Mark Gabarra's Blog : Miscellaneous Information

One Final Surprise

Mark Gabarra — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 09:41:00 GMT

I promised a week of surprises and I have one final surprise for all of you. It is with a very heavy heart that I say farewell to Microsoft. Twelve years ago Microsoft hired me right out of college and it has been an amazing ride ever since. My days in...(read more)

Short Break

Mark Gabarra — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:28:00 GMT

Well my laptop is nearly recovered (I still have a few applications I need to reinstall), and I am looking forward to moving my writing time back to somewhere other than my office. This week I am going to take a short break on peeling back the onion of...(read more)

Seven Segment Countdown Timer

Mark Gabarra — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 02:29:00 GMT

Sometimes the inspiration for funny little applications induces as much laughter as the application itself. Although, in my experience, often these inspirations seem ridiculous to the point that I never sit down to turn inspiration into implementation. Yesterday I experienced one of these moments and actually forced myself to sit down and author the attached application.

As you may know, the final release date of the WCF product approaches. Each morning we have a cross feature team meeting to track progress against a couple of upcoming dates. Until this morning, these meetings opened with an unsent email on the screen giving the number of days left until these dates. Yesterday, some rich formatting was added (read bold text) with a joke that the next day would add color. I jokingly asked when would someone write a web page with a count down timer. Laughter ensued, but my brain refused to let the idea go. Boom – inspiration.

That afternoon, I put aside 30 minutes and wrote the attached .NET 2.0 WinForms application in C# that emulates seven segment display count down timers. At first, I hard coded the two dates important to the WCF product. However, that quickly became too restrictive as my wife asked me to add an additional date important to us. This led to adding functionality to add and remove additional timers. To keep it simple, I decided to persist the timers in the application’s AppSettings section of the app.config file.

I do not write many WinForm applications, but each time I do I find myself pleasantly surprised with how easy .NET makes the process. My new favorite control: FlowLayoutPanel. Combined with Form.AutoSize = true, and AutoSizeMode = GrowAndShrink, this control makes dynamic control content (in my case, number of countdown timers) super simple.

I almost forgot how much I enjoy writing small, fun applications. An unfortunate, potentially not uncommon, side affect of writing software professionally. Hopefully my experience with this little app reminds me to take some time each week to work on some personal project just for fun. If you have not written a small application (less than 100 lines of code, not counting auto generated lines) recently, I highly recommend it. Along with helping to keep your skills sharp, it reminds us why we do this professionally in the first place.

Mark Gabarra

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Nothing this week

Mark Gabarra — Wed, 17 May 2006 01:05:00 GMT

I have to appologize for the lack of posts this week. My family flies into town and I will be touring local golf courses with my father instead of writing here about the Windows Communication Foundation configuration system. I will return next week with regular writings. My current working title: "So What Is A WCF Configuration Extension Anyways". See you next week, and if you find yourself golfing in the Seattle area: "FORE!!!!"

Mark Gabarra

Introducing ... 'Me'

Mark Gabarra — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:48:00 GMT

Greetings and salutations to all of you blog readers out there, and thank you for taking the time to check out my little slice of the Internet. Allow me to introduce myself in an attempt to put my mind's inevitable meanderings into some sort of context.

My name is Mark Gabarra and I currently spend my days working as a developer on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). My developer ownership specifically includes the command line tool 'ServiceModelReg.exe' and the WCF configuration system. Given these areas of ownership, I anticipate focusing my posts here on the WCF configuration namespaces (most notably System.ServiceModel.Configuration) as well as general issues around developing a configuration system for class libraries (i.e. how to plug into and/or extend System.Configuration).

When not at work, I participate in a number of hobbies and activities that are not work. For now I leave those to your curiosity, after all if I told you everything about myself up front what would you come back to read about me?