: A Lament for Stack Overflow The author of this LinkedIn post thinks he’s describing something great in Stack Overflow’s …
: Software Development Roles: Lead versus Manager, Revisited I first wrote about the lead vs manager distinction in software development in 2016. A decade later …
: Navigating the Great Delayering, Revisited It’s been less than a year since I wrote this piece about engineering leadership inside a delayered …
: How I Created My First LinkedIn Carousel Post with Claude and Canva A friend recommended I post more original content on LinkedIn as I enter the job market this year. …
: This story of the use of “less lethal” munitions brought to mind a weird idea: the goon squad has …
: 2 cases of tuberculosis detected at El Paso ICE facility - The Texas Tribune Concentration camps of …
: Jackie Kennedy’s 1964 Letter Comes Back to Haunt Trump - The Daily Beast Jackie Kennedy had a …
: From the Equal Justice Initiative 2026 calendar: February 1, 1965 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and …
: This is the centennial Black History Month www.instagram.com/reel/DUM0…
: A sinister (and unfortunately appropriate in this moment) transposition of the National Anthem. …
: An early Black History Month note: Dr. Gladys West, a sharecroppers’ daughter, laid the groundwork …
: Silicon Valley's Latest Crisis of Conscience Doesn't Impress Me Anil Dash recently shared this N.Y. Times piece about the negative reaction within Silicon Valley to …
: Majoring in Minors Senator Elizabeth Warren’s response to a journalist asking what questions she would pose to the …
: The thin line between entertainment and war There may not be a more apt lyric to describe our present moment than that repeated line from No …
: Linux on the Desktop Revisited I write blog posts primarily for myself, and the post I wrote about running Linux on my Google …
: Revisiting Octavia Butler If you love science fiction, I strongly recommend you spend an hour listening to excerpts from …
: The New Year Brings The Same Dangers to Democracy To kickoff my 2026 posting, I’m sharing this story from ContrabandCamp, on the anniversary of Medgar …
: 2025 Wrapped: Charitable Giving Edition This post is my annual self-reminder to support worthy causes financially. If it encourages others …
: 2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 2) Despite most of the movies and shows I watched being on (too many) streaming services, it proved …
: 2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 1) Since Spotify and YouTube have started puttting out their “Wrapped” summaries of what we’ve been …
: You Don’t Need the Manosphere, You Need Hobbies Maria Bustillos wrote this great piece on the inadequacy of Scott Galloway’s kinder, gentler …
: Updating Micro.blog Cross-posting Settings to Blacksky While cross-posting something I’d written with blacksky.community-specific instructions on switching …
: How I Switched to a Custom Domain on Blacksky After migrating to Blacksky some weeks ago, I wanted to return to my custom handle as well. The …
: How Not to Talk About Being a Man Ian Dunt, a British journalist wrote [this piece] …
: Listen Frontier: Gov. Stitt says compassion has limits as state troopers clear Tulsa homeless camps by Dylan Goforth, The Frontier September 17, 2025 This week on Listen Frontier, we’re looking at …
: Charlie Kirk's Legacy Is Simple It is very unfortunate that any 31-year-old man already have a legacy–because that means he is …
: Navigating the Great Delayering as a Senior Manager or Individual Contributor The recent Wall Street Journal piece titled Your Boss Doesn’t Have Time to Talk to You …
: Mourning a Nation on Independence Day Frederick Douglass’ July 5, 1852 speech unfortunately feels very appropriate this 4th of July. While …
: Another Juneteenth, Another Trump Presidency My employer first started treating Juneteenth as a company holiday back in 2020, back when we still …
: Thoughts on Being a Gray Dad on Father's Day Jelani Cobb’s weekend essay, The Old Man, proved a timely and thoughtful read. I was 41 when …
: Yet Another Tribute to Andor This is my tribute to Andor. There are many like it, but this one is mine. As I write this, over a …
: Thoughts on the Press on World Press Freedom Day Were it not for emails requesting donations from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the …
: I Am Weary of Dispatches from the "Heartland" The latest one comes from John Dick (via excerpts from Mark Cuban), founder and CEO of a company …
: Vote No On Anti-DEI Shareholder Proposals One small way I’m pushing back against the anti-DEI tide is voting no on every such …
: The Cavalcade of Cowardice Grows According to this Wall Street Journal story, Google is the latest company to join the bandwagon of …
: Blaming Joe Biden for a Government He No Longer Runs This Franklin Foer piece is useful in a few ways: it makes clear that the destruction of the …
: How My Plan to Blog About a Great Podcast Episode Landed Me on Micro.blog I’d just finished listening to episode 981 of the Hanselminutes podcast on Blogging for …
: A Foolish Nation Repeats Its Folly Like a dog that returns to its vomit Is a fool who repeats his folly. --Proverbs 26:11 There may …
: Marcus Garvey, Posthumously Pardoned On this last full day before leaving the White House, President Joe Biden granted a posthumous …
: Farewell To Threads, And What Comes Next I deleted my Threads account today. Meta's previous announcements about the end of third-party …
: Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 2) This will wrap up my annual charitable giving post that I began on Christmas Eve with a Part 1. …
: Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 1) My final post of last year talked about charitable giving, but this I'm starting a bit earlier. This …
: The Return of White Impunity for Black Death Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their …
: A Nation Without Mercy, Revisited Yesterday, a mutual on Bluesky shared this news: How can you be deadlocked when HIS HAIR PROBABLY …
: We Are Going Back I hated the "zombie Palpatine" storyline for awhile on social media, but the United States of …
: My First YouTube Video [youtu.be/fE71ttWBu...](https://youtu.be/fE71ttWBuwo?si=0uOoP_H8zP8KAJM-) A hastily-made tutorial …
: Past Tense We are reaching and surpassing dates in real-life that were formerly part of our science fiction. …
: Toxic Fandom Keeps Winning Commentary: Can the Best of Star Wars Survive the Worst of Its Fans? Before Star Wars can have …
: Gatekeeping Blackness is the New Birtherism "Kamala isn't black" is the latest lie dividing black folks (and uniting those seeking to discredit …
: Reaping the Whirlwind For they sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; It yields no …
: The Real Problem with Biden's Bad Debate The response to President Biden's subpar debate performance against Donald Trump creates an …
: How to Protest a War Machine: Thoughts on Campus Protests In recent days, we have seen many university leaders of various titles (president, chancellor, etc) …
: Migrating My WordPress Database from a Lightsail Instance to a Standalone Database Last year, I moved this blog off of a EC2 instance running a too-old version of PHP to a Lightsail …
: "I have no time for foolishness." The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. …
: Now Sharing to the Fediverse, My Threads Account When I checked in on my Threads account recently, I saw that the Fediverse sharing feature was …
: Blaming the Victim: The Shoddy Press Coverage of the Dali Destroying the Francis Scott Key Bridge I've noticed a nasty trend in the way the press is covering the recent destruction of the Francis …
: Grand Opening, Grand Closing Ronna McDaniel's tenure as an NBC contributor has ended far more quickly than expected. Depending on …
: How the U.S. Waged a Global Campaign Against Baby Formula Regulation The following story was originally published by ProPublica, written and photographed by the …
: Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control? That's the title of this op-ed by Solomon Missouri, pastor of a rural church in eastern North …
: Woodrow Wilson Needs to Stay "Cancelled" The Atlantic chose the second day of Black History Month to publish this piece by David Frum to …
: Idolatry of Innovators Can Lead You to Foolish Places Here's an insane thing I read on social media today: Post by @inspiringselfcompassion View on …
: Farewell to the Last of My 40s Today is my 50th birthday, and looking back on my 40s from this vantage point, they were *a lot*. I …
