Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
John Gruber gloats that Windows XP does not fare well in a comparison against OS X: But everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto -- a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn't. Even the Boot
Here's a question that recently came up on an internal mailing list: how do I create an enum with a name that happens to be a c# keyword? I immediately knew the answer for VB.net; you use brackets to delimit the word. Public Enum test [Public] [Private]
Edward Tufte, in his new book, Beautiful Evidence, continues on his crusade for information density. Here's a representative recap of a Tufte seminar from 2001: Tufte spent most of his talk walking around the room while talking on a wireless mike. He had two projectors set up, but
Joel Spolsky came up with a twelve-item checklist [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html] in August, 2000 that provides a rough measure of – in his words – "how good a software team is": 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step?
I've always thought it was ironic that low priority emails are the ones I see first in my inbox. Marking something with a low priority makes it stand out from all the others. Doesn't that make it implicitly high priority? One man's urgent is
J. Timothy King has a nice piece on the twelve benefits of writing unit tests first. Unfortunately, he seriously undermines his message by ending with this: However, if you are one of the [coders who won't give up code-first], one of those curmudgeon coders who would rather be
Now that Virtual PC is finally free, I've become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It's quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you&
Here's a thought question for today: why can't database tables index themselves? Obviously, indexes are a central concept to databases and database performance. But horror tales still abound of naive developers who "forget" to index their tables, and encounter massive performance and scalability problems
Steve McConnell on diseconomies of scale in software development: Project size is easily the most significant determinant of effort, cost and schedule [for a software project].* People naturally assume that a system that is 10 times as large as another system will require something like 10 times as much effort
A few people recently pointed out that my personal branding isn't everything that it could be. Joseph Cooney even took matters into his own hands. Well, I contacted the big man himself, Steve McConnell, and he graciously provided me a high resolution vector file of the original Coding
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
Brad Abrams was a founding member of the .NET common language runtime team way back in 1998. He's also the co-author of many essential books on .NET, including both volumes of the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference. I was at a presentation Brad gave to the Triangle