Is it reusable?

Well, it is the week of one of the big conferences of the year and I'm conferencing!  However, while the developer world I'm most interested in is at Mix 07, I'm at a different conference in Orlando. 

While I'd guess the average person would be thrilled to be in Orlando for the week, I'm not average. As a matter of fact, I was doing a little BlogEngine.NET work this evening instead of more typical conference activities and I began thinking about the late afternoon session I attended at the conference.  The question which came from the audience in the session rings in my head, "is it reusable?"

The session was on using Crystal Reports with this companies product.  Yes, that is right, while others are hearing about DLR, Silverlight, and other cool things, I'm learning hearing about Crystal Reports....  (Breath in... Breath out.... It's ok.  Stay positive.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the presenter had just finished talking about the crystal function to add a SQL command (basically putting a SQL statement in a textbox to be sent to the server for processing ) instead of the using the standard Crystal UI of selecting tables, linking tables, etc.

After the presenter finished telling us about this and making a command (by copying and pasting the SQL generated by Crystal by the way), someone asked about the newly created command, "is it reusable?"

The response left me stunned on many levels.  He said matter of factly, "Yes."  He quickly expanded his answer by saying that you could copy and paste the SQL text to a new command in a new report.  He went on to recommend pasting it into Word or Notepad and saving it there for future reuse. I'm not going to focus on the reasons why this didn't sit well.  I'll simply say this was the loosest definition of code reuse I'd come across to date.

I'm not saying I've never copy and pasted code, I'm just saying I would never have thought to describe that as reusable code.  I could go so far as to say duplication is not reuse, but that is not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is to brighten my spirits and you, the reader, are just along for the ride. 

With this new definition on my mind, I could think of anything that I could get to the clipboard as reusable. As of now, I've decided that in order to stay positive the rest of the conference, whenever things aren't going as I'd hoped, I'm going to remind myself that every piece of code I've ever written is completely reusable while I'm at this conference.  I almost feel like a better developer already.  I'm just wishing I brought some of my old FilePro code..