The RubeTube

Last Thursday night, Simon's team had a Christmas party (#3 in my marathon) at Simon's house. We had agreed at the previous week's team meeting that we'd do an exchange gift at the party.

Being the total geek that I am, I volunteered to write a program to generate the exchange gift assignments. I fired up Visual Studio 2005 and coughed up a C# exchange gift program in less than 15 minutes, whose source code you can download free of charge. Granted, automating the process is not as fun as drawing names from a jar, but it does have its advantages:

1. It doesn't require everyone to be physically present at the assignment drawing.
2. It's faster than the manual process.
   
3. By allowing the user input of a seed for the random, the assignments can be recreated in the future.
   
4. I had much more fun than if we had drawn names from a jar.
   

I had Ian give me a seed which I inputted into my program to generate the assignments, which I then emailed to the whole team. There were some who complained of "luto" when they saw that Simon (our ever-thoughtful manager) was my exchange gift "parent", but hey, it's (literally) just the luck of the draw.

Labels: .NET, C#, Christmas, exchange gift, geek, gifts, programming