Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and RGMII. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
software development concepts
Although you eventually outgrow them, any developer worth his or her salt bears the scars of a thousand tiny religious wars. It’s an occupational hazard, as Steve McConnell notes in Thou Shalt Rend Software and Religion Asunder: Religion appears in software development in numerous incarnations– as dogmatic adherence to
ui
I somehow doubt this is what Joyce Kilmer was thinking of when he wrote the poem, Trees: I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. It’s unfortunate that the TreeView is one of the standard widgets in a usability designer’s toolkit, because trees
regex
All right... will! I’m continually amazed how useful regular expressions are in my daily coding. I’m still working on the MhtBuilder refactoring, and I needed a function to convert all URLs in a page of HTML from relative to absolute: <summary> converts all relative url references
.net
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
.net framework
Steve “what the heck does furrygoat mean” Makofsky crystallized a lot of my thoughts in his recent rant on software installers. One of the biggest advantages of using the .NET framework is the way it enables XCopy deployments for the first time.* Installing a program by copying it to a
internet explorer
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 one
security
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 common CAPTCHA techniques. He compares lots of visual CAPTCHAs side by side and comments on their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the “best”
ergonomics
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. I’
programming languages
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
java
In the spirit of Java Lava Lamp build monitoring: A few months ago, on April 1 2004 to be precise, I posted an article on eXtreme Feedback. The article was on a relatively serious subject: “How do you get your team to pay attention to the software/project status and
productivity
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’s
c#
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 separate properties to specify units of scale for