: Insurrection? What Insurrection? It is January 6, 2023 and in an even more depressing turn than I could have imagined, numerous …
: What We Left Behind in 2023: Mint Intuit decided and announced last year that Mint (an excellent personal finance app that I've used …
: Charitable Giving in 2023 The number of hours left in 2023 is down to single digits as I write this. This year as in past …
: Looking Back at Highs and Lows of 2023 Highlights: Expanded scope at work 2 stand-alone teams versus one large one New area of …
: The American Dream is Still Achievable--But Far from Easy One of my mutuals on social media takes special glee in puncturing strongly-held beliefs. His latest …
: Great Customer Service Smoothes Out Bad Self-Service Success at switching to a truly bundled Disney+ and Hulu experience (both with no ads) from the …
: How To Say Babylon: A Memoir Terry Gross has been an excellent interviewer for decades, so when my dad shared a link to her …
: Flipboard Renewing Its Relevance With the Fediverse Flipboard is jumping into the fediverse with both feet, according to a piece from The Verge. While …
: (Tech) Education Should Be Free (and Rigorous) Free tech education is the reality being created by Quincy Larson, the founder of FreeCodeCamp. I've …
: Last Day of Work Until the New Year I've signed out of my work laptop for the last time in 2023 (as long as no emergencies come up that …
: Duke University Libraries Drop Basecamp I was glad to see Duke University Libraries in-depth explanation of why they're dropping Basecamp …
: Peter Gabriel Is Why I Love Stop-Motion Animation Back in October, I was reminded exactly when I became a fan of stop-motion animation. A friend in …
: Recent Grenadian History Revisited Going deeper down the Grenada rabbit hole I fell into just a week ago, I recently learned of a …
: The Muscle Memory of Surrender: A Brief History of the Modern GOP All of these smart Republicans who frankly did not understand how thoroughly corrupted their party …
: Grenada: Nobody's Backyard I learned a lot from this episode of Throughline about an invasion that happened when I was just 9 …
: Rhymes with 9/11 History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes Mark Twain I could not have anticipated that …
: What I’m Reading and Listening to About Palestine A friend of mine asked what I’ve been reading about the war between Israel and Gaza to help him …
: Ahsoka Fell Victim to the Marvelization of Star Wars via GIPHY I hate to say this about my oldest fandom, but Ahsoka wasn’t good. I'm not here to set …
: Why I Pay for Email (and Domains) In a world where you can get free email accounts seemingly anywhere, I recently decided to pay for …
: Postmarks Revisited Since my initial post on Postmarks, I made two minor changes to my bookmarking site: I edited …
: Remembering 9/11 It’s hard to believe 22 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of that day. I still …
: Unremarked Corners of Social Media: Substack Notes Edition It's been about 5 months since Substack introduced Substack Notes. Some Googling to refresh my …
: Everything Old is New Again: Social Bookmarking Edition According to this TechCrunch article, a Fediverse-powered successor to del.icio.us is now available. …
: The Presumption of Belonging In my occasional attempts to learn from people I disagree with, I watched an episode Briahna Joy …
: The Social Media Shakeup Continues: Bluesky & Threads Over six months have passed since I first started exploring Mastodon. I've switched servers (to …
: GOP state officials threaten legal action over company diversity policies A group of Republican U.S. state attorneys general on Thursday warned the country's largest …
: Religious Freedom is a Poor Cloak for Prejudice One thing I have noticed in the rightward lurch of the federal judiciary over the years, especially …
: What The End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn’t): Addendum Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this …
: What the End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn't) [twitter.com/michaelha...](https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1674424753929732106?s=61)&t …
: Memorial Days, Past and Present According to this article by Dave Roos, the earliest Memorial Day commemoration took place May 1, …
: A Nation Without Mercy Yesterday, Daniel Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter for the death of Jordan Neely …
: Murder on the F Train: Vigilantism is America's New Normal On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely breathed his last breath on the floor of the F train after another …
: Will AI Change My Job or Replace It? One of my Twitter mutuals recently shared the following tweet with me regarding AI: …
: Reading The South Through the Lens of Caste I recently finished reading Adolph L. Reed, Jr’s memoir of life in the Jim Crow South and …
: Is American Christianity Due for a Revival? Timothy Keller believes renewal is possible. He laments the decline in church membership and the …
: GenXJamerican.com Moves to Amazon Lightsail, A Follow-Up One change I missed after migrating to Lightsail, was ensuring that all the posts with images in …
: Salman Rushdie Talks Writing, Democracy, History & More I recently listened to David Remnick's interview of Salman Rushdie--his first since barely surviving …
: Exploring Mastodon Continued: Moving to Hachyderm.io After almost 4 months of using Mastodon, I found the community on Hachyderm.io (and its …
: From "Quiet Quitting" to Loud Layoffs One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is …
: GenXJamerican.com Moves to Amazon Lightsail Before last year ended, I moved this blog off its EC2 instance running a too-old version of PHP to …
: Insurrection Anniversary On this day, the second anniversary of the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, I took a look …
: Jamaicans Doing Big Things in America: Susan M. Collins Susan M. Collins is the new president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Per the bank's …
: Owning My Words, Revisited A few years ago, I wrote this brief post, after Scott Hanselman re-tweeted one of his blog posts …
: 2022 Year in Review Some highlights from this year: Very strong year-end review (best ever at my current employer) …
: Charitable Giving in 2022 As the end of this year gets closer, and more non-profits reach out for charitable donations, I …
: Linux on the Desktop: Google Pixelbook Edition A friend of mine recently shared this post in our Slack group marking 2022 as the year of Linux on …
: For Black Families in Phoenix, Child Welfare Investigations Are a Constant Threat by Eli Hager and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News, photography by Stephanie …
: The [Tech Bro CEO] Strikes Back What Elon Musk is doing to Twitter right now is what happens when someone with the same ideology and …
: Tell Me About Yourself--Engineering Leader Edition The following tweet starts an excellent thread of questions that I’m taking as a starting …
: 2FA/MFA Revisited Seven(!) years ago, I wrote a bit about security breaches and how two-factor authentication …
: Your Mastodon Experience May Vary--And Not Always in a Good Way While my own experience on Mastodon has been a positive one so far, my experience is by no means …
: Exploring Mastodon Continued: Timelines and Federation While checking out the Mastonaut desktop client for Mastodon, I came across the following diagram …
: Exploring Mastodon Continued: Verification As I mentioned at the end of my first post on Mastodon, I’ve been following Martin …
: Navigating the Latest Social Media Shakeup: Exploring Mastodon In the wake of Elon Musk closing a deal to buy Twitter (after trying and failing to back out due to …
: Churches Are Breaking the Law by Endorsing in Elections, Experts Say. The IRS Looks the Other Way. by Jeremy Schwartz and Jessica Priest ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. …
: African-American Evangelicals and their November Dilemma Pastor Dwight McKissic, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, …
: Waiter, there's a [brown person] in my [fictional world] The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally debuted on Amazon Prime, and right on cue came the …
: Who Is Worthy of Forgiveness? Plenty of people aired (and are still airing) their opinions regarding this question in the wake of …
: An Ironic Independence Day In two days, this country celebrates 246 years since the Declaration of Independence from Great …
: What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why www.thebulwark.com/what-do-b… Another excellent piece by Dr. Ted Johnson that makes sense of …
