly, I bet I could sell Ruby and Rails to local businesses easier by showing them this page.

P.S. I am the altnet purse fight blog author. No one ever suspects the quiet guy.

Last night I tried installing Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework. I kept getting the error: "Error: Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0a. MSI returned error code 1603".

Not very informative. I eventually ended up getting it installed by temporarily uninstalling IIS. Hope this helps someone else out who is having the same problem.

Sweetness!