Playing Ball

Like many developers, I entered this career because I enjoy creating programs and solving problems. However, sometimes managers just don't understand the hacker mentality. While we as developers may strive for perfect code, as employees, we are expected to deliver results.

While programmers may prefer to be judged on our awesome coding abilities, managers prefer more tangible and measurable qualities to grade us on. While we may not like it, this is how the corporate environment works.

If a developer wants to advance his career, sometimes its necessary to play ball. Playing the company politics game is not a game most people will want to play, but it is a necessary evil.

Playing the politics game sounds dirty, but not it doesn't have to be.

The easiest way to play to do this is by making your boss look good. Completing tasks on time, delivering accurate estimates, and providing expert advice are a few ways this can be done everyday. But it is the atypical tasks that provide the best opportunity for this. Whenever there support issues, timeliness and clear communication are key to making you, your department, and your manager look good to other departments and the rest of the company.

Special projects are also a good opportunity to excel. Perhaps its tabulating some data, building a special application, or creating some documentation. These can provide insights to what the company at large is working on and provide ways to help accomplish those goals.

Recently, my manager was tasked with finding out who had an MCP ID. I had one, but had some difficulty finding it. While searching for it, I learned that it was important for the company's Microsoft Gold certification. For those without a MCP ID, this would be an opportunity to earn one while the need was still in the manager's mind.

Challenges

Challenges

I had to do something the other day that I've never had to do. I turned down a job offer. Some background infomration might be necessary first to fully understand.

Last fall, I was informed that I would be moving from the domestic development group to the internation development group in late Winter. In the beginning of winter, I was given an assignment from our Implementation group to help them with their backlog. They were impressed with my work and offered me a temporary position with their group to help them decrease their backlog even further.

For the last two and a half months then, I've been augmenting our implementation staff with some of the work they have. Early on, I knew the work would lead to a job offer. In the end, there wasn't really a choice.

A lot of the work is technical in nature, but not very difficult. Most of the challenges that I was faced with in this posistion were not technical challenges, but social challenges.

Technical challenges are the challenges that occur in trying to get the technology to do what is necessary to complete the job at hand. This could as simple as knowing how to operate a lawn mower for a lawn care service, to using Outlook, Office, and other computer applications, all the way up to actually designing the software that others use.

Social challenges are the challenges that occur in working with others. Examples include trying to figure out what a person has asked of you, what it is that they really want accomplished, or how to pursuade them to do what you thing is best.

Each job presents Technical and Social challenges, but I am a person who thrives on the Technical challenges. In this, I had my answer. To be satisfied with my job, I need to have a job that presents me with Technical challenges that push my skills, and not just a job which utilizes my skills.

Weekly .Net Library Review 1: TimeZoneInfo and DateTimeOffset

Weekly .Net Library Review 1: TimeZoneInfo and DateTimeOffset

While on StackOverflow (www.stackoverflow.com), I ran across a link to this poster.

I know very few of the classes listed on the poster, but it occurred to me that I should strive to learn more of them, so in the style defined by Scott Hanseleman, I plan to investigate a different class or two available in the standard .Net library. In this first installment of many, I will go over two classes that were introduced in .NET 3.0, TimeZoneInfo and DateTimeOffset. Both of these classes can be found in the System Namespace.

TimeZoneInfo

TimeZoneInfo is similar to the TimeZone class. However unlike the TimeZone class, the TimeZoneInfo class provides many static methods, including GetSystemTimeZones(), which returns a collection containing a TimeZoneInfo object for each Time Zone that is configured on the local machine.

DateTimeOffset

The DateTimeOffset class is similar to the DateTime object that has been in present in .NET since 1.0. There are two distinctions. First, the DateTime has a Property called Kind, which returns an object of type DateTimeKind. DateTimeKind is an enum with three values, Utc, Local, and unspecified. This denotes what time zone the object is based on; UTC, Local, or an Unspecified time zone. DateTimeOffset is always based on UTC time, so this property is unnecessary. DateTimeOffset also contains an Offset property, which is an object of type TimeSpan. This object contains the Offset necessary to calculate the local time from the UTC time. For example, if the local time zone is Eastern Standard Time, then the offset will be -05:00:00.

Sample Code

Above is a screenshot of the application, with notes in red.

1 is a drop down box named cbTimeZones.

2 is a label named lblUTTime

3 is a label named lblTime

4 is a label named lblOffset

During initiailization, cbTimeZones is populated with the results of TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones(). The selected Time Zone is set to the local time zone. A function called UpdateTime is called, which sets lblUTTime to the current UT Time, lblTime is set to the time in lblUTTime plus the offset, and lblOffset is set to the offset of the current selected Time Zone.

A DispatchTimer is created and set to trigger every second. When triggered, it calls a method which in turns calls UpdateTime().

The constructor looks like this:

        public TimeZoneUtil()
 
        {
 
            InitializeComponent();
 
 
            DateTimeOffset currentTime = DateTimeOffset.Now;
 
 
            foreach(TimeZoneInfo tzi in TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones())
 
            {
 
                cbTimeZones.Items.Add(tzi);
 
                if (tzi.Equals(TimeZoneInfo.Local))
 
                {
 
                    cbTimeZones.SelectedItem = tzi;
 
                }
 
            }
 
 
            UpdateTime();
 
 
            timer = new DispatcherTimer();
 
            timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1000);
 
            timer.Tick += new EventHandler(Timer_Tick);
 
            timer.Start();
 
        }
 

The TimerTick method is trivial and the UpdateTime method is straight forward:

        private void Timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
 
        {
 
            UpdateTime();
 
        }
 
 
        private void UpdateTime()
 
        {
 
            DateTimeOffset currentTime = DateTimeOffset.Now;
 
            TimeZoneInfo selectedTimeZone = (TimeZoneInfo)cbTimeZones.SelectedItem;
 
            TimeSpan selectedTimeZoneOffset = selectedTimeZone.GetUtcOffset(currentTime);
 
 
            lblTime.Content = currentTime.UtcDateTime.Add(selectedTimeZoneOffset).ToString();
 
            lblUTTime.Content = currentTime.UtcDateTime.ToString();
 
            lblOffset.Content = selectedTimeZone.GetUtcOffset(currentTime);
 
        }
 

The 4^th line of UpdateTime is the trickiest. Here we get the UTC time (A DateTime object) stored in the DateTimeOffset object and we add to it the offset from the currently selected TimeZoneInfo (A TimeSpan object). This gives us the current time in the selected time zone.

To get the current time, the easier approach would be to call LocalDateTime property on the DateTimeOffset object. I do not do that in this example, as I wanted to allow the user to select a time zone instead of always using the local time zone.