Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

Managed HTML rendering

At some point in any WinForms project, you’re bound to need either: 1. WYSIWYG text entry areas with text formatting 2. Quick and dirty printed report generation The obvious choice for both of these things is HTML. No problem! I’ll just drag my HtmlTextBox on the form, set

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I want my WSH.NET!

Speaking of ghetto languages, when exactly is the Windows Script Host going to be updated with a modern language – like, say, .NET? I want my WSH.NET! I still use WSH to write quick and dirty command line utilities that don’t justify a full blown .NET console executable. Like

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Stuck in a VB.NET Ghetto

At a recent trinug user group meeting, Richard Hale Shaw was going off on a tirade about how Visual Basic 6 was “the ultimate anti-pattern.” I don’t disagree. VB6 had some serious issues, many of which .NET resolves. Then he put a question to the audience: “What specific things

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A Programmer’s Portfolio

Building up a portfolio (a collection of your work) is essential. Many employers will require it before they consider you for a job. Take the time you need to produce something that will impress them – it’ll really pay off. That’s part of the job description for a graphic

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A Pragmatic Quick Reference

I modified the recommended reading list to include, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. If you haven’t read the book, it includes a handy reference card that will give you a great idea of the gems covered inside. And if you have, well, it never hurts to review

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Are your exceptions silent?

This Slate article highlights an interesting statistic: A few years ago, Microsoft set up the Windows Error Reporting Service to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application – or your whole PC – shuts down, a box pops up asking you to send a confidential error report. Using

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How about an hourly build?

The benefits of a daily build are well understood by now. McConnell even cites the book Showstopper! as an extreme example circa 1993: Who can benefit from this process? Some developers protest that it is impractical to build every day because their projects are too large. But what was perhaps

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Media Center goes retail

I had no idea this was happening, but it is fantastic news: according to this GamePC article, the latest 2005 version of Windows XP Media Center Edition will be released as a retail product within a few weeks: Windows XP Media Center Edition was originally launched roughly two years ago,

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We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!

I saw this really funny, if somewhat ancient, Dave Winer blog entry on Scoble’s blog and I just couldn’t resist: An old software slogan at Living Videotext: “We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!” It makes me laugh! We never ran this slogan in an ad. People wouldn’t

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Defending Perpetual Intermediacy

How many things would you classify yourself as “expert” at? I drive to and from work every day, but I hardly consider myself an expert driver. I brush my teeth at least twice every day, and I’m no expert on oral care; just ask my dentist. I use Visual

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Double-Click Must Die revisited

Don’t be too quick to dismiss Microsoft’s effort to solve the double-click problem. Try it yourself. On any explorer window, select Tools, Options, General: I believe this feature was introduced with Windows 98; it’s an attempt to map everything to the single mouse click, using the web

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Double-Click Must Die

Recently, we had this strange problem with a particular smart client application at work. It happened when the user clicked the OK button on a specific form. Like all difficult bugs, it was impossible for us to replicate. We put a bunch of diagnostic scaffolding into the deployed executable; this

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