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

Virtual PC 2004 tips

I'm working with Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 again. Since the last time I discussed VPC, Microsoft released the essential Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1, which addresses a lot of outstanding issues, particularly compatibility with SP2 and newer AMD/Intel processors. If you start delving into

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Ivory Tower Development

I've always discouraged ivory tower development-- teams where developers are cloistered away for years in their high towers, working on technical software wizardry. These developers have no idea how users will respond to their software they're creating. They probably couldn't even tell you the

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Let the IDE do it

On Bruce Eckel's Static vs. Dynamic [typing]: Despite this, I've had some leanings back in the direction of static type checking. As you point out, the goal is to create solid components – the question is how to accomplish that? In a dynamic

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Wintellect ASP.NET FAQ

Nothing beats a well constructed FAQ based on lots of real-world questions. It's a little old, but I was surprised how much genuinely insightful material is present in the Wintellect ASP.NET FAQ [http://www.wintellect.com/resources/faqs/default.aspx?faq_id=1]. It's a

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Level 5 means never having to say you're sorry

In Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html], Joel derides the least common denominator effect of formal methodologies: > Mystery: why is it that some of the biggest IT consulting companies in the world do the worst work? 1. Some things need talent to

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Resharper for VB.NET

Inspired by Jeff Key's "if loving Resharper is wrong I don't wanna be right" [http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/01/29/363227.aspx] soliloquy, I emailed JetBrains to see if they had plans to bring Resharper [http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/]--

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The He-Man Pattern Haters Club

Richard Mansfield has a bone to pick with object oriented programming: Certainly for the great majority of programmers -- amateurs working alone to create programs such as a quick sales tax utility for a small business or a geography quiz for Junior -- the machinery of OOP is almost always

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MAME Cocktail Arcade, documented

After two weeks of non-stop tweaking, I think my MAME Cocktail arcade is finally complete. I created a MAME cocktail project page documenting everything I've done so far with lots of pictures and links to the products I used, and the rationales behind the choices I made. Most

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Video Codecs are the next DLL Hell

This issue needs more attention. Via Steve Makofsky Codecs are the next DLL hell. While I love Nero Digital's simplicity and quality, the MP4's it produces aren't compatible with most commercial DVD players (due to the AAC or AVC audio). I've tried

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It's the IDE, dummy!

In VB.NET vs C#, round two, I realized that choice of IDE has a far bigger impact on productivity than which language you choose. Lately I've started to think the relationship between language and IDE is even more profound: the future of programming languages isn't

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RegexBuddy and Friends

Jan Goyvaerts released a new version of RegexBuddy today. I've talked about this tool before-- it's easily the best regex tool available. Some feature highlights for this version are: * Built in GREP tool * Visual regular expression debugging support * Full unicode support The GREP tool is an

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