On my last gig my friend Mahesh sent the team a link to Tommy Butler’s simple Corporate BS Generator page, and naturally we all cracked up. For the whole day any chat over Skype was derailed with someone chucking in some random BS, for example “that’s a good idea, but does it conveniently enable visionary services?” It was a Windows 8 app gig, so we were all neck deep in WinRT and XAML, and it came to me that this would be awesome as an app for Windows 8.

Today, I’d like to announce the release of the Corporate BS Generator Windows 8 app on the Windows Store. Tommy has given me his blessing to bring the lulz to Windows 8 and Windows RT users.

Have you ever sat through a corporate presentation and been dazzled by fancy buzzword-filled phrases? Have you ever wished that you were capable of effortlessly making normal, typical and common-sense things sound slick, hip, modern and cool? The Corporate BS Generator can help you get ahead in an industry where spin, buzzwords and vagueness reign supreme.

Swipe or click your way through randomly generated Corporate BS and impress your executives at your next meeting. Your BS will sound so good that they’ll just nod enthusiastically even though they have no idea what your plan to “compellingly target future-proof synergy” actually means!

Here’s a sampling of some of the BS it generates:

• dynamically e-enable world-class solutions
• globally engage intuitive methodologies
• credibly transition ethical communities
• uniquely embrace progressive e-tailers
• dynamically productise orthogonal scenarios
• continually foster stand-alone supply chains

Cracked up yet? Grab the app from the Windows Store now.

Tonight I gave a short presentation at Devevening titled “Async/Await – The Edge Cases and Unit Testing”. Here’s the abstract:

In this talk we'll look at the new async await feature in C# 5, but we'll go beyond the typical toy examples and look at edge cases like exception handling, task cancellation and how we can approach unit testing asynchronous methods.

I’ve uploaded the source code and slides to a BitBucket repository, so for those who want to inspect the examples at their own leisure, please clone away:

• Source code (specifically revision 394d1e3cf9f5 was used in this talk)
• Presentation slides

I hope to make an extended version of the talk and present that at a future user group; I’d like to cover things in a little more detail, look at the history of async over the life of the .NET Framework, cover unit testing a bit more thoroughly, and maybe even take a peek under the covers at what the compiler generates when you write an async method. Stay tuned!