technology trends
One of my most eye-opening early experiences was a tour of a local manufacturing plant during high school. One of our tour guides was a MIT trained engineer who accompanied us, explaining how everything worked. At the end of the tour, he gave each of us a picture of a
.net
As part of my new advertising initiative, Microsoft and I are teaming up to donate $10,000 in support of open source .NET projects. Why am I focusing on .NET open source projects? In short, because open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many highly
legalese
If you’ve used a computer for any length of time, you’ve probably clicked through hundreds of End User License Agreement (EULA) dialogs. And if you’re like me, you haven’t read a single word of any of them. Who can blame you? They’re mind-numbing legalese. As
programming languages
Dennis Forbes took issue with my recent post on C# and the Compilation Tax, offering this criticism, pointedly titled “Beginners and Hacks:” Sometimes [background compilation and edit and continue] are there to coddle a beginner, carefully keeping them within the painted lines and away from the dangerous electrical sockets along
programming languages
If you didn’t get a chance to watch today’s historic interview between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you should. Finally seeing these two computer industry giants on stage interacting with each other was fascinating and at times even a little touching. * Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Prologue * Steve
software development concepts
Rich Skrenta writes that code is our enemy. Code is bad. It rots. It requires periodic maintenance. It has bugs that need to be found. New features mean old code has to be adapted. The more code you have, the more places there are for bugs to hide. The longer
software development concepts
Bill Gates has often said that over time, the cost of computer hardware approaches zero. Here’s one such example: Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free. History has proven him right. Computer hardware isn’t literally free, of
programming languages
It’s hard to imagine now, but in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates was an actual programmer. One bit of hard evidence is the BASIC program DONKEY.BAS included with original IBM PCs running IBM DOS 1.10. The history of this weird little program is covered in
c#
Over the last four years, I’ve basically given up on the idea that .NET is a multiple language runtime. * The so-called choice between the two most popular languages, C# and VB.NET, is no more meaningful than the choice between Coke and Pepsi. Yes, IronPython and IronRuby are meaningfully
user experience
Asa Raskin, the son of the late Jef Raskin, recently gave a presentation at Google on the work his company, Humanized, is doing. It’s largely a continuation of the work of his father. One of the most interesting aspects of Jef’s work was zoomable user interfaces. Asa’s
microsoft
Although I am generally platform agnostic, I make no secret of the fact that I am primarily a Microsoft developer. In a way, I grew up with Microsoft – as a teenager, I cut my programming teeth on the early microcomputer implementations of Microsoft BASIC. And I spent much of my
programming languages
My all-time favorite programming quote has to be this Nathaniel Borenstein bon mot: It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a