Blogs

Think about how easy it is to make a change to a shiny new, clean, well-designed system. Now think about how hard it is to make changes to a fifteen-year old system that has been under constant maintenance. Why the difference? Once upon a time, your fifteen...

I've often seen code with performance problems, and watched people struggle to improve it. I've also seen people struggling to achieve optimal performance while writing code. In both cases, I've witnessed lots of folly committed in the name...

She: You're so picky you stay awake at night wondering whether to spell anal-retentive with a dash. He: It's not a dash ; it's a hyphen .

I just became acquainted with Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen blog. Lots of good stuff there. His Developer != Designer article is short and sweet, and captured my attention. Money quote: The difference between a Designer and Developer, when it comes...

Warning I'm about to talk about modifying a Windows system in a manner that most decidedly does not meet with Microsoft's approval. I did it to a few of my systems for fun and for the educational experience; feel free to do it to yours for the...

.NET has a WeakReference class, whose semantics appear to have been borrowed from Java. As nearly as I can tell, they're both useless. A WeakReference is an object that holds a reference to another object. However, it holds a special type of reference...

There's a simple maxim taught in Business Management 101; Commoditize your complements. That is, whatever other people sell that makes your product more useful should be as cheap and ubiquitous as possible. Selling cars? You want there to be gas stations...