Working late

It’s three in the morning in my time zone and I’ve just stopped working, not on any Free Software project at the moment, but rather on my job’s work.

My job at the moment consists of developing a .NET application using C#. I have to admit, the language itself ain’t as bad as I expected it to be. It has a lot of the good sides of C++, decent switch and foreach statements (funny that two features most C-like languages implement for sure when extending it are switches accepting strings and foreach statements), and it doesn’t have the burden of STL or anything else template-greedy, even though templates exist.

The IDE isn’t bad either, it does really show a lot of Delphiness, if you know what I mean. The form designer, the source tree view and the rest of the things are pretty much Delphish, the code completion though is as usual one of the good points of Microsoft IDEs, sometimes it makes me want to have it on Emacs, would turn out useful with xine-lib most likely. The debugger ain’t entirely bad, it seems to to its job in a decent fashion, although it does miss one feature: being able to stop at a breakpoint only if a given condition is true.

I have to admit that my liking of C# might be related to the fact that when I was given the code to base myself upon I seen such horrible code that anything else would look nice. The code looked to me like it was a Visual Basic conversion, but I’ve been told it was written directly in C#. It had tons of objects that weren’t used as objects, different functions given the same 10 parameters, OLE connections created and closed without ever reusing them, accessors to properties that made them pretty much like a public attribute, and so on. I’ve been rewriting the code to be actually object oriented and the results on the parts I’ve rewritten satisfy me well enough. I’m still doing rewriting though, as there are parts that are still a lot VB-looking.

The linq library is quite a timesaver for some things, as it allows me to find the data I need without the loops in loops the previous code had.

Anyway, I’m good to know I can come to my bed, and watch some Buffy, relaxing and then sleeping. Also, although it might sound strange, sleeping late and till late seems to make me feel better than going to sleep early and wake up early, even if I sleep more in the latter case.