Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:

Bay Area, CA
Jeff Atwood

Keyboard Shortcut Summary Macro

I finally had time to improve my Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcut summary macro. Instead of writing HTML to the console*, it now creates a HTML file in your user documents folder, and navigates the IDE to the created file: Download the Keyboard Shortcut Summary Macro (2kb ZIP) The advantage

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ALT+TAB Extreme*

When I see people using the default, crappy Windows ALT+TAB task switching behavior, I experience physical pain. TaskSwitchXP [http://www.ntwind.com/taskswitchxp/index.html] is completely free and so much better. It's super small, totally elegant, lightning fast, and generally a massive improvement in task switching

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C# implementation of ASCII85

As promised, here is my C# implementation of the ASCII85 algorithm. This code is a loose port of the C sample referenced from the Wikipedia page. It's too much code to paste into a single entry, so I packaged it as a VS.NET 2003 solution -- using

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Equipping our ASCII Armor

On one of our e-commerce web sites, we needed a unique transaction ID to pass to a third party reporting tool on the checkout pages. We already had a GUID on the page for internal use. And you know how much we love GUIDs! 22da5537-de54-459d-9b33-f40f2101143b A GUID is 128 bits,

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Avoiding “Blank Page Syndrome”

One thing I dislike about classic WIMP GUI applications is the way they typically present you with a blank page at startup. Here's what Word 2003 looks like just after I launch it: This leads to Blank Page Syndrome: when presented with infinite choice, it's sometimes

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Comparing GUIs: OS X vs. Windows XP

This OS X versus Windows XP [http://www.xvsxp.com/] site contains an exhaustive, extensively illustrated 100-topic comparison of these two operating systems. The author tries to be objective, which is admirable, but the extremely detailed comparison is worth reading mostly because it highlights a lot of subtle design differences.

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Configurability and Voiding Your Warranty

In The Problem with Configurability, I noted the tenuous balance between the opposing goals of customization and convention. Kam VedBrat, one of the Microsoft Windows UI designers for Vista, riffs on a similar theme. Why isn't Windows Vista completely skinnable out of the box? There is also the

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Changing the Windows XP Boot Screen

We're in the middle of an after-hours MAME [http://www.mame.net/] arcade project at work*. As one of the final fit and finish steps, I did a bit of research on how to replace the default Windows XP boot screen with something a little more arcade-y. I

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Wind, Angle, and Power

One of the oldest computer games is Artillery [http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=2]. It's all about going mano a mano with nothing but wind, angle, and power [http://www.armchairarcade.com/aamain/content.php?article.51] on your side: > The origins of artillery

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Revenge of Codename: Snowball

What would the world be like if Windows 95 and Windows NT has been cancelled? You'd be surfing the web right now in Windows for Workgroups 3.11: I absolutely love the fact that we get a javascript error on the Google homepage. Not unreasonable, considering WFW 3.

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Keyboarding: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000

I was plenty excited when I saw Microsoft was releasing a new non-mangled ergonomic keyboard - the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Now that I own one, I'm not excited any more. I'm ecstatic! This keyboard is the natural heir to the obsolete but much loved

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Mastering GUIDs with Occam's Razor

Do you remember the scene from the movie Full Metal Jacket where the marines recite the USMC creed? It's a little known fact, but programmers have a similar creed: This is my GUID. There are many like it but this one is mine. My GUID is my best

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