Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Discourse, and RGMII. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's be kind to each other. Find me
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 of syntax; we
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, Outlining,
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 machine technology. In
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 objects
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 you’ve never
.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 CrazyFunction(
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
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. Time spent
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: not appropriate
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 until I
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 personalities
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 a religious