Thursday evening seems to be “the night for blogging” for me, so here goes:
I saw this cool programming challenge over on Aaron Skonnard's blog (from day 1 of Code Camp that Pluralsight are running).
Programming challenge: at the end of the day, we held a contest that required students to write code to chase a technology trail. It was a race. They were to start by sending a specific HTTP message to a specific endpoint (it required a special header so you had to write WebRequest code). The HTTP response contained the name of a private queue on the network that they subsequently had to read a message from. The message contained a WSDL document from which they had to generate a WS proxy class. Invoking the WS proxy returned the address to a .NET remoting endpoint, for which they already had an interface assembly. The .NET Remoting call returned a secret, identifying the winner. It took the winner about 20-25 mins. It required them to use every communication technique that we discussed in detail today. Hard? Easy?
In other news from this week Darren Neimke has joined Readify. I haven't really blogged about it yet ('cause I try not to blog about work stuff) but I joined Readify 2 months ago and have been very happy here. Last time Darren and I worked for the same company it didn't last very long - hopefully this time will be different.
At the end of this month I will be traveling to Japan and Italy (my spiritual home, which consumes about 14 billion espressos annually, and where you can get a decent doppio on the train) and won't be on-line much. Does anybody have any book suggestions for an extended period off-line? I'm keen to “travel light“ 1-2 books, and no 1000-page monsters. Code-intensive books make me want to code, and that will probably just lead to frustration. Does anybody have any good ideas?