Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
virtual machine
This won't be news to a lot of you, but I was playing around with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 today: And it's very cool. I know, I know, I'm probably the last developer on the planet to get wise to the benefits of virtual
software development concepts
There's been a lot of discussion recently about the Object to Relational mapping problem, which is a serious one. This Clemens Vasters blog entry summarizes it best: Maybe I am too much of a data (read: XML, Messages, SQL) guy by now, but I just lost faith that
software development concepts
On Rory's effusive recommendation, I purchased a copy of the book, Coding Slave, by Bob Reselman. I have mixed feelings about Coding Slave. It's got a great title, it definitely kept my interest, and it's a quick read. I can also pretty much guarantee
.net
One of the great features of .NET is the automatic garbage collection that absolves the developer of worrying about C++ style memory management, where for every allocate, there must be a destroy, or you're leaking. And yet, I frequently see overzealous developers write code like this: Public Function
processor
I've commented on .NET compiler performance before, and I recently uncovered another Xbit Labs article that confirms my previous conclusion: For compiling .NET code, the Athlon 64 is 33% faster than a Pentium 4 of the same speed. That's a significant productivity boost for a developer.
programming languages
The term "computer science" is a borderline oxymoron. Very little of what we do in software development is science: Many historians suggest that modern science began around 1600 in the time and with the efforts of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Their era
regex
I generally don't subscribe to the UNIX religion, but there is one area where I am an unabashed convert: regular expressions. Yeah, the syntax is a little scary, but for processing strings, nothing is more effective. The RegEx is the power drill of the programmer's toolkit:
debugging
I'm looking forward to VS.NET 2005 like everyone else, but the one killer feature that will absolutely compel me to upgrade on day of release is Edit and Continue. I had no idea exactly how much time I spent editing live code in VB6's debugger
software development concepts
As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it's getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the
.net
I'm currently building a .NET library that constructs .MHT files, aka single file web page archives. That's what you get when you perform a File | Save As | Web Archive, Single File operation in IE6. HTML is a great, standard format for building richly formatted one-off reports,
programming languages
I've found a number of blog posts about the pros and cons of Simonyi's Hungarian Notation, most notably, this blog post commenting on the extreme polarity of the reprinted MSDN article rating: This single image really cuts to the heart of the debate, pointedly illustrating what
gui programming
One of the unnecessary evils of GUI programming is the "Process Dialog Box" – what we think of as MessageBox.Show. You know, like this: All kidding aside, these dialogs are frequently abused for displaying all kinds of trivial information to the user, a mistake that Alan Cooper calls