.NET Mercenary Years (1)

More (but Different) Insurance work

2003-2004

The (original) .NET framework had been out of beta for about 2 years when I found myself contracted to the international division of a relatively large insurance company. I was hired in for my .NET expertise!

I spent several years with that team of developers, helping define an ADO.NET DataSet based framework for intermediating the data access (sort of a rudimentary ERM), and doing whatever other things their self-hosted product needed as they migrated to .NET from whatever it was written in before. (I honestly don’t remember, because it was a rewrite).

Installations of their software ran on servers in branch offices in foreign cities, so a lot of time was spent with Unicode and interesting data-time formats. I also put together a service to use MS Word Automation to generate insurance documents for all sort of small personal possessions they might like to write policies for. I didn’t much like Word Automation (native code libraries would’ve been better, but at the time, it was the design desired). One little bit of dark magic I added was a template to run VBA script to change the Windows title to the process ID, so a watchdog process could read it and ensure it was running correctly (we never wanted more than 2 running on a server at a time, as Word is a hog).

> As a complete aside, when I first saw the syntax for C# (…the flagship language for .NET…), I fell in love with it immediately. No funny memory indirection symbols like C and C++, and the concept of loadable object-exporting DLLs (assemblies). This to me was what Turbo Pascal 6 should have evolved into.
> > Then I discovered that Anders Hejlsberg was the architect of C# and knew this was where I was going to spend the bulk of my system development time.

As good as it all was, it wasn’t a long term deal for me and though I practically could have stayed much longer (some consultants there did stay for a long time; and my manager and the team were great), I still needed to flex the architect in me again and get back to making whole systems, not just parts.