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Printing to the Zebra branded thermal transfer printers requires knowledge of their proprietary EPL2 language. Searching the net for a nice way of using EPL2 to communicate with these printers turns up a number of small projects, though none of them particularly ideal for integrating with a well written C# application, with most of them effectively getting you to copy and paste code into your project that you shouldn’t have to maintain.

Sharpzebra is a new open source project, written in C# that gives you access to a better printing API that abstracts away the EPL2 language concepts. I hope that it helps you spend more time putting together the things you need to print instead of working out how to print. See the Two Minute Quickstart here.

Download the binary release (dll), or binary with the project source code here.

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Its Purpose?
Tech huddles give people an opportunity to reflect on their learnings, and helps to shift those lessons learned from one person to the rest of the group in a time-efficient manner.

Photo taken from Water Lemon’s photostream on Flickr under the Creative Commons license

How Did We Execute It?
Thanks to the idea initially proposed by Behaviour Driven Dan North, we spent about half an hour at the end of the day almost every other day where we would talk about the following topics:

• Any learnings from the day to share with the wider group including IDE tricks, Environment tips, cool patterns, nice bits of the code, any patterns that have been particularly useful at solving something;
• Warnings that may be useful for the other developers (such as watch out for this class - it’s particularly nasty); and
• Any questions or puzzles people may have that they haven’t been had answered through out the day

Why Is It Important?
Learning is an essential part of coming on to a new project. Setting aside time to explicitly think about what people have learned gives them a bit of chance to reflect on their learnings and then by expressing it, helps reinforce those learnings. A beneficial side effect is that more knowledge is transferred within the team that would be very slow to do via other mechanisms such as just pair programming.

Tech Huddles also give a chance for people to gain more context about why something is strange, or doesn’t understand the way that something is done, or the way that something works.

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