Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
user experience
There are so many that it’s really hard to choose, but I think this may be my favorite nonsensical dialog in Lotus Notes, our enterprise mail system of choice: Good luck. You’re gonna need it. I’ve given up criticizing Lotus Notes. There’s no point. It’s
asp
I just went to the Radio Shack website to look for something, and after every click on the main page, I was greeted with this: If I was running a giant corporation, I think I’d hire coders who could develop a rational error handling strategy for our production website.
programming languages
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
.net
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
c#
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("
asp.net
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
technology trends
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
software development
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
display technology
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
shell scripting
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
programming practices
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
programming languages
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