open source
Here’s Scott Hanselman on the death of nDoc: We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it’s free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding. You don’t get to criticize a free puppy that you bring in to your home. Free like
programming concepts
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
programming concepts
Reginald Braithwaite’s favorite interview question is an offbeat one: sketch out a software design to referee the game Monopoly.* I think it’s a valid design exercise which neatly skirts the puzzle question trap. But more importantly, it’s fun. Interviews are a terror for the interviewee. And they’
software maintenance
Mention the words “maintenance programming” to a group of developers and they’ll, to a man (or woman), recoil in horror. Maintenance programming is widely viewed as janitorial work. But maybe that’s an unfair characterization. In Software Conflict 2.0 : The Art and Science of Software Engineering, Robert L.
software development
Jon Raynor added this comment to my previous post about keeping up with the pace of change in software development: The IT field is basically a quagmire. It’s better to accept that fact right away or move on to a different field. I guess someday I wish for Utopia
best practices
James Bach’s seminal rant, No Best Practices, is a great reality check for architecture astronaut rhetoric. It’s worth revisiting even if you’ve read it before. Some might say Bach’s viewpoint is pessimistic, even cynical: The way to get rich in this world is mainly by making
regex
I was intrigued by a recent comment from a Microsoft Hotmail developer on the pitfalls they’ve run into while upgrading Hotmail to .NET 2.0: Regular Expressions can be very expensive. Certain (unintended and intended) strings may cause RegExes to exhibit exponential behavior. We’ve taken several hotfixes for
programming concepts
Even the best programmers make shitty software, with bugs. But some programmers are naturally proficient at creating this special kind of software, as illustrated by a Croatian developer known as Stinky: The anecdote that best reveals how little Stinky knew about programming started when he asked Bojan to help him
visual studio
One of the most enjoyable new features in Visual Studio .NET 2005 is Code Snippets [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/codesnippets.asp] . This animated GIF illustrates how it works: I'm demonstrating three types of snippets here: * simple expansion * template expansion (with
events
A colleague of mine had some excellent comments on the surprising reentrancy issues you'll run into when using Application.DoEvents(): The Application.DoEvents method is often used to allow applications to repaint while some longer task is taking place. This is usually the result of polling instead of
learning
I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week’s E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he’s learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. “I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they’ve worked on,
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