software development concepts
Although you eventually outgrow them, any developer worth his or her salt bears the scars of a thousand tiny religious wars. It’s an occupational hazard, as Steve McConnell notes in Thou Shalt Rend Software and Religion Asunder: Religion appears in software development in numerous incarnations– as dogmatic adherence to
regex
All right... will! I’m continually amazed how useful regular expressions are in my daily coding. I’m still working on the MhtBuilder refactoring, and I needed a function to convert all URLs in a page of HTML from relative to absolute: <summary> converts all relative url references
programming languages
I’m currently whipping up a mini-API for the BetaBrite-specific subset of the Alpha Sign Communications Protocol. Naturally, I want it to be easy to use and understandable for other developers – a classic usability problem. How do you approach usability when your audience is other developers? The answer is, unsurprisingly,
vb.net
It’s amusing that the very people defending VB.NET are, ironically, illustrating precisely why VB.NET is in such trouble: I just want to make it clear that I am one MVP that does NOT intend to sign this petition about VB. And by the way, my background is
.net
You always notice the names that appear frequently in your code related Google searches. For me, one of those names is Peter Bromberg, PhD, the driving force behind Egghead Cafe. There are some great articles there, but the pick of the litter are the ones by Peter’s alter ego,
programming languages
As a complement to my C# to VB.NET cheat sheet links, here’s a comparative list of programming language equivalents in VB, J#, C++, C#, JScript, and even Visual FoxPro. Since .NET is just a thin wrapper over Win32 (or so I've been told), you may also
programming languages
An oldie but a goodie, courtesy of Jeroen van den Bos: A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?
programming languages
How do you recognize talented software developers in a 30 minute interview? There’s a roundtable article on this topic at Artima Developer with some good ideas from a group of well known developers: * Explore an area of expertise * Have them critique something * Ask them to solve a problem (but
programming languages
In Revenge of the Right Brain, Daniel Pink sees a future where being technologically savvy isn’t enough: Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe.
keyboard shortcuts
Like Scott Hanselman, I view the mouse as an optional computer accessory.* Manly coders love the smell of compilation in the morning and we know that speed = keyboard. A mouse? C’mon. That’s so teenage girls can pick emoticons in AOL Instant Messenger. And for flash “developers.” Us tough
programming languages
On Bruce Eckel’s Static vs. Dynamic [typing]: Despite this, I’ve had some leanings back in the direction of static type checking. As you point out, the goal is to create solid components – the question is how to accomplish that? In a dynamic language you have the flexibility to
software development concepts
Richard Mansfield has a bone to pick with object oriented programming: Certainly for the great majority of programmers – amateurs working alone to create programs such as a quick sales tax utility for a small business or a geography quiz for Junior – the machinery of OOP is almost always far more