Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
software development concepts
Here’s a data point supporting my hypothesis that users will jump through any hoops to get things for free as in beer. It’s the SourceForge top downloads list: Seven of the ten top downloads are pure p2p file sharing clients. The other three directly relate to media ripping.
security
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
ui design
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
stored procedures
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&
asp.net
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
.net framework
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
user experience
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
exception handling
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.
software development concepts
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
oop
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
windows xp media center edition 2005
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
productivity
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