BeingADeveloper
About professional development, the trials of such, and other nifty things.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “law of leaky abstraction”, apparently put forth by Joel Spolsky (if you’re unfamiliar, please go read it – it’s worth your time). Lots of people have blogged about what leaks, what doesn’t leak, why things leak and so on.
To deal with this, people often are in search of creating a “cleaner” abstraction layer that doesn’t leak. And how many times have you seen an internal framework that took way too long to create – time spent refactoring to keep it “clean” by hiding the underlying system ? I think this is a big mistake…
Let’s...
I really like the new XPSP2, especially on my Tablet. However, there are more than a few problems on my desktop machine. No, not stability or security problems, but application compatibility.
All of my problems are a result of the new support for the "Non-Executable" memory protection that some processors (such as my amd 64) offer (The support in XP is called “Data Execution Prevention“ or DEP) This feature ensures that programs don't try to run data segments as code (stopping lots of types of common virus and worm attacks). The problem is, there are many applications that use data segments to...
On the persistent menu on a web site I’m working on, I have a menu item – “View / Search Lists”. Every time I look at this item, I feel bad… why? It’s a lie.
What it really does is show the user the name of the lists they have. So shouldn’t it be “Show available lists”? You can’t search them. You don’t view the details. In short, the menu item is a lie.
I see this in a lot of software – like the blatant “Go to my email inbox” in Windows Messenger that really means “Click here to get pitched ‘add-ins’,...
It's not bad enough that there's remote code execution exploits with the “more secure than ever” windows 2003 server... but to fix them, we have to take our sites down and reduce reliability numbers as well. Got any more salt for that cut?
If you hit my blog (here), or the VS 2005 “community readme” last night at 5:13, you may have noticed that you didn't get a response. That's because there is apparently no possible way to copy new files to my machine without rebooting it.
So here's a wish for the longhorn server team (whoever you may be): figure out your...
Think your software runs great in lots of situations? You've tested multiple monitors, all sorts of resolution, and even 16 color mode. Good for you.
But did you try putting the taskbar at the top of the screen?
That's right, people. Not everyone has the start menu in the lower left corner. I do on many machines, but on my tablet I put it at the top (It's much easier to reach up when your hand is resting on the screen). But many (many) of the applications I use don't work right with that placement. What can happen?
The application appears under the taskbar
The app saves...
There are many, many tools in the .net framework that are there to help solve specific problems that developers may need to overcome. The big problem is knowing when they are there. For me, a great example of this is a problem that I used IMessageFilter on.
I didn't realize how neat this feature in the Windows Forms framework is, until I had an "off the wall" request from a friend. They had this small application that they created, and they were doing frequent training on it. What they wanted to do was highlight each control (textbox, listbox, label, etc)...
SOA and SOE sound great. I love the goals, and I think that this approach may be
able to accomplish them. In fact, I'm trying to adopt these philosophies
myself and explore the benefits and drawbacks. However, instead of discussing if
SOA is going to work, I've been wondering what happens when you do SOA
half-assed.
That's right - what happens when you use SOA approaches but do them poorly, or
without understanding? Now that you've quit reading, let me explain why I ask...
Perhaps not ever. Chris Pratley (the “One Note owner”, Group Program Manager of Office) posted a quick bit about using OneNote to organize blogs. It's great, isn't it? I used to do the same. In fact, I thought “Hey, I'll just make a quick OneNote plug-in to post directly to .Text and I'll be sitting pretty. Perhaps I can even use Ink occasionally.”. Alas, that was not meant to be.
You see, as many of you may know, OneNote has no automation facilities. At all. The API is not public, and can't be used. So if you put your blog notes...
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I'm sure many people have heard of experts-exchange.com -- a question/answer forum site with a twist. People ask questions and assign “points” to them, based on how hard they think the question is. “Experts” (anyone) can look at the question, and answer it if they wish - if the questioner accepts the answer, the expert gets the points.
So the expert can say to himself “Self, this question is hard, and only worth 10 points. I'll answer this easy one worth 500 instead” -- the intent being that the more points a qestioner gives to the question, the more likely...