: Our Dishonest Discourse About "The Hard R" A controversy that began with this open letter asking Spotify to "take action against the …
: Social "Firsts" and the Supreme Court A few days ago, Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States …
: Two Tales of Tech Recruiting [embed][twitter.com/jstTECHch...](https://twitter.com/jstTECHcharge/status/1487209360883339264)[/emb …
: MLK Day 2022 The third Monday in January is here, and once again people who oppose everything Dr. King stood for …
: 1/6 and 9/11 Absent from much of the written commentary I've read about the insurrection at the US Capitol last …
: Is a College Degree Worth It? Public discourse has turned (again) to the question of whether or not a college degree is "worth …
: Thoughts on the Many Shades of Anti-Blackness A friend shared the following tweet with me not long ago: twitter.com/meredith_… Whoever Jen …
: Thoughts on Diversity in Tech On April 28, I participated in a panel and Q & A on the intersection of race & technology. …
: False Unity and “Moving On” is Dangerous Even before yesterday’s inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the new President and Vice …
: The Minimum Wage Debate is Too Narrow and Small Recently I've found myself having variations of the same conversation on social media regarding the …
: Why Conservatives Are Anxious About America Rahmaan Mwongozi (@TheRocsWorld) recently had one of the few good-faith conversations I've heard in …
: Only a Little Forgiveness for Old Debts I came across this parsimonious student loan forgiveness proposal in a tweet earlier today. The …
: Life and Religious Liberty for Me, But Not for Thee With Amy Coney Barrett now on the Supreme Court and weighing in on cases, the payoff to the …
: Rest In Peace David Prouse I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t thought much …
: Empathy Now Predictably, the calls for empathy for “the other side” have already begun. This tweet from Ian …
: 2016 Was Not an Anomaly As of this writing, we lack certainty regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. But …
: Kamala Perhaps unlike most people of Jamaican or West Indian descent, I was somewhat conflicted by …
: Thoughts on "Cancel Culture" On Twitter, I'm one of those guys who tweets "At-will employment" every time someone loses their job …
: An Imperfect Dividing Line for Honor America still wrestles with names, symbols and statues. But in the wake of George Floyd’s …
: My First Juneteenth Today marks the date in 1865 when General Gordon Granger read General Order 3 to the people of …
: New MacBook Pro The untimely death of the mid-2015 MacBook Pro that had been my primary machine the past few years …
: COVID-19 Doesn't Care About Our Politics A friend on Twitter asked the following question: Does the shortage of ventilators/mask[s] show the …
: Puerto Rico was a harbinger of the botched response to covid-19 In reading this excellent Financial Times piece, I was struck by this paragraph in particular: …
: Philanthropy is Marketing This post is the product of a conversation with some friends on Slack, on the topic of billionaires …
: (Stay) Inside [embed][youtu.be/mKzVc0rTh...](https://youtu.be/mKzVc0rThK8)[/embed] I came across a shorter clip of …
: Résumé Shortening (and other résumé advice) I saw a tweet from one of the best tech follows on Twitter (@raganwald) earlier today about the …
: Jamaican Anatomy I remember having a good, long laugh about this particular image when one of my cousins shared it on …
: Does Diversity & Inclusion Disadvantage Poor Whites? I came across a Twitter thread today (it begins here) which argued that diversity & inclusion is …
: Does Your Business Card Run Linux? Mine sure doesn’t, but George Hilliard's does: …
: What I'm Thankful For I have plenty to be thankful for this year. My 4-year-old twins are doing well--healthy, happy, and …
: Owning My Words After Scott Hanselman retweeted this blog post recently about owning your words, I've decided to get …
: A Thought on Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap I listened to this conversation between Dr. Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes with great interest. I …
: The JavaScript Guide to Clean Code This is a great presentation with numerous examples of clean JavaScript (and the much worse …
: Retroactive Repudiation Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that Virginia’s Democratic Party has been …
: The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World A piece well-worth the time to read, regardless of your ideology. I disagree with Dr. McWhorter’s …
: Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't Voldemort I'm no Harvard-trained historian like Leah Wright Rigeur …
: Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost. theintercept.com/2018/11/1… I’m not sure what took so long for the “broad political left” to …
: Thoughts on America’s Need for a Healthy Conservatism nymag.com/daily/int… The link above is Andrew Sullivan’s latest diary entry for New York …
: Nulls Break Polymorphism, Revisited Steve Smith wrote this post regarding the problem with null about two years ago. It’s …
: Thoughts on the Damore Manifesto I’ve shared a few articles on Facebook regarding the now infamous “manifesto” …
: Entity Framework Code First to a New Database (Revised Again) As part of hunting for a new employer (an unfortunate necessity due to layoffs), I’ve been …
: Podcast Episodes Worth Hearing Since I transitioned from a .NET development role into a management role 2 years ago, I hadn’t …
: Best Practices for Software Testing I originally wrote the following as an internal corporate blog post to guide a pair of business …
: Software Development Roles: Lead versus Manager I’ve held the title of development lead and development manager at different points in my …
: Getting (and Staying) Organized During the past year-and-a-half as a software development manager for a local consulting firm, I've …
: Security Breaches and Two-Factor Authentication It seems the news has been rife with stories of security breaches lately. As a past and present …
: Bulging Laptop Battery Until yesterday, I’d been unaware that laptop batteries could fail in a way other than not …
: Which Programming Language(s) Should I Learn? I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine (a computer science professor) and one of …
: Reflection and Unit Testing This post is prompted by a couple of things: (1) a limitation in the Moq mocking framework, (2) a …
: Pseudo-random Sampling and .NET One of the requirements I received for my current application was to select five percent of entities …
: RadioButtonListFor and jQuery One requirement I received for a recent ASP.NET MVC form implementation was that particular radio …
: Complex Object Model Binding in ASP.NET MVC In the weeks since my last post, I’ve been doing more client-side work and re-acquainting …
: XUnit: Beyond the Fact Attribute (Part 2) One thing I initially missed about NUnit compared to XUnit (besides built-in support for it in tools …
: Everyone is Junior at Something--Even You Hanselminutes #427 was an excellent interview with Jonathan Barronville, the author (perhaps the …
: XUnit: Beyond the Fact Attribute After using XUnit for unit testing the past couple of years, I finally got a bit tired of the …
: Learning New Programming Languages Important advice from The Pragmatic Programmer (page 62): "Learn at least one new language every …
: When Third-Party Dependencies Attack Last week provided our office with an inconvenient lesson in what can happen when third-party …
: Another Tale of a Developer Interview Loop There are literally millions of links on the internet about interviewing developers–interview …
: Farewell RockNUG! Last week was the final monthly meeting of the Rockville .NET User Group (aka RockNUG) after a …
: Managing Your Tech Career Episode #980 of .NET Rocks was an excellent 52 minutes on career management for developers. Since …
: Code Generation with LINQPad 4 Today I encountered a task at work that offered the prospect of some pretty dull development …
: How to Debug Small Programs This brilliant post by Eric Lippert is one I wish I’d had available to point to last month …
: Infinity, Epsilon and NaN I inadvertently learned some new things about the .NET double struct while refactoring some code …
: Advice for Aspiring Software Engineers Last night, I gave a talk at Towson University to a section of software engineering students (a …
: String concatentation Yesterday, Bill Wagner (author of a number of excellent books on C#) wrote a post on string …
