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

Because I love the smell of compilation in the morning

As McConnell notes in Code Complete: If you haven’t spent at least a month working on the same program – working 16 hours a day, dreaming about it during the remaining 8 hours of restless sleep, working several nights straight through truing to eliminate that “one last bug” from the

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Custom AssemblyInfo Attributes

To complement my previous post bemoaning the lack of respect for AssemblyInfo, I wanted to illustrate just how easy it is to add a few custom attributes to our AssemblyInfo file: Imports System Imports System.Reflection <Assembly: AssemblyTitle("ASPUnhandledException")> <Assembly: AssemblyDescription("ASP.NET unhandled

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Populate your AssemblyInfo

All too often, I download sample code with AssemblyInfo files that look like this: // // General Information about an assembly is controlled through the following // set of attributes. Change these attribute values to modify the information // associated with an assembly. // [assembly: AssemblyTitle("")] [assembly: AssemblyDescription("")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("

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WebFileManager

I posted a new CodeProject article, WebFileManager: I often deploy ASP.NET websites to servers that I don’t control. In these situations, I can’t get to the underlying filesystem to do any file maintenance, because I don’t have direct access to the server. For various reasons, I

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Giving of thanks, and tech support

Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and... Please. Let's be frank. We are going home to

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On American Programmers

Paul Graham posted an interesting new essay about American culture and software development: This works well in some fields and badly in others. I suspect it works in movies and software because they’re both messy processes. “Systematic” is the last word I’d use to describe the way good

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Trapped in a Bitmapped World

In a recent blog entry, Don Park waxed poetic about 1600x1480 15″ LCDs. That’s more of a microfiche reader than an actual screen. High DPI displays, though, aren’t the root of the problem. As Scoble points out, the real issue is Windows itself: Turns out his screen was

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Full Threaded Shellicious

I couldn’t resist adding some features to my Shellicious code. You can now run shell commands either asynchronously (as before) or synchronously, like so: Private WithEvents _s As New Shell Private _IsExecutionComplete As Boolean = False Public Sub Main() _s.UseNewThread = True _s.Execute("C:LongRunningConsoleApp.exe") Do

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Good Programmers Get Off Their Butts

I searched for this citation, and like Wes, I remember reading it, but I can’t remember the exact place I read it: This echoes another comment from a recently read blog article, the author of which I cannot recall. Good programmers get off their butts. Typically, programmers won’t

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Shellicious

I mentioned in a previous post that I was launching command line utilities from an ASP.NET web app and capturing the output. I wrote a little multithreaded .Process wrapper class to encapsulate this behavior. It's nothing magical, but it is handy for these scenarios: Dim cmd As

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Process.Start and Impersonation

Did you know that Process.Start always uses the security context of the parent ASP.NET process? I just found this out the hard way; Using Process.Start on “whoami.exe” always returns the ASPNET worker process no matter what I do. Some searching turned up this entry in Scott’

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Web Farms and ASP.NET ViewState

If you deploy ASP.NET websites to a web farm, you may run into this perplexing System.Web.HttpException: The viewstate is invalid for this page and might be corrupted If you’ve installed ASP.NET 1.1 service pack 1, you may also get a much more helpful exception

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