Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Microsoft gets blamed for a lot of security problems, and for the most part, they deserve it. There’s no excuse for the irresponsible “on by default” policy that resulted in so many vulnerable Windows 2000 IIS installations. That’s why Nimda was so devastating. Windows 2003 has a great
Occasionally I run into UI elements so boneheaded, I have to wonder what the programmers were thinking. It’s a standard convention for installers to show (estimate, really) how long the install will take. That way users have some idea how long they’ll be waiting, and whether they can
It’s intended as sarcasm, but I believe this Daily WTF entry on Stored Procedures should be taken at face value: I’m sure we’ve all heard, over and over, that inline SQL is generally a bad practice, and that we should use Stored Procedures when possible. But let&
One of the issues I have with ASP.NET is that it is postback crazy. Virtually nothing of significance can be done in pure browser client code with ASP.NET out of the box.* You have to Submit() the specially formed ASP.NET HTML form to the server, and all
In response to my previous post decrying the lack of a master list of Exception classes for .NET, a helpful reader pointed out a clever little utility buried in the .NET SDK: Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio .NET 2003SDKv1.1Binwincv.exe Wincv works well, but it doesn’t allow me to
I’ve talked about irresponsible use of dialog boxes before, but a few pages I’ve read recently highlighted an interesting aspect of this topic that I hadn’t considered. First, Joel Spolsky: This may sound a little harsh, but you’ll see, when you do usability tests, that there
I find myself throwing plain old System.Exception far too often. If only I had a complete reference of the many default Exception classes Microsoft provides, like the one Chris Sully provides in his article. That’s good as a starting point, but I don’t see things like System.
Today’s dose of YAGNI comes from a recent Anders Hejlsberg interview: If you ask beginning programmers to write a calendar control, they often think to themselves, “Oh, I’m going to write the world’s best calendar control! It’s going to be polymorphic with respect to the kind
Microsoft performance guy, Rico, touches on a topic near and dear to my heart: I hardly think that one can make any conclusions about which vendor has the edge in performance from my article on Performance Tidbits. If I was to summarize my advice in that blog in a few
Courtesy of MSDN Universal, I downloaded and installed Windows Media Center Edition 2005 on my home theater PC yesterday. It looks like the original reports were correct – MCE 2005 is more widely available at retail, too. Here are the relevant product links at newegg: * Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Derek Sivers relates an interesting Steve Jobs anecdote: In June of 2003, Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do (x)?”, “Do you
In a recent entry, I bemoaned the lack of good global error handling options for .NET Web Services. By “good” I mean “easy,” like the Application_Error event in Global.asax for ASP.NET websites. I have a pretty solid web-oriented generic unhandled exception class, which is documented in my