Author Archives:
Jeff Atwood Finally Jumps the Shark
Well, we all knew it had to happen eventually. After years of great blog posts and insightful commentary on the programming world, Jeff Atwood has finally jumped the shark in his latest post which essentially says “programming is hard, let’s go shopping!”. Now I’m not entirely sure why Jeff and Joel have decided to wage [...]
We’re Pregnant!
In general I try to keep this blog as programming-centric as possible. However, I will make an exception for this: We're Pregnant! 7 weeks along so far for those interested. All signs are normal right now *knock on wood*. With any luck, we'll be welcoming our new child into the world sometime around 7/28/2009!
Do We Need Another Open ID Provider?
As many of you have undoubtedly have heard by now, Microsoft officially announced during PDC 2008 that Windows Live ID will become an Open ID provider. From the Live Services blog: "You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!" That's right! Soon you [...]
Is Code Coverage Really All That Useful?
Test driven development proponents often tend to push code coverage as a useful metric for gauging how well tested an application is. 100% code coverage has long been the ultimate goal of testing fanatics. But is code coverage really all that useful? If I told you that my application has 100% code coverage, should that [...]
10 Programming Proverbs Every Developer Should Know
Proverbs are used to express universal truths or life lessons in a short and memorable fashion. I find that they are a great way to keep things in perspective, both in life and in work. Because of this, I have assembled 10 programming proverbs that every developer needs in their arsenal. 1. There is no [...]
Mapping Enums to Strings and Strings to Enums in .NET
I recently stumbled across a blog post demonstrating how to convert enums to strings using the Description attribute. I thought it might be useful to expand on that example by providing a function that reverses the process (e.g. takes in the resulting string and converts it back to the enum). This would allow you to [...]
Debugging and the Five Stages of Grief
My latest article, Debugging and the Five Stages of Grief, has been published on Datamation! Here's a short excerpt from the intro: As a programmer, you learn to accept bugs as a part of life. No matter how hard you try, there is no simple way to avoid them. What separates good programmers from bad [...]
Top 200 Tech Blogs
Datamation just posted their list of the Top 200 Tech Blogs and my blog came in at #165! I'm honored. There are a lot of great sites in that list (#147 Joel on Software, #149 Coding Horror) and it's humbling to be included, especially given the short amount of time that I've been blogging. On [...]
Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers
10. Comments that explain the “how” but not the “why” Introductory-level programming courses teach students to comment early and comment often. The idea is that it’s better to have too many comments than to have too few. Unfortunately, many programmers seem to take this as a personal challenge to comment every single line of code. [...]
Visual Studio Tip: Split Views
There are a couple of ways to get a split view in Visual Studio. Both are incredible time savers that I use daily. The first is one that most developers will be aware of, but the second seems to be one that many do not seem to know about. Viewing Two Files in a Split [...]
