namespaces
Jon Galloway recently pointed out something that’s been bothering me for a while: I’m happy to see the huge growth of community contributed code – things like RSS.NET, sharpziplib, ftp classes to tide us over ’til .NET 2.0, etc. But one thing that bothers me is the
software development concepts
Jack Black, in the DVD extras for School of Rock, had this to say in an interview: I had to learn how to play electric guitar a little bit because all I play is acoustic guitar. And I’m still not very good at electric guitar. And the truth is,
software development concepts
How can you tell experienced programmers from beginners? New programmers think if they work hard, they might succeed. Experienced programmers know that if they work really hard, they might not fail. Allow me to elaborate with an excerpt from an interview with Steve McConnell: SM: One of the points I
unicode
Over the last few months, I’ve come to realize that I had an ugly American view of strings. I always wondered what those crazy foreigners were complaining about in their comments on my CodeProject articles, and now I know: there ain’t no such thing as plain text: If
software development concepts
A recent post by Wesner Moise after a two month hiatus got me thinking about a passage from Steve McConnell’s, After The Gold Rush. Like all Steve’s stuff, it’s great, but the title is unintentionally ironic: the book was released in 1999, at the very height of
programming languages
It’s always reassuring to be reminded that people much more talented than myself make mistakes, too. And I especially appreciate it when they share those mistakes in the form of advice: On avoiding IT mistakes: Rick Cattell’s, Things I Wish I Learned in Engineering School: * Good technology is
software development concepts
Brad Wilson pointed out a new, interesting blog yesterday: Spurious Pundit. On managing developers: It’s like you’re asking them to hang a picture for you, but they’ve never done it before. You understand what you need done - the trick is getting them to do it. In
software development concepts
If Task Manager Extension is Task Manager on steroids, then Mark Russinovich’s Process Explorer is Task Manager in a ripped anabolic fury, fueled by high octane rage. In other words, it’s extreme: Although it can be a little overwhelming – I think it just kicked sand in my face
programming languages
I stumbled across the Craig Andera post, The Last Configuration Section Handler I’ll Ever Need a few months ago, but I didn’t really understand the implications until I started writing a bunch of configuration section handlers. His approach is very clever; instead of writing a bunch of tedious
programming languages
Mike Gunderloy’s book, Coder to Developer, suggests, as part of configuring your IDE, that you explore programming specific fonts. I was intrigued, because I hadn’t ever considered that. I’ve been using Courier New 9 for years. A little searching turned up a few links: * This programming font
software development concepts
In The Fallacy of the Data Layer, Rocky Lhotka makes a case for something I’ve come to believe as absolute truth: It is commonly held as a truth that applications have a UI layer, a business layer and a data layer. In most of my presentations and writing I
programming languages
As the old adage goes: Good programmers write good code; great programmers steal great code. This is definitely true, mostly because great programmers have learned to do some research before writing anything at all. However, even great programmers tend to be absolutely terrible at graphic design, even though the solution