Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and staygold.us. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
design
The appeal of the Mac Mini is totally lost on me. It’s an underpowered, expensive box – like every other computer Apple has ever introduced. And yet, a certain contingent of PC users are buying this thing on release day. I never understood that. Ed Stroglio may be the best
performance
In my previous entry on the real cost of performance, there were some complaints that my code’s slow and it sucks. If I had a nickel every time someone told me that, I could have retired years ago. Let’s take a look at the specific complaint that the
user experience
You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He’s no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman dream team. He also maintains a website with the 10 most wanted UI design bugs: 1. Power failure crash
software development concepts
How can you tell experienced programmers from beginners? New programmers think if they work hard, they might succeed. Experienced programmers know that if they work really hard, they might not fail. Allow me to elaborate with an excerpt from an interview with Steve McConnell: SM: One of the points I
.net
In a previous entry, Net.WebClient and Gzip, I posted a code snippet that enables the missing HTTP compression in Net.WebClient, using the always handy SharpZipLib. This code eventually made it into one of my CodeProject articles. An eagle-eyed CodeProject reader noted that, while my code worked for
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
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
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.
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