When building technology, you need to think about not only what problems you're solving, but also what problems you're creating. 'Nuff said.
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...
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....
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...
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...
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, tire stores, and map vendors everywhere....
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...
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...