Without recessions we wouldn’t have prosperity. Everything in this world is relative, remember?  Everything!  There is no good without bad, no bad without good.  How would you compare and contrast without both?  You can’t!  Apples to apples are only just apples.  How ordinary!

Its recessions that allow me hire the most kick ass SDET ever born to walk this face of wanna be enterprise software ever to be born out of some half ass naked enterprisey architect fool!  Yes, recessions shake this world up, let the dead weight die, and make the good truly shine in all their glorious golden hue.  Code is no different.

I love bad, nay, horrible code.  Without the most clown-a-rific code ever (yes Kent, Clown-a-rific) my code would be so boring and ordinary.  It’s this clown code that makes my code standout and really shine like the terd that it is, er, gem that it is.  My code basks in the glow in the terdious cloud of awful code, so thank you for awful code for your wonderous glowing shine.

My point is we can’t just have good.  If we only have good, we would only have boring.  With boring we have nothing.  Thank you Jeebus that we have good and bad.  Thank you terdious code base for letting me shine! ASP.NET MVC wouldn’t look so good if we didn’t have Ruby.  So thank you Jeebus for some Ruby.  And circa 2005, go die ASP.NET webforms!  Ruby is the flashlight upon ASP.NET webforms.  We all knew around 2005 the problems, but Rails just put the spotlight upon ASP.NET webforms and made them naked for what they were.

Sure, webforms were glamorous, at least they were back in 2001 when I was evaluating ASP+ beta2 (yeah, ASP+, not ASP.NET).  Yes, yes they were quite remarkable.  Compared to classic ASP, ASP.NET webforms was the shiznit, as they say in my hometown.  I’m glad we have ASP.  I’m glad we have ASP.NET webforms.  I’m glad we have ASP.NET MVC.  One without the other is so ordinary and boring, so middle America.  Could we have rich without the poor?  Nay, we would all be so middle.  Again, I remind you dear reader that middle is boring!

So, let me be first to say that ASP.NET MVC sucks!  Sure, right now it’s pretty damn good. It copied MonoRail fairly well (which itself was a copy), but in a couple of years we’ll all be wishing for something else. They all say, too much static typing!  Give me controllers that are dynamic that don’t require a re-compile! It’s so slow! Views?  Views?! JavaScript XXX handles views and has its own templating engine!  I can’t believe we ever generated views on the server!  That’s what they’ll say, they will.

We just need some good old fashioned data services from our web server. Client server shall live again!  Trends always repeat themselves.  Don’t believe me?  Glam rock will rock again in 2012.  History is bound to repeat itself because of cycles.  OK, I’m getting a bit out there.  I agree, but damnit glam rock shall live again!  Guitar Hero Metallica is pretty damn fun!

Without cycles we would have only good which would yawn us all to death.  It’s the bad which makes the good, actually good.  It’s all relative, isn’t it Einstein?

I finally downloaded Simian today to give it a test drive, and already I think I'm going to love this tool. If you don't know what Simian is, its a tool to automatically locate duplicate lines of code and any good programmer should love to delete duplicated code, which where I work is pretty important. 

Simian being a console application is pretty useful, but being able to click a button from Visual Studio, see the output in the output window, and then being able to navigate to the duplicated lines by double clicking is what I really wanted.  So that's what I did, I created a Simian output formatter that transforms the output to MSBuild formatted output that is clickable!  Cool, how do we use it?

Download and copy the formatting tool somewhere, I put it in my Simian bin directory.  Create a batch file in this same directory, the batch file is used to pipe the Simian results to the formatter because Visual Studio doesn't let you from the external tools menu.  My batch file looks like this:

@ECHO OFF
REM Run simian redirecting output to the MSBuild formatter
C:\"Program Files (x86)"\Simian\bin\simian-2.2.24.exe %1 | C:\"Program Files (x86)"\Simian\bin\SimianMsBuildFormatter.exe

With that out of the way we need to setup Simian as an external tool within Visual Studio.  In this example I will setup Simian for the current file:

Now Simian - Current File will show up in the Visual Studio Tools menu.  With a file open in the editor we just need to click our new menu item to run Simian and get our output. Here's an example output run.

The interesting and useful part is that the source files listed in the output are now clickable, just like from the csc compiler.  Happy dupe finding!

First off let me say that I'm probably the last person to figure this out, but Google Reader allows you to share web pages via a simple toolbar shortcut. Just open Google Reader and drag the "Note In Reader" box to your browser toolbar.

It works exactly as I had wanted, without any browser plugins, the toolbar shortcut is just some Javascript that runs to share the current web page you are viewing, genius!