software development concepts

.net

Return to the Planet of Managed Code Bloat

I just updated my post The Bloated World of Managed Code with baseline memory footprints for Console and Winforms apps in .NET 2.0. I’ll admit I am a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to managed code apps. Now that tiny, native BitTorrent clients are available such

By Jeff Atwood ·
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file systems

Filesystems Aren’t a Feature

Don Park recently made an interesting observation about how his family uses the computer: When I observe how my wife and son uses the family computer, I can’t help noticing how little use they have for the desktop. They look bewildered when I open the Windows Explorer. To them,

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers

Philip Chu's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers [http://www.technicat.com/writing/programming.html] is witty, eloquent, and peppered with illustrative real world anecdotes: > Upon joining an early-stage startup called Neomar, I found myself in two months of design meetings for a wireless internet portal that

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

Client vs. Developer Wars

The 69 page e-book Client vs. Developer Wars documents one web design company's struggle to formulate a rational development process: Up until the middle of 2000, Newfangled's development process was much like that of every other web development company. The process started with the "planning/

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

The Story of SkiFree

Laurent Bourgeois sent in an amusing link to the story of SkiFree [http://ski.ihoc.net/] in the words of Chris Pirih, the original Microsoft programmer who wrote it: > I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

[http://www.clive.nl/detail/24424/] The 1978 BASIC program Animal [http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4] is an animal-specific variation of twenty questions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_questions]. You think of an animal, and the computer tries to guess what animal you're

By Jeff Atwood ·
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retro gaming

The History of Wumpus

I sometimes go by the handle "Wumpus" online. It's part of my personal brand, just like Coding Horror is. Why? Let's go hunting together: It was one of my formative computing experiences on the first "real" computer I owned. No, my Coleco

By Jeff Atwood ·
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case sensitivity

The Case For Case Insensitivity

One of the most pernicious problems with C-based languages is that they're case-sensitive. While this decision may have made sense in 1972 when the language was created [http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html], one wonders why the sins of Kernighan and Ritchie [http://cm.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The TweakUI Tips

I've been running some version of Microsoft's cool TweakUI powertoy [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx ] since the heady days of Windows 95. I recently found out that the author is none other than Raymond Chen [http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Conversations with Erich Gamma

Artima has another great interview series, this time with Erich Gamma. You know, Erich Gamma: Gang of Four, JUnit, Eclipse. As you might expect from such a notable developer, it's full of great advice. Like this section on avoiding frameworkitis: Frameworkitis is the disease that a framework wants

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Software Apprenticeship

programming languages

Software Apprenticeship

In Software Training Sucks: Why We Need to Roll it Back 1,000 Years, Rob Walling makes a compelling argument for abandoning traditional training classes in favor of apprenticeships: [Why not] use the time-tested approach of trades that have been doing it for years? Let's take an electrical

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The Lesson of HyperTerminal

In response to My Giant Calculator, Joost commented: I'll jump to the defense of trusty old calc.exe. Even though it's crappy, we know it's on every Windows box we touch. He's got a point. The applets that ship in the box

By Jeff Atwood ·
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