Tom’s talking ’bout his role at his job and I’m still not sure if I really know what he does at work, but his post reminds me of the “5 things you didn’t know about me” meme which was so popular several months ago; in honor of that meme, and because bloggers love talking about themselves I’m tagging Ben and James with the “What do You Do?” meme.

Let me start:

I’m a senior software engineer at a small software development company in Karachi. Most of my work revolves around integrating third party applications, i.e.: Project Server 2007, with Microsoft Dynamics Navision 4.0 (an ERP) and customizing different modules and reports in Nav. I also spend part of my time working on ASP.NET applications and writing Perl scripts to automate Navision migrations.

I use the same development tools that you use, Visual Studio 2005 and jEdit for my editors/IDE, SVN for source control, MbUnit for Unit testing, WATIR for web application testing. The only uncommon tool you’ll find on my computer is Beyond Compare—THE single best file and directory comparison utility I’ve ever used.

So, what do you do?

I’ve been incredibly busy at work again and instead of writing something coherent I’ll just dump my brain in this post. I’ve also developed a very severe case of Nerd ADD.

Earlier this week I hit a snag in my Project Server/Navision integration, lets just say that portions of Project Server’s web service isn’t documented very well. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out researching exactly which functionality the Time Sheet web service exposes; it wasn’t until I found an example on Christophe Fiessinger’s Blog that I finally figured out what I wanted.

Working with Project Server has gotten me excited about programming languages again and I want to learn C# 3.0 and Ruby– C# has gone through some major changes, they’ve added extensions which are similar to Ruby mixins, lambda expressions and anonymous variables, it’s a completely different language now, much more flexible, much less like Java and much more like Ruby.

Tenerife Skunkworks, a Erlang blog has peaked my interest in Erlang and day trading in general. In my former life I was a quant in training and a software developer working on an algorithmic trading platform. Algorithmic trading is resource intensive and our system distributed ‘jobs’ over several computers to manage the processor load, looking back I wish I programmed the core of the system in Erlang instead of C++. That’s hindsight for you. I’d like to get back to my ‘roots’ and work with financial systems again, maybe the FIX protocol or a trading simulator or platform, I should spend some time searching for open source projects that I could get involved in.

I finally got around to installing an evaluation copy of Resharper– I’m disappointed, maybe my expectations were too high, or I haven’t had enough time to use it– while it’s an improvement over the default VS 2005’s interface it still falls behind Eclipse’s refactoring code generation. Does anyone have any Resharper tips for me?

Definitely a severe case of Nerd ADD.

I’ve been pretty busy lately and I every time I think about writing a post I find myself fighting trackback spam. Akismet has been doing a wonderful job for comments but I need a  solution for trackback spam.

Any advice?