task manager
Shamelessly stolen from Scott Hanselman’s most excellent Ultimate Developer Tools List, Task Manager Extension is one of my favorite new addins. Like Notepad, Task Manager is something I use on a daily basis: it’s an essential part of my toolkit. I took a look at some replacements, but
software development
Although it's a little hard to parse through, I was blown away by The Rise of “Worse is Better”, because it touches on a theme I've noticed emerging in my blog entries: rejection of complexity, even when complexity is the more theoretically correct approach. Two famous
outsourcing
One conclusion is clear, anyone who thinks that onshore developers will triumph because they are more skilled is very wrong. We’ve found that we can hire just as talented developers in India as we can in North America and Europe. – Martin Fowler I’m actually so excited [about offshoring]
.net
There’s an interesting article documenting the dramatic uptake of .NET: Want more proof .Net is taking off? Consider the following: In May, Forrester Research released a report that found 56 percent of developers polled consider .Net their primary development environment for 2004, compared with 44 percent for J2EE. In
exception handling
There’s a bit more subtlety to rethrowing exceptions than most developers realize. Although this topic is covered very nicely at The .NET Guy blog, here’s another example: Try session = smgr.getSession(_strDocbaseName) Catch ex As Exception If ex.Message.IndexOf("authentication failed") > 0 Then Throw
outlining
Evidently the VB code outlining support is completely broken in VS.NET 2003. Why hasn’t this gotten more publicity? We used the code outlining features all the time at work in 2002, and they worked great. But after switching to VS.NET 2003 we noticed that selecting Edit, Outlining,
virtual machine
This won’t be news to a lot of you, but I was playing around with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 today: And it’s very cool. I know, I know, I’m probably the last developer on the planet to get wise to the benefits of virtual machine technology. In
.net
One of the great features of .NET is the automatic garbage collection that absolves the developer of worrying about C++ style memory management, where for every allocate, there must be a destroy, or you’re leaking. And yet, I frequently see overzealous developers write code like this: Public Function CrazyFunction(
regex
I generally don’t subscribe to the UNIX religion, but there is one area where I am an unabashed convert: regular expressions. Yeah, the syntax is a little scary, but for processing strings, nothing is more effective. The RegEx is the power drill of the programmer’s toolkit: not appropriate
debugging
I’m looking forward to VS.NET 2005 like everyone else, but the one killer feature that will absolutely compel me to upgrade on day of release is Edit and Continue. I had no idea exactly how much time I spent editing live code in VB6’s debugger until I
unix
A few months ago, Eric Raymond, the open source guru best known for his seminal paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, posted a rant about the difficulty he encountered with a common user printing scenario in UNIX. The follow-up post is even more intriguing: I am informed that an RFE
error messages
I’m sure I don’t have to explain what is wrong with error messages like this: Catastrophic Failure General Protection Fault Error: The operation completed successfully But as bad as those are, they pale in comparison to what is, hands down, the worst kind of error message: a beautiful,