Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
programming languages
I’ve always been fascinated with road signs. And evidently so is Donald Knuth: During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides. (Well, not every sign; only the
rhythm games
Although I’m a big fan of rhythm games, I had no idea Guitar Hero was coming out until I saw the glowing GameSpot review: And here you thought that the rhythm game genre was getting stale. While Konami still has a firm lock on most rhythm-oriented games [primarily Dance
online discussion
If you’ve participated in usenet, mailing lists, or web forum discussions for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with Godwin’s law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. The Flame Warrior website offers deeper insight, based
operating system
When people find out I’m a big fan of AMD’s Athlon 64 – specifically the dual core X2 chips – they often ask how I’m enjoying 64-bit Windows. They’re always surprised to hear that I have no interest in a 64-bit OS on the desktop. I’m glad
sql server 2005
SQL Server 2005 doesn’t include the classic Pubs and Northwind databases. You can, however, download them from Microsoft. You’ll get both binary database images (*.mdf and *.ldf) as well as SQL scripts. If you plan to use the binary database files (*.mdf and *ldf), first copy those files
software development
Why is it that fully half of my interactions with GotDotNet are extremely unpleasant? I was telling someone about the Microsoft sponsored IronPython project today and I foolishly attempted to click through to the GotDotNet workspace for same: That's, like, totally awesome. Maybe I should visit the Workspaces
software development
After I discovered the CTRL+I incremental search function in Visual Studio, I never used the standard find dialog again. Incremental search is so good that it makes traditional search dialogs completely obsolete. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider that Chris Sells calls incremental search “pure sex.” This particular
clipboard
In this era of 3ghz processors, 1gb memory, and 500gb hard drives, why is the Windows clipboard only capable of holding a single item? Sure, you have fancy multi-level undo and redo in applications like Microsoft Word and Visual Studio. Did you know that the humble Windows textbox supports a
enums
Brad Abrams recently posted another great excerpt from the unfortunately named .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Volume 2: Avoid creating methods with Boolean parameters. Boolean parameters make calls harder to read and harder to write. Indeed. What is the difference between... Authorization(“foo”, true) Authorization(“foo”, false) Who knows?
programming languages
As I mentioned in Formatting HTML code snippets with Ten Ton Wrecking Balls, copying code to your clipboard in Visual Studio is often an exercise in futility if you want anything more than plain vanilla text. VS copies code to the clipboard with bizarro-world RTF formatting instead of the sane,
visual studio
Here’s a handy little Visual Studio .NET macro which searches for the currently highlighted term in Google. The search is launched as a new tab within the IDE when you press I know what you’re thinking: you’ve seen this macro before. Yeah, but this one goes to
programming languages
Charles Petzold is widely known as the guy who put the h in hWnd. He’s the author of the seminal 1988 book Programming Windows, now in its fifth edition. And he can prove it, too. He has an honest-to-God Windows tattoo on his arm: This is explained in his