Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here:
I don't know why I haven't found this before, but Robert Read's* How to be a Programmer [http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html] (PDF version [http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.pdf]) is well worth your time:> To be a good programmer
I accepted a position at Vertigo Software today. You may know Vertigo from one or more of the following: * Quake II .NET (Managed C++) * IBuySpy (ASP.NET) * .NET Pet Shop (J2EE performance comparison) * Fitch & Mather (Windows DNA) * FotoVision, IssueVision (.NET Smart Client) I'm tremendously excited to join
If you develop software long enough, you'll eventually run into Universal Modeling Language [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uml]. This happened to me last year when we started working with our offshore vendor. UML is a diagramming standard that allows you to model software in a universal way.
I recently purchased a USB CueCat from eBay [http://search.ebay.com/cuecat-usb] to play around with UPC barcodes, which I found out about from comments posted in a Scott Hanselman blog entry [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CommentView,guid,48e61762-b273-4a6d-b0d0-f90cb56e3fde.aspx] . It's fun to run around the
In a recent post, Scott Koon proposes that to be a really good .NET programmer, you also need to be a really good C++ programmer [http://www.lazycoder.com/weblog/archives/2005/04/26/bad-developers-are-made-not-learned/] : > If you've spent all your life working in a GC'ed
I was chatting with a fellow developer yesterday, who recently adopted the very cool Busy Box ASP.NET progress indicator [http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/archive/2005/02/16/737.aspx] that I recommended: > We often need to provide a user message informing the user that their request is
I have fairly strong feelings when it comes to the stored procedures versus dynamic SQL argument, but one thing is clear: you should never, ever use concatenated SQL strings in your applications. Give me parameterized SQL, or give me death. There are two good reasons you should never do this.
You may remember the ASP.NET canonicalization vulnerability [http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=887459] from last year. And what exactly is canonicalization? From Microsoft's Design Guidelines for Secure Web Applications [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648647.aspx]: > Data in canonical form is in its most standard
As I struggle to open applications on my PC, I was reminded of a few entries in Scott Hanselman's blog: Personally I have enough crap in my start menu to fill my 1400x1060 screen...arguably only 30% of the icons represent applications, the rest are just flotsam. (May
A recent user-submitted CodeProject article took an interesting perspective on the VB.NET/C# divide by proposing that the culture of Visual Basic is not conducive to professional software development: We've seen that the cultures of VB and C# are very different. And we've seen that
Mark Russinovich recently posted a blog entry bemoaning the bloated footprint of managed .NET apps compared to their unmanaged equivalents. He starts by comparing a trivial managed implemention of Notepad to the one that ships with Windows: First notice the total CPU time consumed by each process. Remember, all I&
The Edward Tufte [http://www.edwardtufte.com/] books are well known classics now, but I distinctly remember my first encounter with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0961392142/codihorr-20] in 1995. At the time I was working for a market research company in