: Europe in Winter: Barcelona, Spain (Day 2) The bus mentioned in yesterday’s post was the Barcelona Bus Turistic. It turned out to be a …
: Europe in Winter: Barcelona, Spain Barcelona is the first stop on our trip to Europe (hotels courtesy of my lovely wife, flights …
: Candied Sweet Potatoes 2013 Since the first time I posted a candied sweet potato recipe, I’ve made it a few more times. …
: Re-Introducing NuGet (and introducing Chocolatey) Last month, I presented on the topics of NuGet and Chocolatey at RockNUG as the lead-in to David …
: Reducing Duplication with Interfaces, Generics and Abstracts The parts of our application (a long-term service and support system for the state of Maryland) that …
: How can I become a world-class coder in under three years? I came across this question on Quora today and decided I would answer it. There were enough up-votes …
: Book Review: Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad Any new technical book has the challenge of adding value above and beyond what’s available for …
: Binding Redirects, StructureMap and Dependency Version Upgrades Dealing with the fallout in failing unit tests from a code merge is one of the most frustrating …
: Not Surprised, But Still Disappointed After being told the composition of the jury considering the case against George Zimmerman the week …
: Word Games I love word games. Whether it’s old-school ones like Scrabble and Boggle or the increasing …
: The App Store Economy Ain't Broken (So Don't Fix It) I came acrossthis article via Daring Fireball, and figured I’d post my two cents about it. I …
: My 2 Cents on SXSW 2013 Size I hadn’t been to a conference so large (whether you’re counting people or land area …
: Replicating Folder Structures in New Environments with MSBuild I recently received the task of modifying an existing MSBuild script to copy configuration files …
: Fixing MVC Sitemap Errors When attempting to manually test a .NET MVC application, I got the following exception from Visual …
: Identifying All Bad Mappings with AutoMapper One of the long-running annoyances we’ve had with our test of AutoMapper configuration …
: Ours At Last After about two weeks of homelessness (a.k.a. living in my wife’s condo and hotels), we …
: Fastest Realtor in the East? I didn’t think a house could be sold in just 4 days, but I was wrong. We got a list price, …
: First-Time Home Seller Since my wife and I are buying a new place together, I’m selling the townhouse we currently …
: How to Be Black I finished reading this provocatively-titled book a couple of days ago. I expected Baratunde …
: Visual Studio & TFS Behavior Tweaks One of a few long-running annoyances I’ve had with every version of TFS is one of the default …
: Freedom From Default Color Themes in Visual Studio 2012 I finally joined the ranks of those who’ve installed Visual Studio 2012 this week. The default …
: Tim Cook Should Ignore Ars Technica (Almost) Completely I came acrossthis article by Jacqui Cheng and thought I’d add my two cents on each of the …
: Help Build a Tesla Museum One of my favorite cartoonists, Matthew Inman, is using his unique brand of humor tohelp raise funds …
: Introducing AutoPoco I first learned about AutoPoco from this blog post by Scott Hanselman. But it wasn’t until …
: The Perils of Renaming in TFS Apparently, renaming an assembly is a bad idea when TFS is your version control system. Earlier this …
: Please Learn to Code (Continued) A couple days ago, I wrote a post on why Coding Horror is wrong to suggest people shouldn’t …
: Please Learn to Code I came across this post from Jeff Atwood in my Twitter feed this morning. It even sparked a …
: Thanks Again StackOverflow! About a month ago, I wrote a brief post about starting a new job. In it, I tipped my hat to …
: From Web Forms to MVC In the weeks since my last post, I’ve been thrown into the deep end of the pool learning …
: New Gig Tomorrow will be my first day with FEi Systems. They design, build and maintain healthcare IT …
: Retraction Just came across this story relating to my January 25th blog post on Mike Daisey’s story of …
: Inserting stored procedure results into a table Working with one of my colleagues earlier today, we found that we needed a way to store the results …
: Saving Changes is Not Permitted (SQL Server 2008 R2) We just upgraded our development VMs at work, and I got bitten by one of the more annoying default …
: A Brief Introduction to LINQPad I presented a brief talk on LINQPad at RockNUG a couple of weeks ago. This post will elaborate on …
: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory If you haven’t already heard this episode of This American Life, it’s definitely worth …
: Ninja UI Since yesterday’s post about my goals for next year, I heard from my friend Faisal about a …
: Another Year Gone It’s annual review time again, which means this year has gone by even more quickly than usual. …
: LINQ Aggregate for Comma-Separated Lists of Values A couple of days ago, while pairing with my colleague Alexei on bug fixes to a new feature, we came …
: AppleScript + RSVP Emails = Weddings Guests Address Book Group I’ve been using Macs as my primary home computers for about seven years now, but hadn’t …
: About that rapture thing It’s May 21, and we’re all still here. Not that I expected a different outcome, but …
: Introducing NuGet Today at work, I gave a presentation on NuGet. I’ve suggested they consider it as an option to …
: Practical MVVM Last Wednesday night, I attended a talk at RockNUG on MVVM by Joel Cochran. It’s the best …
: Wedding Website Up Here it is: http://ebandscott.tying.the.knot.org/ Thanks again to my friend Sandro for setting this …
: Ballet This year is the second in a row I’ve gotten to go to a Kennedy Center performance. Last year, …
: .NET Reflector--No Longer Free, But Still Worth It Those of us who registered with red-gate.com after they bought Reflector from its creator, Lutz …
: (Finally) Engaged Back on January 14, I turned my girlfriend Ebony into my fiancée :-) The next day, we went cruising …
: Introducing .NET Reflector I gave a presentation on .NET Reflector at the January 12 meeting of RockNUG. I took most of my time …
: Candied Sweet Potatoes Last month (for Thanksgiving), my dad, sister, a few cousins and I cooked so mom could have a break. …
: The problem with exit interviews The biggest problem with exit interviews is that they’re too little, too late. I had an exit …
: Deleting TFS Tasks I changed the state of a TFS task I was working on recently, only to discover the workflow …
: Filtering Heterogeneous Arrays in .NET One of the bugs I was recently asked to fix for an application required me to determine whether or …
: PowerGUI and .NET Framework 4.0 On my current project, we use PowerShell scripts to automate our UI testing. We’ve been …
: New MSBuild 4.0 Features My current assignment has me working with the application build again. MSBuild 4.0 got a number of …
: ScrollViewer+ItemsControl vs. ListView One of my most recent tasks at work was determining the cause of slow performance in one part of an …
: Bloatware happens when you aren't the only customer This article in Ars Technica reminded me of one of the things I never liked about PCs you bought …
: My First PowerShell Cmdlet We’ve been using PowerShell to write automated tests of the UI on my current project. One of …
: In non-iPhone 4 news Apple stealthily revised the Mac mini. Get the full story here, but the part I think is the most …
: When default settings attack When you first install SQL Server 2008 Express, the TCP/IP protocol is disabled by default. Be sure …
: To Curacao and back I spent the past 7 days vacationing in Curacao with my girlfriend Ebony and another couple …
: Going beyond files with ItemGroup If you Google for information on the ItemGroup element of MSBuild, most of the top search results …
: From enthusiast to user My friend Sandro read this Slate piece yesterday and wrote this blog entry in part about enthusiasts …
: An update on SCO Though I wished them dead years ago, SCO still lives. With any luck, this latest court ruling will …
: Adventures in e-commerce I’m working on an e-commerce site for the first time in about 10 years. The site is Trés Spa, …
: More on migrating partially-trusted managed assemblies to .NET 4 Some additional searching on changes to code access security revealed a very helpful article on …
: Upgrading .NET assemblies from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0 Code access security is one area that has changed quite significantly between .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0. …
