Palegoldenrod

I’ve sometimes been asked “Carly, WTF is ding?” and I have also seen dingage mis-used. Now is the time to clear up all questions, dramas and misconceptions related to Ding in World of Warcraft.

WTF is Ding?

Ding is when you level up – like a bell ring, you know.� It is usually used to let people (who may not be right next to you in game) know that you have levelled up, e.g. “Ding!”, “Ding 20″ (meaning you have reached level 20). There are other (sometimes humorous) variants such as “dingage”, “ding-a-rino”, “da-DING!”, “dingz0r” , “dingy” etc.

It can also be used in general conversation to refer to the act of reaching a new level, eg “when you ding 55″, “I just dinged 29″, and the phrase of dedicated WoWers – “Live for the ding”.

Dinging level 70 may result in such announcements as “O.M.G.����� drumroll…. DING 70 ”.

When should I use Ding?

There are some inappropriate times to notify others of your ding.

• Low Levels. I usually don’t bother notifying my guild if I am under level 20, and I don’t notify the general chat if I am under lvl 40. Broadcasting a ding can be risky – if you broadcast dings too often in a public space you might be greeted with cries of “n00b!”. If you ding too often in your guild channel, you will annoy your most precious guild buddies, which is not cool.
• When there is fighting to be had, particularly life-threatening fighting. Don’t get distracted from the fight just so you can tell you party or others that you have dinged. Your party will probably be too busy fighting to note your claim to fame, and if your negligence results in a wipe no doubt you will be in the bad books. If you ding mid battle, be patient. Take care of the mobs and let your friends know about it when you’re all safe.
• When you have already told people of the ding. Don’t call ding multiple times for the same level up. Not cool.

Where should I use Ding?

Let your guild buddies know via the guild channel, by all means. Let your party know via the party chat. These are pretty safe places – the people who will be listening will probably care about your progress. They’ll congratulate you.

Dinging in the general channels can draw a wide range of responses depending on the region you are in and who happens to be online at the time… and also I guess what level you are dinging. If you wander into Barrens and broadcast your level 9 ding you will probably get some impolite responses – even more so if you then continue to notify the public of each of your dings like 10, 11.

Interestingly public dings seemed to get more supportive and positive responses when I was playing Alliance on Jubei’Thos.� Most of the public dings I have been witness to on Horde result in requests to “Shut up N00b”. Admittedly,� the� Horde dings I saw were quite low level, which may have affected the response. Or maybe its because most new players roll Alliance and most experienced / serious players seem to roll Horde. Hmm. I’ll think on that one some more.

How do I respond to a Ding from someone else?

The usual response is some form of congratulations, usually brief for most levels – “grats”, “congrats”, “nice one”. If you are next to the char you can “/congrats”, “/salute” or “/applaud” or something similar. Key levels usually get more of a response – eg 40 usually gets comments relating to the gain of a mount (e.g. “w00t! Horsie time ”); 58-60 is when you usually make your way to Outlands, so the higher lvls usually encourage the recently dinged to head out there. Dingage of level 70 should be greeted with all kinds of awesome, especially if it is the person’s first character – a lot of effort goes into getting a char to 70, and it should be acknowledged.

You should always respond to a ding from another player – its a real let down to proudly broadcast a ding only to be met with silence on channel. Be polite, encourage others – keep the game fun

Back in uni I was developing in Java, a bit of C++. I absolutely loved the Java development – actually I enjoyed the C++ development too.� I also appreciated the wealth of joy to be found in the Open Source world in these languages, the free compilers and the free IDEs available too.

When I came into a Microsoft workplace I guess I was a bit of a code snob… there was so much that the old COM+/ASP model was missing. Oh, it wasn’t all bad, sure. But architecturally and culturally Microsoft development was missing a lot. Microsoft development wasn’t “cool”. People didn’t really play with it in their own time. In fact, while I was employed in that workplace I still went home and played with things like Java and Ruby on Rails.

When I went in search of learning materials on how to develop asp applications I found the dreaded MSDN (useful if you know what you are looking for, useless if you don’t), and otherwise very little – nothing comprehensive, nothing exciting or interesting or engaging. Certainly nothing that inspired me to develop more in Microsoft technologies.

To be honest I guess I only ever saw Microsoft development as a stepping stone – something to tide me over until I was able to move into the Java development world. I held this view for several years.

I am currently in a .NET workplace, using .NET 1.1 mostly, .NET 2.0 in the last 3 months or so (I’d used it a little at home, but not heavily). Since starting .NET 2.0 development I have been forced to re-assess my opinion of Microsoft development. Things have changed since the old asp / COM+ times.

The release of the Express versions of the IDEs and SQL Server has been great – finally people outside of offices are able to develop in Microsoft technologies. Great for many reasons:

1. students and others can more easily get skilled before arriving in the workforce, which means more skilled workers are available
2. people who actually do want to develop as a hobby don’t need to resort to using illegal bootleg copies of the product
3. because development is occurring out of the commercial environment, Microsoft has finally becoming popular for Open Source projects

Now, because of that Open Source development (and in no small part also because of the significant improvements in the technologies since the days of asp/COM+) Microsoft development is starting to become cool. That in turn fuels further development, tinkering, sharing, bragging, competitions – all of these great for .NET.

Instead of being left with those old and stale resources for development information, we are provided with great sites like www.asp.net, ajax.asp.net, MSDN Flash and others.

I commented recently to a colleague about my old views of Microsoft development being a disliked and temporary career path, and I had to admit that I no longer thought of it that way. I find myself enjoying Microsoft development more and more. Almost every day I learn something awesome or interesting I can do with .NET or that someone else has done with it – and the amount of Open Source .NET work that has sprung up is astounding.

So, while Steve Balmer is still a little scary, Microsoft can still be a pain (grrr, Vista!), and Java is still cool, .NET is definitely growing in teh c00ln3ss. If you are thinking that you might want to try some development or want to know what the fuss is about, let me encourage you to take the time to actually have a look.

I’ve included some resources for you, below.

.NET Learning Resources

• http://www.asp.net/
  The resources for ASP.NET development, run by Microsoft – excellent (and massive) collection of blogs, detailed tutorials, articles, links to the Express downloads, links to starter kits and other information. The first place to look if you are learning!
• http://ajax.asp.net/
  The fairly new AJAX library for ASP.NET
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx
  Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices resource centre. If you want to develop well, then it might help to have a read through here
• https://www.microsoft.com/australia/msdn/tools/msdnflash.aspx
  MSDN Flash Newsletter, a nice way to keep up to date on what is going on in the world of MS development
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx
  C# Developer Centre

Open Source .NET Resources

• http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/
  The Lucene project in .NET – a port of the powerful search engine from Apache, originally in Java
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/nunit
  Unit testing for .NET
• http://www.codeplex.com/
  Codeplex is Microsoft’s area for people to collaborate on Open Source projects. There are some good ones there, and the list is always growing!
• http://www.mono-project.com
  Mono is a way to run .NET in non-windows environments – pretty exciting!
• http://www.subtextproject.com/
  SubText is an open source blogging engine. It powers this site!
  

Other Resources for .NET / Microsoft Development

• http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/
  .NET Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. Reflector allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies. Lutz Roeder has a few other interesting bits and pieces there for .NET too.
• http://silverlight.net/
  Silverlight is something I am still learning about – it’s a new technology aimed at rich media web applications. Looks interesting.
  
• http://www.netfx3.com/
  .NET Framework 3.0 site
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx
  XNA – Wanna develop games for the PC or XBox? Check this out.