Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
icons
It’s good to know that others share my weird fascination with signs. Ian Albert has a page dedicated to hazmat placards. Ian created high quality, hand-traced PDFs for each placard. Now that’s dedication. But he also offers this amusing warning: Don’t use these decoratively in a public
programming languages
OSNews published a nine-language performance roundup in early 2004. The results are summarized here: intlongdoubletrigI/OVisual C++9.618.86.43.510.548.8Visual C#9.723.917.74.19.965.3gcc C9.828.89.514.910.073.0Visual Basic9.823.717.74.130.785.9Visual J#9.623.917.
.net
Vertigo Software’s .NET Pet Shop 4.0 article just went live on MSDN. It’s Pet Shop! You know... our old pal, Pet Shop: However, unlike previous versions of Pet Shop, this version is not a benchmark comparison with Java. It’s purely a showcase for ASP.NET 2.
debugging
Edit and Continue, which shipped in Visual Studio 2005, is generally regarded as A Good Thing. It’s pretty difficult to argue against the benefits of immediacy when debugging, but that isn’t about to stop some people: * Frans Bouma People who grew up with assemblers, the gnu commandline C
security
After I posted the CodeProject article .NET Encryption Simplified, a reader asked this question in the comments: I would like to know what your thoughts are on private key storage in applications. I believe the recommended practice is to use the DPAPI, but I have found this to be too
visual studio 2005
I constantly rename variables. It’s probably the single most frequent refactoring activity I do. And that’s why I love Visual Studio 2005’s built-in Smart Tags feature. If you’re not familiar with smart tags, check out K. Scott Allen’s post; he has some nice screenshots illustrating
acronyms
As a commenter noted in my previous post on how not to give a presentation, I have another complaint about software development presentations that I didn’t list. They’re chock full of meaningless acronyms. SOAP, BI, SOA, RDBMS, SGML, CRUD, RMS, RDBMS, XML, ORM, FAQ. I appreciate the need
communication skills
I hold speakers to relatively high standards. They get paid to present to large groups because they’re ostensibly good communicators. And I cannot believe the beginner mistakes some of the speakers are making here at VSLive. Based on my experiences over the last two days, here are a few
user experience
Here at VSLive! 2006 San Francisco, I’ve been sitting through a lot of presentations. Unfortunately, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of that time staring at tiny, unreadable 12 and 10 point IDE text. Presenters, please don’t do this to your audiences. If you can’t pre-scale the
triage
One thing that continually frustrates me when working with dedicated test teams is that, well, they find too many bugs. Don’t get me wrong. I want to be the first person to know about any bug that results in inconvenience for a user. But how do you distinguish between
usability
Jensen Harris recently cited some Microsoft Office usability research which produced a rather counter-intuitive result: One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts. How can this be?
design patterns
A recent post by Steve Makofsky reminded me that the excellent UI Patterns and Techniques site is now a book from O'Reilly – Designing Interfaces. There’s technically no reason to buy a book on visual design patterns when you can find the same information online... * GUI design patterns