: Why GDP Matters for Schoolkids Planet Money, one of many podcasts I listen to in Beltway traffic, had a great episode recently …
: When 3rd-party dependencies attack Lately, I’ve been making significant use of the ExecuteDDL task from the MSBuild Community …
: Continuous Integration Enters the Cloud I came across this blog post in Google Reader and thought I’d share it. The idea of being able …
: Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned When you first get started with PowerShell, don’t forget to run ‘Set-ExecutionPolicy …
: Can't launch Cassini outside Visual Studio? This may help ... I’d been trying to launch the Cassini web server from a PowerShell script for quite awhile, …
: Can Google Find You? Recruiters use Google. Whether you’re actively seeking a new job or not, it’s important …
: Transforming Healthcare through Information Technology Back on November 20, I attended a seminar at the Reagan Building on how healthcare in the U.S. could …
: Unit testing strong-named assemblies in .NET It’s been a couple of years since I first learned about the InternalsVisibleTo attribute. It …
: Figuring Out Google Wave I recently received an invite to Google Wave (thanks Rory). From the few minutes I’ve played …
: A visit to Iowa City Last weekend, I visited my cousin Kevin at the University of Iowa to sit on his Ph. D defense. For …
: StackOverflow Dev Days DC In this case, DC = Falls Church, VA. I went to the State Theatre to attend this conference. …
: A .NET Client for REST Interface to Virtuoso For my current project, I’ve been doing a lot of work related to the Semantic Web. This has …
: Adventures in SPARQL If this blog post seems different than usual, it’s because I’m actually using it to get …
: Adding File Headers Made Easy One of the things on my plate at work is a macro for adding a file header and footer to all the …
: Snow Leopard: Days 1-2 Thanks to a pre-order from Amazon on August 3, a copy of Snow Leopard arrived on my doorstep August …
: Random SQL Tricks (Part 2) In my previous random SQL tricks post, I discussed how to generate random alphanumeric strings of …
: A long overdue upgrade I’m finally running the latest version of WordPress (I’ve been way behind on upgrading). …
: Build Server Debugging Early in June, I posted about inheriting a continuous integration setup from a former colleague. …
: Random SQL Tricks (Part 1) One of my most recent tasks at work has been generating test data for integration tests of a new …
: Introducing Doxygen Last Wednesday evening, I gave a presentation on Doxygen at RockNUG. I didn’t actually bother …
: Converting MSTest Assemblies to NUnit If you wanted to convert existing test assemblies for a Visual Studio solution from using MSTest to …
: MSBuild Transforms, Batching, Well-Known Metadata and MSTest Thanks to a comment from Daniel Richardson on my previous MSTest post (and a lot more research, …
: Detect .NET Framework Version Programmatically If you need to determine what versions of the .NET Framework are available on a machine …
: Calling MSTest from MSBuild or The Price of Not Buying TFS When one of my colleagues left for a new opportunity, I inherited the continuous build setup he …
: CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild and Multicore CPUs When I was trying to debug a continuous build timeout at work recently, I came across this Scott …
: The unexpected home of IsHexDigit I was about to write a method that checked to see if a character was a hexadecimal value when it …
: Implementing Mouse Hover in WPF We’ve spent the past couple of weeks at work giving ourselves a crash course in Windows …
: Gotta love this April Fool's Day gag from Google Here’s the e-mail home page. They’ve got a little announcement, technical specs, even a …
: Free Software for Your New Computer If you’ve bought a new PC or Windows laptop recently, it probably came “bundled” …
: Recommended Listening: Derivative Dangers If you want to know how long ago the seeds of the current financial crisis were sown, definitely …
: Sometimes, I really love the web I’m at the airport to pick up a couple of friends, just back from a week in Spain. Adam asked …
: Alternative PDF Readers According to an article I got from my boss, there is a flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat …
: Las Vegas Sites and Attractions Photo Republished One of my Las Vegas photos from a trip last year got picked up by a little online travel guide. I …
: Microsoft Gets It Wrong Again According to this story, there’s no direct upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. Given all the …
: The rest of the inauguration day story The group of us that went down (my sister and I, plus two of our friends), secured our spot on The …
: So close, but so far away We were making great time until we tried to get to L’Enfant Plaza. Even though we caught the …
: On the train to downtown We got on the train at Wheaton around 6:40am. There was a bit of a crowd on the platform, but we all …
: Headed downtown Of course it’s crazy for me to brave the cold and the crowds to see Obama’s inauguration …
: Windows 7 Beta Here are my brief impressions of it so far: Installation Requires that Vista be on the machine in …
: World of Goo For years I’ve been more of a console gamer (XBox 360) than a computer gamer, but World of Goo …
: In Search of Wireless Internet Recently, I’ve gotten a couple of questions from family about where they can get wireless …
: Alternatives to Microsoft Office My dad asked me yesterday if there were any free alternatives to Microsoft Office. The one that came …
: Free Tech Support For family and friends of mine who don’t work with computers, I often act as free tech …
: Free Test Data If you find yourself in need of test data (and if you write software for a living, you’ve got …
: Another use for RSS feeds Caphyon, the vendor of Advanced Installer, has a feed for updates of the software. A brief look at …
: Clever Twitter Client Some googling for Mac OS X Twitter clients revealed this clever one. I wasn’t aware of Fluid, …
: Finally joined Twitter Being part of The Borg Facebook wasn’t enough–I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago. At …
: Comparing XML Strings in Unit Tests Comparing two XML strings is painful. So of course, my current project required me to come up with a …
: Flu tracking, courtesy of Google According to this story in the New York Times, Google can detect regional flu outbreaks up to 10 …
: Converting File URIs to Paths I spent most of this morning looking for a replacement to Application.ExecutablePath. The reason for …
: It's morning again in America The U.S. is certainly a different place today than it was yesterday. The commentary I’ve seen …
: Election Day I got in line a little over 30 minutes after the polls opened. According to the poll worker who came …
: Mark Cuban, Keeping an Eye on the Bailout If you’ve been listening to NPR’s Planet Money, you already know about …
: My Two Cents on Reinventing the Wheel Yesterday, I came across a spirited defense of reinventing the wheel in a recent post from Jeff …
: Why Performance Reviews Don't Work This morning, I came across this interesting post about why performance reviews don’t work. …
: More Financial Crisis Info I heard about this site on the financial crisis during an episode of the Planet Money Podcast. They …
: Understanding collateralized debt obligations The best explanation of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) I’ve heard so far comes from …
: Bailout Price Tag Continues Rising According to this story in the Wall Street Journal (it’s subscriber-only, sorry), AIG just got …
: More Financial Crisis Education The reporters who did the Giant Pool of Money story have followed up with Another Frightening Show …
: Planet Money Podcast The “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life I blogged about in May has …
: Grand Canyon, North Rim After the Antelope Canyon tour, we pushed on to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The north rim …
: Antelope Canyon This morning, we rode into Navajo Nation land to see Antelope Canyon. It’s one of a number of …
: Arches National Park A couple of days ago, we left Torrey and headed for Castle Valley, UT. Our purpose there was to …
: Bryce Canyon After breakfast at the Spotted Dog Cafe, we bid farewell to Springdale, Utah (and an excellent …
: Zion National Park We spent most of the day inside Zion National Park (in Springdale, Utah). The centerpiece of it is a …
: Need An Icon For Your Application? Visit ASP.NET Icons and download what you need.
