markup languages
Black and white works fine when I'm reading newspapers. But when I'm reading computer languages of any kind-- from Perl to SQL, from C# to Regular Expressions, from HTML to XML -- I can't bear to read them in black and white any more.
security
After I posted the CodeProject article .NET Encryption Simplified, a reader asked this question in the comments: I would like to know what your thoughts are on private key storage in applications. I believe the recommended practice is to use the DPAPI, but I have found this to be too
user experience
Here at VSLive! 2006 San Francisco, I've been sitting through a lot of presentations. Unfortunately, I've spent a disproportionate amount of that time staring at tiny, unreadable 12 and 10 point IDE text. Presenters, please don't do this to your audiences. If you can&
code refactoring
I often encounter code like this: if (rowCount > rowIdx) { if (drc[rowIdx].Table.Columns.Contains("avalId")) { do { if (Attributes[attrVal.AttributeClassId] == null) { // do stuff } else { if (!(Attributes[attrVal.AttributeClassId] is ArrayList)) { // do stuff } else { if (!isChecking) {
programming concepts
Even the best programmers make shitty software, with bugs. But some programmers are naturally proficient at creating this special kind of software, as illustrated by a Croatian developer known as Stinky: The anecdote that best reveals how little Stinky knew about programming started when he asked Bojan to help him
programming languages
I finally had time to improve my Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcut summary macro. Instead of writing HTML to the console*, it now creates a HTML file in your user documents folder, and navigates the IDE to the created file: Download the Keyboard Shortcut Summary Macro (2kb ZIP) The advantage
programming concepts
I don’t know why I haven’t found this before, but Robert Read’s* How to be a Programmer (PDF version) is well worth your time: To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is
software development practices
Marco Dorantes recently linked to a great article by Watts Humphrey, who worked on IBM’s OS/360 project: Why Big Software Projects Fail. Watts opens with an analysis of software project completion data from 2001: Figure 2 shows another cut of the Standish data by project size. When looked
security
I stumbled across an interesting article outlining how to beat the MSDN visual CAPTCHA algorithm with some .NET code. Unfortunately, the author (a Microsoft MVP) demonstrated his “crack” by testing it on the blogs of other MVPs: (if you were one of the 94 people i comment spammed) sorry about
refactoring
There was much handwringing last week when Somasegar announced what we already knew: VB.NET 2005 will not have refactoring. This resulted in a few emotional outbursts: We don’t need toys like [the] MY [namespace], we need working tool like Refactoring!! How can Microsoft refuse us those magical software
j2ee
You may remember TMC’s recent comparison of J2EE and .NET. Predictably, there was an IBM rebuttal to the study. Now there’s a Microsoft rebuttal to the rebuttal, which contains comments from both Microsoft and IBM. It’s interesting reading: IBM: The Middleware Company’s WebSphere J2EE programmers failed
.net
Speaking of ghetto languages, when exactly is the Windows Script Host going to be updated with a modern language – like, say, .NET? I want my WSH.NET! I still use WSH to write quick and dirty command line utilities that don’t justify a full blown .NET console executable. Like