Looking for a .NET programmer in Salt Lake City, Utah? You should hire me!

UPDATE 6/01/2011: I have accepted a great position at GE healthcare that interestingly has very little to do with .NET and everything to do with making better software. I look forward to diving back into Linux and BASH scripting and am already having nightmares about Oracle!

UPDATE 5/15/2013: Although I am still working for GE (Now part of a joint venture with Microsoft) I am also actively looking for new challenges in Software Engineering or Developer Operations.

UPDATE 8/01/2013: No longer active on the job market. I have accepted a position with 3M Health Information System and am excited to bring some DevOps to a company most known for making office products :-P

UPDATE 7/14/2014: The examples in this post are a bit dated now (see full resume instead), but I occasional still get emails about job opportunities. I am happy at 3M but am always open to new opportunities involving .NET/SQL/Powershell. If the word Help Desk or Phone Support is in the job description though I will probably ignore any emails you send.

My 30 second over-hyped elevator pitch:
Most people don’t have the time to read through a full resume nowadays, so I’ll keep things short and to the point. You should hire me! Why? Because I am smart and I get things done. The last time I was in the job market I turned a 3 week software testing project into a 6 year pursuit helping to convert a small ISV into a cloud driven heavyweight. I don’t always code in .NET, but it is definitely my platform of choice. Life is too short to worry about pointers and memory leaks. If I wanted to do that I’d go back to working in assembly language on an 8086 like God intended. I can automate just about anything using a combination of BASH, PowerShell, AutoIT, VBA, WatiN, MSAA, a bunch of HWNDs, a packet sniffer, a few servos, and a roll of duct tape. I work well as part of the A-Team or sent out solo in the wild like Rambo. In short: I am the most hirable man in the world! :-P Keep coding my friends!

I live my life like an open book, indexed by Google. I have a thirst for knowledge and a passion for technology. I pay great attention to detail and strive for nothing less than perfection. A lot of my past projects are internal or backend systems, but below is a sample of what has kept me busy over the last decade or so.



Personal Coding projects:
PhraseMeme Scanner, WinFone Alpha (Windows Phone, 2010-2011)
Silverlight port of ZXing Barcode Scanning library (Silverlight, C#, 2010-2011)
Texas Holdem Monte Carlo Simulator (Silverlight, Windows Mobile, 2009)
Resolver one: Texas Holdem, Pivot Charts/Auto filter, Web page automation, WPF Charts, Mad Lib generator (IronPython spreadsheet, 2009)
GnuMap P2P Mapping project (Visual Basic, Web Spider, aiSee, 2002)




Samples of documents I have created:
High level overview graph (Visio 2007)
Detailed technical overview chart (Visio 2009)
In depth technical documentation (Word 2008)
Short section of web based training material (PowerPoint 2010)
Samples of feedback reports w/ synopsis (Acrobat 2006)
Flash Memory Summit Conference Presentation (PowerPoint 2007)

Screencasts and videos of project I have created:
PhraseMeme scanner demo video (3 mins, Camtasia, PowerPoint 2010)
WinFone Alpha demo video (3 mins, Camtasia, PowerPoint 2010)
Texas Holdem Monte Carlo Simulator (5 mins, Camtasia, PowerPoint 2009)




Coding Competitions:
PhraseMeme Scanner received good rankings in Windows Phone 7 Competition sponsored by Red Gate (2010)
Texas Holdem app received honorable mention in 2009 INETA Code Challenge and 2009 Telerik Silverlight contest
Monte Carlo spreadsheet was the winner of $4,000 prize in April 2009 round of Resolver One Challenge

InvalidOperationException from IsolatedStorageSettings.Save on Windows Phone 7

I just had my first failed test from the marketplace certification for PhraseMeme Scanner v1.2. You can view the full error report here, but the important part is:

Comments: The application terminates unexpectedly when the user turns on/off one of the setting while trying to scroll to

another page.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Launch the application.

2. Scroll over to the setting menu.

3. At the same time, press and scroll on any of the settings.

4. Notice the application terminates unexpectedly when the user turns on/off one of the setting while trying to scroll to

another page.

The settings page uses ToggleSwitches from the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit with a simple two-way binding to a values stored in an IsolatedStorageSettings class, so I was a bit confused where the error was coming from. Using Visual Studio I found that the IsolatedStorageSettings.Save method was throwing an InvalidOperationException whenever the user changed a setting and navigated way from the page at the same time.

The MSDN documentation doesn’t mention that the method can throw this error, but my guess is that either the value is in an indeterminate state or there is a conflict between the save method and the two-way binding. The error could have been there all along, but in this version I had moved all the IO calls to background threads to increase performance where as previously the exception was captured by a try/catch block on the calling method.

Luckily it was an easy fix: I added a try/catch statement to the save code block and inserted a delay to let whatever processing it was conflicting with finish before it tried to save the settings. Below is the new code that can be used for saving settings stored in an IsolatedStorageSettings class:

/// <summary>

/// Save settings to isolated storage. Will run using background thread to prevent blocking UI thread.

/// </summary>

public static void Save()

{

    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(func => {//Save items using background thread.

        try

        {

            //NOTE: may throw InvalidOperationException exception if user is in process of changing settings and navigating away from page

            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(200);

            issSettings.Save();

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

            Debug.WriteLine("Error saving settings: " + ex);

        }

    });

}

 

Hope that helps someone prevent a failed submission to the marketplace.