Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
software development concepts
I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine a few days ago, and he described a project he recently inherited. It was the work of a half-dozen different developers, who each built their parts of the project in a completely different way with little to no communication
diversity
A few months ago there was a little brouhaha about lack of diversity in weblog authors, which caused a few ripples. Julia Lerman asks the same question about software development in a recent interview: I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of
programming concepts
I don’t know why I haven’t found this before, but Robert Read’s* How to be a Programmer (PDF version) is well worth your time: To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is
.net
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 such
programming languages
If you develop software long enough, you’ll eventually run into Universal Modeling Language. 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. This could be theoretically be helpful if
barcode
I recently purchased a USB CueCat from eBay to play around with UPC barcodes, which I found out about from comments posted in a Scott Hanselman blog entry. It’s fun to run around the house scanning in UPCs from household items, although the low-powered LED reader in the CueCat
c++
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: If you’ve spent all your life working in a GC’ed language, why would you ever need to know how memory management works, let
user experience
I was chatting with a fellow developer yesterday, who recently adopted the very cool Busy Box ASP.NET progress indicator that I recommended: We often need to provide a user message informing the user that their request is “processing.” Like the hour-glass mouse pointer lets the Windows user know the
security
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.
security
You may remember the ASP.NET canonicalization vulnerability from last year. And what exactly is canonicalization? From Microsoft’s Design Guidelines for Secure Web Applications: Data in canonical form is in its most standard or simplest form. Canonicalization is the process of converting data to its canonical form. File paths
operating systems
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 11,
programming languages
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 this is