Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
Shawn Burke's post Shippin' Ain't Easy (but somebody gotta do it) explains why you have to resist change at the end of a project, no matter how justifiable and rational the reasons may be. Even the smallest change has a real risk of introducing additional
Ask yourself this question: what if everything could be queried with SQL? Microsoft's LogParser [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en] does just that. It lets you slice and dice a variety of log file types using a common SQL-like syntax. It'
A colleague of mine had some excellent comments on the surprising reentrancy issues you'll run into when using Application.DoEvents(): The Application.DoEvents method is often used to allow applications to repaint while some longer task is taking place. This is usually the result of polling instead of
Omar Shahine's Clean Sources [http://wiki.shahine.com/default.aspx/MyWiki/CleanSources.html] is a nifty little right-click app for .NET developers: > This application does one thing. It adds an explorer shell menu to folders that when selected will recursively delete the contents of the bin, obj
If you were about to throw out your C++ compilers because of my post on the productivity benefits of managed code and scripting languages, hold your horses. Although managed code is pretty darn fast, sometimes performance still comes first. As Ole Eichorn points out in the comments: [You said] "
Have you ever noticed how, in movies and television, actors can take a crappy, grainy low-res traffic camera picture of a distant automobile and somehow "enhance" the image until they can read the license plate perfectly? Yeah. I don't know what kind of crazy infinite-detail fractal
There's a chart in Code Complete that compares the productivity of working in different languages: Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited with improving productivity, reliability, and
We were discussing nasty software hacks today at lunch. The worst hacks are always in software, but those software hacks have an insidious tendency to seep into the hardware, too. I was reminded of Intel's infamous CPUID hack [http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=11457]: >
I'm sure most of you are familiar with this famous Microsoft group photo from December 1978: Groovy. In case you were wondering, the photo is authentic. It's even featured on the official Microsoft Bill Gates biography page [http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/bio.asp]. Of course
Windows Media Player may be the only windows application with a UI that gets progressively worse with each new version. It is my media player of choice due only to overwhelming indifference on my part; I curse every time I use it. That's why I was so encouraged
The article Passwords: The Weakest Link references a 25 year old research work on the efficacy of passwords: In the pre-Internet Age of 1979, when storage was measured in the number of bits that could fit on a foot of magnetic tape, a seminal paper on password security found that
When diagnosing server performance problems, the first tool I turn to is the humble Task Manager. That's usually enough to get a rough idea of where we are in the bottleneck shell game: is it CPU, Disk, Network or Memory? But sometimes you need to dig into performance