India (Part II)

Just back from my second trip to India (India - Trip 1). Again I didn't find any time to do other things than working/sleeping/eating, but I still found it a very interesting week. In total I have now trained almost 40 .NET developers how to work with Compuware DevPartner. I tried to convince them of the fact that DevPartner must be seen as a tool that can help them to deliver quality software applications. One of the misunderstandings is that DevPartner is solely a troubleshooting tool that can be used to troubleshoot issues in a production environment. Well, it's not! Actually it's a tool that should be used pro-actively in a development environment. DevPartner looks over the shoulder of the developer how things are implemented and can be seen as the virtual expert that increases code quality. Also the consultancy job went pretty well and all that was promised to the customer was also delivered in time and with the appropriate documentation. The in time factor was really important and that's why I've chosen for a solution with LINQ to XML and especially the Entity Framework. Why should we still keep writing our own Data Access Layer? The O/RM tools out there have evolved quite a bit these days and do we really think we can do a better job than the NHibernate team or Microsoft? The main benefit I get from using an O/RM tool is productivity! NHibernate may be the best free OR/M solution on the market for now, but I'm more familiar with using the Entity Framework and it was the perfect match for the requirements I was faced with.

On the other hand I finally learned why India has a GMT +5:30 timezone. Until I travelled to India I actually did not know that certain countries/areas have timezones that only differ 30 minutes from an adjacent timezone. India is quite a large country : the country's east–west distance of more than 2000 km covers over 28 degrees of longitude, resulting in the sun rising and setting almost two hours earlier on India's eastern border than in the far west. So, India spans almost exactly two time zones, but their government decided that they wanted one time for the entire country. Their solution was to split the difference between what the time would be if they used two zones. Instead of the time being 10:00 in Bombay and 11:00 in Calcutta, the time is 10:30 in both places and also for all other areas in India.

Just as a side not : this download may be handy if you travel a lot between timezones or if you schedule a lot of meetings with people in different timezones : Microsoft Time Zone. It installs a small tray icon that allows you to specify a number of cities to watch the different times at those places.