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
software development concepts
One of McConnell’s 36 classic development project mistakes is gold-plating. It’s also repeated in the list, so I guess the risk of falling into this particular trap is twice as high: #28: Requirements gold-plating. Some projects have more requirements than they need right from the beginning. Performance is
programming languages
I found two interesting top 10 lists yesterday. From MSDN Magazine, 10 Tips for Writing High-Performance Web Applications, is a fine read. I’ll summarize: 1. Return Multiple Resultsets 2. Paged Data Access 3. Connection Pooling 4. ASP.NET Cache API 5. Per-Request Caching 6. Background Processing 7. Page Output
user experience
There are so many that it’s really hard to choose, but I think this may be my favorite nonsensical dialog in Lotus Notes, our enterprise mail system of choice: Good luck. You’re gonna need it. I’ve given up criticizing Lotus Notes. There’s no point. It’s
programming languages
As McConnell notes in Code Complete: If you haven’t spent at least a month working on the same program – working 16 hours a day, dreaming about it during the remaining 8 hours of restless sleep, working several nights straight through truing to eliminate that “one last bug” from the
technology trends
Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and... Please. Let's be frank. We are going home to
shell scripting
I couldn’t resist adding some features to my Shellicious code. You can now run shell commands either asynchronously (as before) or synchronously, like so: Private WithEvents _s As New Shell Private _IsExecutionComplete As Boolean = False Public Sub Main() _s.UseNewThread = True _s.Execute("C:LongRunningConsoleApp.exe") Do
programming practices
I searched for this citation, and like Wes, I remember reading it, but I can’t remember the exact place I read it: This echoes another comment from a recently read blog article, the author of which I cannot recall. Good programmers get off their butts. Typically, programmers won’t
programming languages
I mentioned in a previous post that I was launching command line utilities from an ASP.NET web app and capturing the output. I wrote a little multithreaded .Process wrapper class to encapsulate this behavior. It's nothing magical, but it is handy for these scenarios: Dim cmd As
programming languages
Now that XML comments are confirmed for VB.NET in VS.NET 2005, I’ve started to aggressively adopt the VBCommenter add-in, which adds XML comment support to the current version of VS.NET. XML comments are great primarily because of the additional IDE tooltip feedback they provide to developers