Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
code refactoring
I don’t usually get territorial about modifications to “my” code. First of all, it’s our code. And if you want to change something, be my guest; that’s why God invented source control. But, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t take working code and
c#
I updated the WebFileManager CodeProject article with some enhancements. It now supports zipping files and column sorting: I included both the code-behind and inline code versions of the page in the solution archive this time. There’s also a new dependency on SharpZipLib, assuming you want the remote file zipping
arcade gaming
After years of resistance, I finally buckled. I ordered a 3-way MAME cocktail arcade kit: Over the last few years, the homebrew arcade market has spawned a number of businesses specializing in prefab cabinets – think IKEA meets MAME. They ship you the cabinet in a large box, and you assemble
unicode
Over the last few months, I’ve come to realize that I had an ugly American view of strings. I always wondered what those crazy foreigners were complaining about in their comments on my CodeProject articles, and now I know: there ain’t no such thing as plain text: If
multithreading
As a follow-up to my caution about exceptions in Form.Paint(), I wanted to illustrate why this technique is so effective. Let’s say you had a form with this code: Private IsFirstPaint As Boolean = True Private Sub DoWork() Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor StatusBar1.Text = "Loading..." System.Threading.Thread.
software development concepts
A recent post by Wesner Moise after a two month hiatus got me thinking about a passage from Steve McConnell’s, After The Gold Rush. Like all Steve’s stuff, it’s great, but the title is unintentionally ironic: the book was released in 1999, at the very height of
windows forms
In a previous post, I mentioned the old VB6 trick of deferring form work until the Form.Paint event in order to provide a (seemingly) responsive interface to the user. Well, in the .NET world there’s one strange side effect when you do this. Let’s say you had
asp.net
After religiously adhering to the new, improved code-behind model of ASP.NET for so long, I have to admit it’s sort of refreshing to rediscover inline code ASPX pages again. Deploying single web pages to a server without recompiling the entire solution? Making localized edits to single pages that
programming languages
It’s always reassuring to be reminded that people much more talented than myself make mistakes, too. And I especially appreciate it when they share those mistakes in the form of advice: On avoiding IT mistakes: Rick Cattell’s, Things I Wish I Learned in Engineering School: • Good technology is
javascript
When I visited Alex Gorbatchev’s blog, I noticed he had a unique client-side code highlighting solution in place, one I hadn’t seen anywhere else. That’s something I’ve wanted on my blog for a while; the vanilla <PRE> sections I’ve been using are serviceable,
windows
The year 2005 marks the 20th anniversary of Windows 1.0: The first version of Windows I actually used was Windows 3.0. Coming from an Amiga background, I was unimpressed. It wasn’t until Windows 3.1 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 that I actually started to believe
dvd
Steve Makofsky turned me on to some software I already use: Nero Burning ROM, but more specifically, Nero Recode 2, which is a part of their expanded “ultra” Nero suite. I’ve long considered Nero the definitive DVD and CD burning software; I had no idea they also offered a