I’ve been firefighting for too long. On Dashbuddy it’s been only recently - but at work it’s been longer than I care to think about. I got burnt, and it’s my users who are now pissed at me for it.

I can’t do anything on DashBuddy now until the next update is released, and to be honest after this update I need to take stock anyway - really see what’s next, and make sure I get there in a timescale that lets me avoid this miss again.

So this weekend I’m coding for the same reason I started Dashbuddy - because I want to see what I can produce.

For the next 48 hours when I spin up Visual Studio I’m going to work on parsing Markdown in Silverlight. This is something that I will, eventually, put into DashBuddy to allow rich text editing within the capabilities of WP7 - but not in the next couple of weeks, when it’s ready. I’m going to ignore the 1-star reviews, I’m going to not look at the crash count on my app counters, I have to take a step back and realise I can code without the silly mistakes when I chill out a bit.

I love regular expressions, they ebb and flow as you move through your text. I feel very comfortable working with them, and I can’t help but smile when I hear the people at work swear at the incomprehensible language in the middle of their C#. The piece that looks like garbage but does something they know would take 100 lines of regular code.

I’m going to spend a few hours in the middle of a bunch of them for Markdown and see where I get. I’ve got my object model - but the parser I’ve been holding back on.

See you on the other side.