Great Coding Guidelines Document

I came across a PDF document (you can see it here) that I think is very useful in not only detailing coding guidelines but also explaining why the guidelines are there in the first place. It also talks about other stuff like when you should use an interface instead of a abstract class or when you seal a class. It also has good sections on error handling and commenting.

Also, in case you did not already know, on Visual Studio 2005 if you right click on your project node in the solution explorer and select the Coding Analysis you can run a check on your own code. I have found this to be very useful in not only correcting my own mistakes but also learning good practices.

Review - A Common Wealth of Thieves - 6/10

A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

As the title suggests, the country of Australia was founded with the intentions of being a penal colony housing the unwanted criminals of England.  Remarkably, now Australia is one of worlds most technology advanced and desirably advanced countries in the world.

This book chronicles the first five years of the countries founding.  It details the different stories of the criminals, what they did to be shipped to Australia and how they lived once they got there.

To be honest I could not really get into this book, and I think it is probably mostly my fault.  I just lost interest early on and could never get it back.  I think it was because the stories were just so foreign to me that they I just did not care.  The book is written well and there are some interesting stories, but it was not for me.

How to create a rich create a rich text editor

There are free tools you can download to do this but here is a good article on how to do it yourself begind the scenes.