: Stack Overflow is Live Stack Overflow is a great new programmer Q & A site from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. I (and …
: Now I'm Blogging for Work Too In addition to the entries I post here, I’ve started blogging for my employer, along with some …
: New Toy Vacations and holidays are my primary excuses for buying new toys. Since I’ve got a trip to …
: Granting full permissions to all tables and views in a database One of my assignments is to write a script that will grant CRUD (create, read, update, delete) …
: First Impressions of Google Chrome I started using Google Chrome (hereafter referred to as just “Chrome”) yesterday to see …
: Google Gives Us a Browser Even though Google Chrome is open source, I wonder what will happen to Firefox (my current browser …
: Reflector Update When I originally posted about the purchase, Red Gate hadn’t added a product page to their …
: smallestdotnet.com Scott Hanselman came up with this site that tells you what version of .NET you’ve got and your …
: Red Gate Buys Reflector I just came across the news this morning. I used Reflector a lot when I was first learning .NET. …
: Other People's E-mail Lately, I’ve been getting e-mail at my Gmail account that are clearly intended for other …
: My iPhone Review I picked up a white 16GB iPhone 3G on July 13. After a month of use, I can add my 2 cents to the …
: An Alternative to NUnitForms I first heard about Project White from someone at the Agile 2008 conference last week. I …
: More frustration with Alienware Today I come into the office to work, and find that my machine blue-screened overnight. I figured it …
: XML Schema Gotcha This is probably old hat to XML experts, but it’s new to me–the default values of the …
: My VW Passat and the Check Engine Light I took mine in for service this week for its regular 5000-mile service, and a check engine light …
: Writing the contents of a string to a text file I should have assumed this existed, based on Ed Poore’s comment on this post, but here’s …
: NDbUnit Revisited I first wrote about NDbUnit back in 2006. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear much new has …
: Loading text file contents into a string While working on some XSD validation code today, I found that I needed to load a couple of text …
: A couple of "old-school" CS principles Robert Martin is a guy our CEO and architects really respect when it comes to software design and …
: iPhoto Archiving When I bought my MacBook Pro a couple years ago, I didn’t get the largest hard drive available …
: The Giant Pool of Money For a great explanation of the current meltdown in mortgages, definitely check out this podcast. The …
: Hello WordPress 2.5.1 Finally upgraded to the latest version, so I figured I’d change themes too. The upgrade …
: Strongly-typed DataSets in Subversion Strongly-typed datasets are the default option for creating a data access layer (DAL) with the …
: Paintball I spent part of my Sunday running through the woods shooting at friends and strangers. The place: …
: Macbeth, Teller-style I saw this production of Macbeth this afternoon with my friends Jen and Alban. We were rewarded for …
: Upgraded to Leopard I installed it last Wednesday. My first upgrade attempt failed, so I paid a visit to the …
: Changing Primary Keys from "int" to "uniqueidentifier" I’m in the process of doing this for a project that uses Microsoft SQL Server. One of the …
: Back to the trenches Instead of management and code, I’ll just be writing code (at least for now). Today, I started …
: Stockholm, Sweden Yesterday, before our concert at Ekebyholmsskolan, we got to tour Stockholm. We arrived there from …
: Scandinavia Tour I’m writing this from a school dorm at Toivonlinna, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Finland. …
: A More Perfect Union Barack Obama spoke at length yesterday on the issue of race in general and his former pastor in …
: $1.67 That’s how much one (1) euro cost me yesterday when I was converting currency with Chevy Chase …
: The truth about usability I came across this via Daring Fireball today. There’s a lot more than a grain of truth to what …
: Time to buy an iPhone? I went to the barbershop on Friday. During my haircut, I ask my barber how he likes the iPhone. He …
: Refactoring Last night, I went to a presentation on refactoring by Jonathan Cogley. My notes are below: refactor …
: Wireless Mighty Mouse I saw one of these as a clearance item at MicroCenter yesterday, so I picked one up to try it out. …
: Taxes For the first time in a number of years, I had a professional do my taxes. I’d been a TurboTax …
: Null Coalescing Operator I didn’t know about this C# 2.0 operator (??) until ReSharper suggested it as a replacement …
: Fixing Computer Science I’ve been reading a lot of complaints about the current state of computer science education …
: TeamCity 3.0 Now there’s a freeware version of it that supports up to 20 users and build configurations. We …
: Apple Stuff iPod nano The iPod I mentioned yesterday is the 4th (!) one I’ve owned. Each of the previous …
: Birthday I turned 34 today. I suppose I’m officially in my “mid-30s” instead of my early …
: The trouble with using strongly-typed datasets Apparently, if your database-driven website is under heavy concurrent user load, the Adapter.Fill …
: Welcome to 2008 If a single word could define my 2007, it would be “travel”. I suspect it’s the …
: Digital Cameras, and another Adobe Lightroom Plug This time, from a much higher-profile blogger than me–Tim Bray. The bulk of the post is …
: Happy Holidays I wish all my readers a happy holiday season!
