There is a really heartwarming article (if you’re from Poland) on Silicon Valley Watcher about the skills of Polish engineers, the low turnover and the general satisfaction from Polish employees by international companies something that UK as a country discovered and Cognifide in particular have noticed quite a while ago.

And I really can fully relate to that, I would bet any money to stand the competency of any person in my crew against any of the top professionals out there. It definitely is a good time to be in the IT business in here. A small excerpt – worth noting:

Common cultural ties

Polish engineers are also very familiar with Western culture. Common cultural understanding is very important for any company. Poland is now part of the European Union, which gives US firms great access to huge markets, and rapidly developing markets in Poland and in Eastern Europe.

Quality not price

Mr Slawek pointed out that Polish engineers are not chosen because they are cheaper, companies choose them because of the quality of their work. And Polish teams are very good at thinking on their feet, as is shown by their numerous accomplishments in programming competitions, which are won by quickly finding solutions to complex problems.

Just a daily time saver, for reuse at another time.

Any old time windows developer, will remember the fun of using the ini files with GetPrivateProfileString. As much as ini files sucked there is one nice aspect of that call – you can setup a default value it is to return in case a value is not specified in the file. Similarly in a daily episerver programming you usually want to read a value but if one is not epcified you will usually want to use another value and just move along with the progress, and not really care to have an if there to do the filling in. Not to limit the property to any specific type – the task can be nicely solved with generics to handle pretty much any type of property.

/// <summary>
/// Gets a property from a page by its name - if a property does not exist or is not set - returns a default value.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T">The type of the property</typeparam>
/// <param name="page">The page to pull the data from</param>
/// <param name="propertyName">The name of the property</param>
/// <param name="defaultValue">The value to be returned if the property does not exist or is not set.</param>
/// <returns>The value of the property.</returns>
public static T GetPropertyDefault<T>(PageData page, string propertyName, T defaultValue)
{
    PropertyData property = page.Property[propertyName];
    if (property == null || property.Value == null)
    {
        return defaultValue;
    }
    else
    {
        return (T) property.Value;
    }
}

It’s hard not to appreciate how clean that resolve is (with strong typing being forced with use of generics):

string link = PageUtility.GetPropertyDefault(CurrentPage, "ALink", "#top");

Another speedup coming from the TryParse background – when I want to deviate from the normal execution if a property is not defined but still have a clean code and strong typing…

/// <summary>
/// Gets a property from a page by its name - if a property does not exist or is not set, 
/// returns the presence status of the property existence as a boolean value.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T">The type of the property.</typeparam>
/// <param name="page">The page to pull the data from</param>
/// <param name="propertyName">The name of the property</param>
/// <param name="value">The value to be returned if the property exist and has a value, 
/// if the proeprty does not exist or is not set the value witll remain unchanged.</param>
/// <returns>True if the property was retrieved succesfully, false otherwise.</returns>
public static bool TryGetProperty<T>(PageData page, string propertyName, ref T value)
{
    PropertyData property = page.Property[propertyName];
    if (property == null || property.Value == null)
    {
        return false;
    }
    value = (T)property.Value;
    return true;
}