But *insertcoolprojecthere* Already Does That

I was looking into the concept of DynamicProxy the other day and came across DynamicProxies by Jason Bock.  Looking through his blog for info on the project, I found one entry that got an interesting comment: " ...why start a new Open Source project if Castle Project DynamicProxy already does that..." 

This reminds me of a good post by Jeff Atwood the other day, Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels.  I do this all the time.  I wrote my own  IOC container for HyperActive.  Yes I could have just referenced another assembly for that functionality, but it was fun coding one of those up, I now have a better understanding of how they work.

Doing those kind of projects can also make you appreciate how much effort gets poured into some of that stuff and potentially how much better those projects are than the code you create.  Several years ago, I wrote my own logging tools, sql generators, etc, etc.  Today? Eff that, I'm picking up log4net or nlog, and for anything dealing with a database, it's gonna be any one of several free orms out there.