Although I am generally platform agnostic, I make no secret of the fact that I am primarily a Microsoft developer. In a way, I grew up with Microsoft-- as a teenager, I cut my programming teeth on the early microcomputer implementations of Microsoft BASIC. And I spent much of my
My all-time favorite programming quote has to be this Nathaniel Borenstein bon mot: It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a
Most of the hacking techniques described in the 1994 book Secrets of a Super-Hacker are now laughably out of date. But not all of them. A few are not only still effective, but far more effective in the current era of ubiquitous internet access. As the author notes early in
I met Jon Udell this year at MIX. I was reading through his excellent blog to flesh out some of the topics we talked about, when I was struck by the powerful message of this particular entry: When people tell me they're too busy to blog, I ask
In my previous post, I urged developers to learn a mainstream graphics editing program. This is purely a mechanical skill, so it seemed reasonable for developers to give it a shot. If we can absorb extremely complex development environments, compilers, and databases, why not a graphics editor? But as a
One lesson I took from MIX is that software development and graphic design are increasingly interrelated disciplines. Although they are very different skillsets, it's important for developers to have some rudimentary design skills, and vice-versa. There's a lot of useful cross-pollination going on between developers and
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning is an extraordinary piece on Bayes' theorem that starts with this simple puzzle: 1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast
I'm heading off to MIX07 today. MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft conference, because it "mixes" in a liberal dose of traditionally non-Microsoft folks for a broader range of perspectives. It's probably the only Microsoft conference I'll be attending this year.
I've been troubleshooting a bit of JavaScript lately, so I've enabled script debugging [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/10/26/247912.aspx] in IE7. Whenever the browser encounters a JavaScript error on a web page, instead of the default, unobtrusive little status bar notification.
It was my great honor to participate in this week's epsiode of .NET Rocks! [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=232] .NET Rocks! [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/] is a long running internet radio talk show for software developers that goes all the way back to 2002. I&
If I told you to choose between two technical books, one by renowned Windows author Charles Petzold, and another by some guy you've probably never heard of, which one would you pick? That's what I thought too. Until I sat down to read both of them.
Hugh MacLeod asks, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires? [https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2007/04/16/how-well-does-open-source-currently-meet-the-needs-of-shareholders-and-ceos/] > If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner [https://partner.microsoft.com/global/program] stuff? I already know