: Lightroom: Day 24 My earlier plan of a longer series of posts on the ins-and-outs of Lightroom was devoured by work, …
: Sight and Sound Theatre My sister and I spent the weekend with my parents and an aunt to watch the Christmas shows at Sight …
: Are Exceptions Always Errors? It would be easy enough to assume so–but surprisingly, that’s not always the case. So …
: SourceForge to the Rescue I’d been hunting around for awhile trying to find a tool to automatically convert some .resx …
: Google Webmaster Tools I just started playing with Google Webmaster Tools yesterday. I was very interested to find out …
: Aftermath: The Failure of Virtual Case File The FBI awarded Lockheed-Martin (my former employer) the lead role in implementing Sentinel, a …
: Lessons Learned: The Failure of Virtual Case File I came across this article about the failure of the Virtual Case File project about a week ago. I …
: .NET Developers Search The latest podcast of Hanselminutes mentioned a custom search engine focused on .NET topics. …
: Lightroom: Day 1 If you love iPhoto, I warn you–stop reading now. Once you read even a little about what Adobe …
: URL aliasing After dealing with a few of the gigantic URLs to SharePoint documents in e-mail, a custom version of …
: Outlook Lookout While I wait for Google to fix their desktop search bug, I’m using Lookout (version …
: Google Desktop Bug It looks like Google Desktop 5.5 has a bug that prevents users from opening forwarded e-mail …
: A brief note on version control, labeling, and deployments One thing I didn’t realize about CruiseControl.NET until recently was that it automatically …
: Exposing InnerException This week, an application I work on started logging an exception that provided no help at all in …
: App_Code: Best In (Very) Small Doses When I first started developing solutions on version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, I saw examples that …
: First earthquake I was at the San Jose Airport waiting on a flight to Los Angeles when this earthquake hit. It …
: Chocolate Sunday at Cacao Anasa I spent a few hours this afternoon making chocolate at the Cacao Anasa kitchen. My friend Peter …
: Defending debuggers (sort of) I came across this post about debuggers today. I found it a lot more nuanced than the Giles Bowkett …
: What tests are really for Buried deep in this Giles Bowkett post is the following gem: "Tests are absolutely not for checking …
: Quick fix for "Failed to enable constraints" error If you use strongly-typed datasets in .NET, you’ve encountered the dreaded “Failed to …
: Multiple meanings of test-driven development This Roy Osherove post surprised me because I hadn’t been aware of so many different …
: Reactions to inherited code This entertaining Phil Haack post on inherited code definitely tells the truth when it says: "Here’s …
: Between in T-SQL isn't truly inclusive for dates I’d forgotten this when writing a stored procedure to provide access to log entries in a …
: Theory D or Theory P? Earlier today, I came across this excellent post by Reginald Braithwaite on the management of …
: I really hate SQLDataSource What I said about hating ObjectDataSource doesn’t count. SQLDataSource is worse. At least …
: Don't forget to Google prospective hires One of my colleagues reminded me of that today. The developer we’re interviewing tomorrow was …
: NCover goes corporate I was on vacation when this happened, but NCover has become a product you pay for. The rationale for …
: Lessons from failure It’s an older Reg Braithwaite post, but an excellent one. His four most important causes of …
: Back from vacation While I haven’t made much headway on my other four resolutions for 2007, I just accomplished …
: I hate DTS I’ve spent a good chunk of this week trying to revise some DTS packages to account for changes in …
: Windows Software "Best Of" Lists Scott Hanselman updates this list every year. I use 4 of his top-10 utilities on my work laptop (my …
: Universal vs. Apple on DRM-free Music A very interesting take on Universal offering DRM-free music directly instead of through iTunes. I …
: Improving developers Scott Hanselman posts a number of great tips for improving development teams. The technical brown …
: To rewrite, or not to rewrite? This question comes up rather often in my job, and this post by Adam Turoff answers the question by …
: Leading by example I found this post on technical leadership particularly useful because it’s my role at work. …
: No parameterless constructor defined for this object. This error message started showing up during testing of some code changes I made to an application. …
: Die patent troll, die! Thanks to Judge Dale Kimball, we may finally be rid of SCO. Since he ruled that they never owned …
: Refactoring An excellent post by Julian Bucknall of Developer Express on refactoring–more specifically the …
: SQL Server Table Properties I needed a T-SQL statement to get the created date of a couple of tables as part of a project. One …
: Jeremy D. Miller on Software Teams His top three preferences in brief: internalized discipline over externally-enforced discipline …
: Is Fit Testing Dead? Jeremy Miller asks that question in this post. I haven’t had a chance to use it on any …
: Implementing IDisposable One of the FxCop rule violations I found in one of my projects had to do with IDisposable not being …
: Comma-delimited strings in SQL with COALESCE I came across a nice how-to post this morning. When it comes to databases, I’m a fan of …
: ALT.NET-->NOT.NET? I came across this James Avery post via Mike Gunderloy’s blog. Avery attempts to make a …
: Strongly-typed datasets and queries without matching select clauses I learned an annoying lesson about these late last week. I’d created the dataset by dragging …
: Programming Language Wars Scott Westfall, a member of the SlickEdit development team, weighs in with three “theorems of …
: Subversion and Team Foundation Server There’s a Codeplex project that enables developers to use their Subversion clients with Team …
: Ruby on Microsoft This piece by Martin Fowler interests me more for his contention that the best technical leaders are …
: "Rails.NET" Revisited It’s been almost a year since I learned about the .NET Action Pack. Since then, the project …
: Fun with Settings.settings Apparently this is where Visual Studio 2005 stores connection strings when you add strongly-typed …
: My 2 cents on the iPhone This Sunday’s Opus comic strip captures the hype perfectly. I did get to play with one for a …
: Unlocking Value at Microsoft I came across this article, via a post from Mini-Microsoft. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a …
: Validation for Windows Forms I don’t do much WinForms work. So when I was trying to find out how to get the equivalent of …
: VSS Shadow Folders We still use Visual SourceSafe at my job for version control. I inherited the administrative duties …
: .NET Utility Classes I just came across this great post on overlooked .NET utility classes. I prefer to buy functionality …
: Guiding principles for developers This list comes courtesy of Patrick Cauldwell, an architect at Corillian Corp. I’m definitely …
: Slimming down the FxCop rule set I asked a group of consultants currently working in my office for advice on which FxCop rules were …
: Safari on Windows I’m trying it out on my laptop at work to see how I like it (I’m all Mac at home now). …
: Index Seeks versus Index Scans We were pointed to this blog entry by one of the DBAs at work today. I didn’t fully understand …
: Use code coverage Eric Sink wrote this post in favor of code coverage. I wasn’t terribly familiar with the …
: Requirements Eric Sink’s post on requirements is the best and most concise treatment of the subject …
: TFS: Scenario Coverage Analyzer We use TFS at work, so I found this blog post on scenario coverage rather interesting. I especially …
: I hate ObjectDataSource They’re ok if all you want to do is display data in a GridView control (and sort it, page it, …
: A use for XCode that has nothing to do with writing software I came across an old MacWorld tip while searching for a quick way to compare an iTunes folder on a …
: Richard Stallman on Software Patents I came across this opinion on software patents via the programming reddit. It makes a great for why …
: Quick Data Access Layer While trying to find information on what exceptions a table adapter could throw, I came across this …
