enterprise software
Via Ole Eichhorn, the UK Guardian’s Survival of the Unfittest: Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive? We’ve all had bad software experiences. However, at one of my jobs,
communication
So I’ve been critical of other people’s presentations. Which naturally leads to a few questions: * What makes a presentation good? * Why don’t you try giving a presentation? I realize that giving presentations isn’t easy. But I still feel that some speakers haven’t done the basic
music technology
I’m a big music fan. And as a longtime computer enthusiast, I’ve always been intrigued by the intersection of computers and music: audio visualization. The first experience I had with visualization was the 1993 CD-ROM add-on for Atari’s short-lived Jaguar console. It included Jeff Minter’s VLM-1
icons
It’s good to know that others share my weird fascination with signs. Ian Albert has a page dedicated to hazmat placards: Ian created high quality, hand-traced PDFs for each placard. Now that’s dedication. But he also offers this amusing warning: Don’t use these decoratively in a public
programming languages
OSNews published a nine-language performance roundup in early 2004. The results are summarized here: intlongdoubletrigI/OVisual C++9.618.86.43.510.548.8Visual C#9.723.917.74.19.965.3gcc C9.828.89.514.910.073.0Visual Basic9.823.717.74.130.785.9Visual J#9.623.917.
.net
Vertigo Software’s .NET Pet Shop 4.0 article just went live on MSDN. It’s Pet Shop! You know... our old pal, Pet Shop: However, unlike previous versions of Pet Shop, this version is not a benchmark comparison with Java. It’s purely a showcase for ASP.NET 2.
debugging
Edit and Continue, which shipped in Visual Studio 2005, is generally regarded as A Good Thing. It’s pretty difficult to argue against the benefits of immediacy when debugging, but that isn’t about to stop some people: * Frans Bouma People who grew up with assemblers, the gnu commandline C
security
After I posted the CodeProject article .NET Encryption Simplified, a reader asked this question in the comments: I would like to know what your thoughts are on private key storage in applications. I believe the recommended practice is to use the DPAPI, but I have found this to be too
visual studio 2005
I constantly rename variables. It’s probably the single most frequent refactoring activity I do. And that’s why I love Visual Studio 2005’s built-in Smart Tags feature. If you’re not familiar with smart tags, check out K. Scott Allen’s post; he has some nice screenshots illustrating
software development
As a commenter noted in my previous post on how not to give a presentation, I have another complaint about software development presentations that I didn’t list. They’re chock full of meaningless acronyms. SOAP, BI, SOA, RDBMS, SGML, CRUD, RMS, RDBMS, XML, ORM, FAQ. I appreciate the need
communication skills
I hold speakers to relatively high standards. They get paid to present to large groups because they’re ostensibly good communicators. And I cannot believe the beginner mistakes some of the speakers are making here at VSLive. Based on my experiences over the last two days, here are a few
user experience
Here at VSLive! 2006 San Francisco, I’ve been sitting through a lot of presentations. Unfortunately, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of that time staring at tiny, unreadable 12 and 10 point IDE text. Presenters, please don’t do this to your audiences. If you can’t pre-scale the