programming languages
Scott Hanselman was kind enough to sing the praises of my blog a few months ago, completely unprompted. I finally met Scott in person at TechEd this year, and I can assure you that if you suck, Scott will be the first person to tell you that you suck.* That’
orm
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase “Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industry” in late 2004. It’s a scary analogy, but an apt one. I’ve seen developers struggle for years with the huge
productivity
In a world of 43Folders* and dozens of other blogs that worship at the altar of Getting Things Done, it’s a little surprising that nobody has taken aim at the #1 enemy of productivity everywhere: The Internet. Do you spend so much time obsessively keeping up with the latest
programming languages
Jonathan Edwards’ Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front is an inspiring call to arms for programmers who are fed up with the status quo of Java and C#. Maybe it is time to open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I&
software development concepts
Ian Griffiths recently wrote a proof of concept WPF browser for the MSDN online help. One of the improvements cited is multi-column text: This is why WPF offers a column-based reading experience. We know from experience in the print world that breaking text into columns can make it much easier
xml
Let’s say you wanted to generate and render this XML fragment: <status code="1" /> <data> <usergroup id="usr" /> </data> Here’s a fully object-oriented way of building it: System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder(); XmlWriterSettings
open source
The unofficial Wikipedia blog entry The Future of Open Source Five Years Ago makes some fascinating comparisons between the adoption rate of Linux and the adoption rate of Wikipedia. Server-side Linux is still a powerful force, but what happened to the desktop utopia that was supposed to unseat Windows? And
clean code
Christopher Seiwald’s Seven Pillars of Pretty Code argues that code that looks good, works good: 1. Code changes should blend in with the original style. It should not be possible to discern previous changes to a file without seeing the previous revisions. Nothing obscures the essential visual cues more
gaming
One of my favorite things to play on Verticade, our full size MAME arcade machine, is pinball simulators. There’s something about the completely digital simulation of analog gameplay that fascinates me. Plus, it’s easy to take five or ten minutes out for a quick game of pinball. No
laptop
I was desperately trying to avoid the expense of buying a new laptop, but my work-provided Thinkpad T43 just isn’t cutting it for me. The problem with Thinkpads, even the very nice new T60 models, is deeper than the hardware and the classic black box design. Thinkpads are uninspiring.
desktop organization
This guy* who gave a presentation with Patrick Cauldwell yesterday revealed his desktop during the presentation. Here’s what it looked like: After the presentation, I ribbed him about his desktop. You have a few square millimeters of desktop left uncovered, I said. Clearly you have your work cut out
software development
I’m currently reading Steve McConnell’s new book, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. The section on individual expert judgment provided one simple reason why my estimates are often so horribly wrong: If you ask a developer to estimate a set of features, the developer will often come back