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
.net
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 implementation of Notepad to the one that ships with Windows: First notice the total CPU time consumed by each process. Remember, all I’
data visualization
The Edward Tufte books are well known classics now, but I distinctly remember my first encounter with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1995. At the time I was working for a market research company in Denver. I noticed the book sitting on the president’s desk while I
gaming
Sometimes you just gotta ask yourself: What Would Blanka Do? “Eventually, my nickname at school became Blanka. When I got into real fights, I even tried using some of his moves. They never worked,” said Gutierrez. “I often ask myself, what would Blanka do? I even met my wife because
security
I just posted a new article on CodeProject, .NET Encryption Simplified. In my spare time over the last 6 months, I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the System.Security.Cryptography classes. And you know what I learned? Cryptography is hard. Anyway, I now have a heavily documented wrapper class
web development
Due to popular demand one person’s request, I added for sale searching to my existing craigslist.org all-city search page. I also made a few other minor improvements: * Searching of Jobs or For Sale items * Selection of subcategories * Age of posts in days is shown as an offset
nunit
After years of building ad-hoc test harnesses, I finally adopted formal unit testing on a recent project of mine using NUnit and TestRunner. It was gratifyingly simple to get my first unit tests up and running: <TestFixture()> _ Public Class UnitTests Private _TargetString As String Private _TargetData As
.net
One of the key diagnostic data points for any .NET assembly is “when was it built?” Until recently, I thought there were only two ways to suss this out: 1. Check the filesystem date and time 2. Derive the build date from the assembly version The filesystem method has obvious
asp.net
At work, we have the luxury of assuming that everyone’s on an intranet. So when it comes to identity management on our ASP.NET websites, NTLM authentication is the go-to solution. Why trouble the user with Yet Another Login Dialog when you can leverage the built in NTLM
user interface
Cyrus bemoans the user interface catastrophe known as tabbed browsing: As far as I can tell, tabs just exist to violate the existing window management systems I have in the OSs I use. So all the built-in ways I know to use my system fly out the window (no
programming languages
In Maciej Ceglowski’s cutting counterpoint to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, he cites a key difference between software development and painting: writing software doesn’t get you laid. There’s nothing whatsoever distinctive about the analogy to painters, except that Paul Graham likes to paint, and would like