Last week at the Software Craftsmanship 2010 conference held at Bletchley Park, I attended an excellent session on “Refucktoring”, which may be defined as below:

As a project goes on, developers become increasingly expendable. Refucktoring is like job security for developers. By making the code function the same but in as complex a way as possible, it is easier to keep your job as only you can maintain the code.

As Software Craftsmanship is a hands-on conference with attendees taking part in the presentations by writing code, we were all encouraged to write our own “Refucktorings”.

Last night I presented at the Reading Geek Night on the subject of building plugins for Seesmic Desktop 2.

I blasted out a load of links and demos, so if you want to get your hands on them they are all here.

That’s it, I’m fed up – I’m calling out Flipboard for blatantly disregarding ownership of content, costing me money without providing a return, and reducing my advertising revenues.

Now don’t get me wrong, I only make a few quid out of my website, so this is not a massive problem to me (let’s face it, I have a job); but scale this up and it basically turns into robbery. It’s what got Google in a big stack of lawsuits over Google News, and just because you’ve got some “cool app” for the iPad doesn’t mean you can just go treading on people’s rights and doing what you please.

A few days ago on Twitter, I asked if anyone had some great resources for writing good documentation.

Unfortunately, nobody got back to me with resources, but several people expressed interest in seeing the resources if I found them.

Since then I have not been able to find any articles, blogs and so on which detail how to write great docs. However, I have completed writing a significant amount of documentation, which is now out and about in the public domain.

So I thought it would be a good idea to post about it, and see if any developer types have any suggestions for improving them.

The documentation in question is for DataSift – the API documentation and the FSDL documentation.

So far the feedback has consisted of someone telling me that I write like an academic and should make my sentences shorter – so anything you have to add would be appreciated.

I spent a while this morning becoming somewhat baffled at the apparent lack of simple-to-use Timing features in .NET 4 in Silverlight. All I wanted was a simple solution to call a certain method inside the current scope and thread ever few seconds. However, many of the timing solutions are designed to work in a multi-thread manner, which takes everything out of scope and does not permit the required access to resources that I had in the standard scope.

Long story short, you can make use of System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer to solve this problem. Here are the code samples.