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When building technology, you need to think about not only what problems you're solving, but also what problems you're creating. 'Nuff said.
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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-year-old monster was a shiny new system with...
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Because C# is garbage-collected, I don't need to worry about cleaning anything up. Not. If you've ever wondered why your C# application is so bloated, this post is for you. The garbage collector in .NET ensures that you don't have to worry about freeing managed memory that you allocated....
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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 of performance. So here are some of my observations...
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You've got a big, complicated computer program and it's time for that program to exit. The user just chose the Exit menu, or he clicked on the close button of his main window, or your service has been asked to stop. What do you do? In my experience, people writing termination code fall into two...
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MapPoint is a Microsoft product that's a lot like Streets & Trips, with additional features. Most interestingly for me, it includes interfaces to programmatically control it, plus an embeddable ActiveX control. Since I was putting a computer into my car, it seemed like just the thing. In Streets...
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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 to design skills, is the difference between shooting...
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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 same reasons. But having patched your system, don't...
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.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, that doesn't prevent the target from being...
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When I start thinking about system security at home, I find it useful to consider the lock on the bathroom door. It's an extremely weak lock, and any ten-year-old knows how to defeat it. However, in practice, it's quite effective on a wide variety of levels. Consider: It's strong enough to...
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E_ACCESSDENIED? Good. We did OUR job. One of the security groups at Microsoft used to have T-Shirts that said this; every time I saw one, my blood pressure went up. He's a story illustrating why: Scene: A home office, fall, 2003. Our hero has just bought a new Macintosh (probably OS 10.0 or 10.1...
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Here are my three favorite rants about computer security: Matthew Paul Thomas, Security Snake Oil [link target editted 06/16/11] Ian Grigg, What's Your Threat Model? Bruce Tognazzini, Security D'ohLTs They're all five years old. Things haven't gotten any better since they were written...