Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
security
My personal turning point on the importance of managed code was in September 2001, when the NIMDA worm absolutely crushed our organization. It felt like a natural disaster without the “natural” part – the first notable port 80 IIS buffer overrun exploit. We got literally zero work done that day, and
programming languages
As a complement to my C# to VB.NET cheat sheet links, here's a comparative list of programming language equivalents in VB, J#, C++, C#, JScript, and even Visual FoxPro. Since .NET is just a thin wrapper over Win32 (or so I've been told), you may
logging
I’m working on a console app that needs to provide integrated logging of its own output. Sure, you could do a standard console output redirect, but I wanted the app to be responsible for logging its own output. I decided to write my own TraceListener that automatically creates IIS-style
programming languages
An oldie but a goodie, courtesy of Jeroen van den Bos: A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?
text editor. tags: software development concepts
In revenge of Notepad, I recommended Florian Balmer’s truly excellent freeware Notepad replacement, Notepad2. And when I say replacement, I mean replacement: copy notepad2.exe c:windowsservicepackfilesi386notepad.exe copy notepad2.exe c:windowssystem32dllcachenotepad.exe copy notepad2.exe c:windowssystem32notepad.exe copy notepad2.exe c:windowsnotepad.exe What good is
regex
I am currently in the middle of a way-overdue refactoring of MhtBuilder, which uses regular expressions extensively. I noticed that I had sort of mindlessly added RegexOptions.Compiled all over the place. It says “compiled” so it must be faster, right? Well, like so many other things, that depends: In
enterprise software
After nearly four years working for a Fortune 50 company, I am now completely convinced that the term “Enterprise,” as applied to software, is synonymous with “crappy.” Clearly, I’m not the only guy to notice the apparently linear price to bug ratio in the so-called “Enterprise” software I’ve
programming languages
How do you recognize talented software developers in a 30 minute interview? There’s a roundtable article on this topic at Artima Developer with some good ideas from a group of well known developers: * Explore an area of expertise * Have them critique something * Ask them to solve a problem (but
.net
Kit George is the program manager for the .NET Base Class Library team. Kit recently posted an entry on the BCL blog describing a solution to a customer problem: We recently got asked this question by a customer: “In C#, how do I ensure that a string entered into a
software development practices
Marco Dorantes recently linked to a great article by Watts Humphrey, who worked on IBM’s OS/360 project: Why Big Software Projects Fail. Watts opens with an analysis of software project completion data from 2001: Figure 2 shows another cut of the Standish data by project size. When looked
software development concepts
It’s the coolest hack in years – The Sound of iPod: I got an iPod for Christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some
remote desktop
Some of my coworkers have an annoying habit of remoting into our Win2k servers and never logging out. They also like to do this in pairs, which means nobody else can remote into the machines due to Microsoft’s default two-user administrative mode Terminal Services limit. Yeah, I could rclient