Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
outsourcing
One conclusion is clear, anyone who thinks that onshore developers will triumph because they are more skilled is very wrong. We've found that we can hire just as talented developers in India as we can in North America and Europe. – Martin Fowler I'm actually so excited
software development concepts
I found these editorials buried on Steve McConnell's website, from his stint as editor of IEEE software magazine. It's a great series of articles; they're all good, but I particularly recommend "Cargo Cult Engineering." Here are direct links to each, in chronological
spam
I like the way anyone can leave a comment regarding my posts – the only good discussion is a two-way discussion – but the comment spam is getting way out of hand (viagra, gambling, penis enlargement, ad nauseam). Thank goodness, then, for MT-blacklist, a simple anti-spam plugin for Movable Type. As promised,
scalability
I'm sure everyone reading this is familiar with the slashdot effect: When Slashdot links a site, often a lot of readers will hit the link to read the story or see the purty pictures. This can easily throw thousands of hits at the site in minutes. Most of
object-oriented programming
Have you ever noticed that new .NET developers have a tendency to use inheritance for... well, everything? On some level, this is understandable, since inheritance is used throughout the framework; everything in .NET inherits from a root object. There's one big difference, though: we're writing crappy
.net
We recently switched to VS.NET 2003 (.NET 1.1) at work, yet we're still using third party assemblies compiled under .NET 1.0. Now, ideally, you'd want assemblies recompiled to be sure that they are running as .NET 1.1. We happen to have a
idisposable
I am working with some classes that wrap unmanaged APIs, so I have to be concerned with releasing the resources associated with these APIs – e.g., the IDisposable interface. I was a little confused about the distinction between Dispose() and Finalize(), and in my research I found this article by
.net
There's an interesting article documenting the dramatic uptake of .NET Want more proof .Net is taking off? Consider the following: In May, Forrester Research released a report that found 56 percent of developers polled consider .Net their primary development environment for 2004, compared with 44 percent for J2EE.
exception handling
There's a bit more subtlety to rethrowing exceptions than most developers realize. Although this topic is covered very nicely at The .NET Guy blog, here's another example: Try session = smgr.getSession(_strDocbaseName) Catch ex As Exception If ex.Message.IndexOf("authentication failed") > 0
programming languages
There's an interesting interview with Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is the primary developer behind the open-source port of the .NET runtime known as the Mono Project. This project was recently purchased by Novell, ostensibly to bolster the development tools available on Linux. Miguel seems refreshingly free of the
vb.net
If I see one more blog entry complaining about VB's verbosity, or the elitism of C# developers, I think I'm gonna puke. Why can't we all just get along? Part of what makes the .NET Runtime unique is that it offers you a choice
outlining
Evidently the VB code outlining support is completely broken in VS.NET 2003. Why hasn't this gotten more publicity? We used the code outlining features all the time at work in 2002, and they worked great. But after switching to VS.NET 2003 we noticed that selecting Edit,