testing
Michael Hunter's blog [http://blogs.msdn.com/micahel/] byline is unapologetically over-the-top: making developers cry since 1995. That's probably why he's such an awesome tester. Well, that, and the braids. Never before in the history of testing professionals have the top and bottom halves
software development
If you ask a software developer what they spend their time doing, they'll tell you that they spend most of their time writing code. However, if you actually observe what software developers spend their time doing, you'll find that they spend most of their time trying
user experience
Is it really necessary to qualify everything in Windows Vista with the "Windows" namespace? Hey, guess what operating system this is! At least the Vista start menu lets me do a containing search, so if I start typing 'fax', the menu dynamically filters itself to show
software development
For the last few days, I've been surveying a software project. Landing on a planet populated entirely by an alien ecosystem of source code can be overwhelming. That's why the first first thing I do is bust out my software tricorder -- static code analysis tools.
software development
Nathan Myhrvold [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold], the former CTO of Microsoft, is also a bona-fide physicist. He holds physics degress from UCAL and Princeton. He even had a postdoctoral fellowship under the famous Stephen Hawking. Thus, as you might expect, his 1997 ACM keynote presentation, The Next
software development
It's unbelievable to me that a company would pay a developer $60—$100k in salary, yet cripple them with terrible working conditions and crusty hand-me-down hardware. This makes no business sense whatsoever. And yet I see it all the time. It's shocking how many companies still
directx
Has anyone noticed that Microsoft defines "version" a little loosely when it comes to DirectX 9.0c? Here's a screenshot of the DirectX 9.0c download page on FileHippo [http://www.filehippo.com/download_directx/]: DirectX 9.0c was originally released in August 2004, according to
regular expressions
We're working on a little shell utility that displays paths in a menu. Some of these paths can get rather long, so I cooked up this little regular expression to shorten them. It's a replacement, so you call it like this: static string PathShortener(string path)
open source
Here's Scott Hanselman [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SandcastleMicrosoftCTPOfAHelpCHMFileGeneratorOnTheTailsOfTheDeathOfNDoc.aspx] on the death of nDoc [http://www.charliedigital.com/PermaLink,guid,95b2ab68-ba92-413a-b758-2783cde5df9c.aspx] : > We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it's free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding.
software development
Joel Spolsky came up with a twelve-item checklist [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html] in August, 2000 that provides a rough measure of – in his words – "how good a software team is": 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step?
unit testing
J. Timothy King has a nice piece on the twelve benefits of writing unit tests first. Unfortunately, he seriously undermines his message by ending with this: However, if you are one of the [coders who won't give up code-first], one of those curmudgeon coders who would rather be
virtual machines
Now that Virtual PC is finally free, I've become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It's quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you&