Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

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Jeff Atwood

BetaBrite LED Sign API completed

As I mentioned in Automated Continuous Integration and the BetaBrite LED Sign: I'm currently working on some .NET classes that wrap a BetaBrite-specific subset of the Alpha Sign Communications Protocol. This requires serial communication via a 25 or 50 foot RS-232 serial to RJ-12 cable, so you'

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Make Mine XCOPY

Steve "what the heck does furrygoat mean" Makofsky crystallized a lot of my thoughts in his recent rant on software installers [http://www.furrygoat.com/2005/03/rant_install_pr.html]. One of the biggest advantages of using the .NET framework is the way it enables XCopy deployments

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Because IE6 is the new Netscape 4.7x

As I read through all the articles spawned by the IE7 announcement (press release), I finally realized something: IE6 is the new Netscape 4.7x. It's like we woke up one day, and IE6 had transformed overnight into the browser that we all wish would go away. The

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Captchas Compared and Critiqued

An eagle-eyed CodeProject reader posted a comment to my ASP.NET CAPTCHA Server Control article pointing out one French developer's very thorough attempts to defeat many common CAPTCHA techniques. He compares lots of visual CAPTCHAs side by side and comments on their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the

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A Developer's Second Most Important Asset

As software developers, we worry a lot about improving and protecting our most important asset – our brains. But what about our second most important asset – our rear ends? As much time as we spend seated in front of a computer, it pays to think about investing in quality seating. [http:

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Developers Are Users Too

I'm currently whipping up a mini-API for the BetaBrite-specific subset of the Alpha Sign Communications Protocol. Naturally, I want it to be easy to use and understandable for other developers-- a classic usability problem. How do you approach usability when your audience is other developers? The answer is,

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Automated Continuous Integration and the BetaBrite LED Sign

In the spirit of Java Lava Lamp build monitoring [http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=67492]:> A few months ago, on April 1 2004 to be precise, I posted an article on eXtreme Feedback [http://www.developertesting.com/managed_developer_testing/000036.html].The article was on

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Get Me The Laziest People Money Can Buy

Omar Shahine recently posted an inspiring ode to laziness: An email every few minutes and desktop alert + sound to go with it makes it to easy to lose focus on my task at hand and look at my inbox. While I loved this feature when Outlook came out, it'

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Logging TraceListener Improved

I made a few improvements to the Logging TraceListener: * Files can now be aged by date as well as size * Filename is now completely templated using a single FileNameTemplate property, which supports standard String.Format codes for file number and date * Added seperate properties to specify units of scale for

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The Slow Brain Death of VB.NET

It's amusing that the very people defending VB.NET are, ironically, illustrating precisely why VB.NET is in such trouble: I just want to make it clear that I am one MVP that does NOT intend to sign this petition about VB. And by the way, my background

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Paging Dr. Dotnetsky...

You always notice the names that appear frequently in your code related Google searches. For me, one of those names is Peter Bromberg, PhD [http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com/], the driving force behind Egghead Cafe [http://www.eggheadcafe.com]. There are some great articles [http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles.asp] there,

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On Managed Code Performance

My personal turning point on the importance of managed code was in September 2001, when the NIMDA worm [http://news.com.com/2100-1001-273128.html?legacy=cnet] absolutely crushed our organization. It felt like a natural disaster without the "natural" part-- the first notable port 80 IIS buffer overrun

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