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The past few days at work have actually been, dare I say it, bearable. The cause of this surprising upturn in morale is that I've been writing .NET code as if it was old-skool Visual Basic 6. To cut a long story short, we needed several hundred classes generating for our performance tests, differing only by a few key characteristics, like class name, file name and a few internal bits and bobs. Doing the generation by hand would have taken an age and been very error-prone, so I spent a couple of days writing tools that did the work for us.

These tools will probably not be used again and they needed to be written quickly, so quality and stability weren't exactly high up on the list of requirements. In the end I churned them out and really enjoyed the experience. When you're working on a large-scale project with dozens of developers and support staff, there isn't a lot of chance for this sort of thing, and it really reminded me of developing VB programs a few years back - design patterns were out of the window, with pretty much all of the UI logic was behind the forms. It was a really fun, iterative process. My perfectionist streak meant that I actually wrote comments and laid the forms out neatly, though - I really need to stop with that whole "good enough just isn't good enough" mentality.

Anyway, it's not often that you get to produce two programs in two days, even if they aren't exactly bleeding edge technology showcases ;)

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