: The Obsolete Attribute One of the consultants I work with told me about an alternative use of the Obsolete attribute last …
: Don't Derive from ApplicationException According to this blog entry (or rather, the annotations), deriving from Exception is the correct …
: Hackers and Fighters I found this post on "street programmers" and computer scientists quite interesting because I manage …
: .NET Progress Bar I’d managed to avoid all .NET WinForms work of any consequence until today. We’ve …
: Microsoft vs. Open Source--Don't Worry That’s the gist of this rather comforting post at groklaw.net about Microsoft’s claims …
: UML Sequence Diagrams Intro I came across this link on UML sequence diagrams via Mike Gunderloy’s blog. While the site is …
: Another MacBook Pro Owner I picked up my Intel Mac last week. It will soon replace the Mac mini I bought in February 2005, and …
: Resetting passwords with .NET membership provider Say you have a user with no password question and answer. It turns out that calling ResetPassword() …
: Classic OO Anti Patterns I started reading programming.reddit.com not long ago. Today, I came across Classic Oo Anti …
: GUID vs. Identity Column for Primary Keys From the time I started using databases (Sybase 10, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5), I’d always used …
: Recursive FindControl with Generics Came across this via Larkware. I’ll have to make sure this code finds its way into our custom …
: Unit testing framework for BizTalk solutions I didn’t know such a thing existed before today, but thanks to a couple of consultants in my …
: Unit testing assemblies with internals How do you unit test an assembly if the vast majority of its methods are declared …
: A rant on programmers who can't program I came across this post today and wasn’t sure what to make of it. In my current job and my …
: Working with virtual machines A few weeks ago, my employer updated the RAM on a bunch of our machines to 2GB. The reasons was so …
: What Makes a Good Software Developer? TSS.NET posed this question in one of their newsgroups on March 1. Here are the comments I added to …
: App_Offline.htm I came across a couple of useful posts from Scott Guthrie about App_Offline.htm. This page appears …
: The Honest Boss Some friends of mine on a mailing list I belong to are having an interesting dialogue on ways to …
: SQL Server Cursors Personally, I dislike them. I avoid using them whenever possible. But I came across this excellent …
: Getting rid of ThreadAbortException We came across this on one of my current projects. It didn’t prevent the application from …
: ApexSQL Diff I first heard about this tool from my friend Greg at work. I’ve been using it the past couple …
: Daimler-Chrysler: Another Failed Merger? Today’s news brings word that Daimler may be looking to break up with Chrysler. I find this …
: Short circuiting in .NET Last week revealed an interesting difference between C# and VB.NET. C# operators like …
: New Monitor (At Last) I’ve been using a 19" Hitachi CM751 monitor for a long time–until today. FedEx …
: Agile vs. Waterfall It seems clear enough to me which approach is the best way to develop software, but not everyone in …
: Visual Studio 2005 Default Browser Changes I’m a big fan of Firefox. So it’s the default browser on every machine I have access to. …
: Coding Guidelines Another free e-book, this time on C# and VB.NET development standards. Fair warning, you do have to …
: Free .NET Book Charles Petzold has written a book titled .NET Book Zero. It’s a guide to implementing …
: Sandcastle Rant I came across this excellent post on the problems with Sandcastle, the Microsoft offering for …
: More on VSI files A bit of “googling” turned up these links: An MSDN entry on the subject This link to a …
: Visual Studio Templates for Test-driven Development I came across this blog post earlier today via Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware.com. One of the …
: India Skills Gap I came across this article in one of the e-mail newsletters I subscribe to. It’s highly …
: Yet another xUnit testing framework I wasn’t aware of the existence of SPUnit until a consultant mentioned it yesterday. I’m …
: Visual SourceSafe Tidbit I administer my employer’s VSS and Team Foundation Server (TFS) instances as part of my job. …
: The SHAPE command is the bane of my existence I inherited some classic ASP code not long ago that needed some enhancement. The look-and-feel of …
: 10 Years I was in the middle of writing my self-evaluation for work (review time is coming up) when I …
: Goodbye 2006, Hello 2007 First, to my readers (all three of you), I hope that 2006 treated you well and that 2007 is even …
: More on databases and business logic This particular entry in the “forever war” of whether to use object-relational mapping …
: Source Code Control I came across this post from Joel Spolsky last week (though I’m just now getting around to …
: Common causes of the System.NullReference exception I came across this blog post today while researching a problem with one of our applications. The …
: Working with IT agencies I have to deal with IT agencies a lot more now as a software development manager than I ever did in …
: Training IT managers I came across this post in a rare break between meetings. Since I’m an IT manager now, I found …
: The right penalty for breaking a software build Maybe I should institute this at my office on Monday.
: String.Format is your friend One of the consultants that works for me was trying to figure out the best way to format strings for …
: SQL Injection It’s one thing to know that SQL injection is bad, and quite another to have some stats to back …
: NDbUnit I’ve been a big fan of test-driven development (and unit testing) since I first learned about …
: Home computer backups Some friends of mine in California have been discussing backup strategies over the past few days. …
: Continuous Integration The practice is well-defined in a couple of articles on Wikipedia and on Martin Fowler’s …
: Stop users from double-clicking Submit buttons I came across this tip via 4GuysFromRolla.com. It’s some JavaScript to disable a form’s …
: Leaving Lockheed Martin I’ve left to join APS Healthcare as a manager of software development. My last day at Lockheed …
: Aston-Martin & Jaguar Changing Hands There’s been quite bit of buzz in the press about the possibility of Aston-Martin (and …
: Why Unit Test I came across a great post on unit testing today that provided not just why to unit test, but what …
: MyGeneration and Gentle.NET After last week’s post about the stored procs vs. ad-hoc SQL debate, I decided I’d take …
: Inspired by Ruby on Rails Instead of vegging out on TV after work today, I decided to veg out on the web. Between reading and …
: Visual Studio 2003 Service Pack 1 Somehow I completely missed this announcement about the Visual Studio 2003 service pack being …
: Stored Procedures vs. Ad-hoc SQL Redux I’ve written on the never-ending stored procs vs. ad-hoc SQL debate before, but there are …
: C# versus VB.NET I decided to post on this topic today because of an article I saw on the printer at work this …
: Open Source on the .NET Platform (part 2) Back in April, at the end of my first post on the topic of “open source .NET”, I’d …
: Downtime I haven’t blogged in awhile since finishing my latest project, pushingback.com. My employer …
: ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Today I’ve been spending a bit of time fiddling around with Visual Studio 2005, particularly …
: Effective Bug Reporting This has been a real problem at work lately. I’ve decided to write a document to send to …
: Community Server 2.0 Quick Image Buttons The blog I’m building for a client at work needed an image button to trigger searches instead …
: A "Most Viewed Blog Posts" control for Community Server 2.0 The Code Project is one of my favorite sources for finding out how to do things on the .NET …
: Adding static pages to Community Server 2.0 I was actually searching for information on how to add dynamic pages to a Community Server 2.0 …
: Changing File Upload Limits in Community Server 2.0 I wanted to see how much effort it would take to replace this RSS feed with a CS 2.0 blog. …
: Browster I came across a story about this nifty little plug-in just this morning in MIT Technology Review. …
: Windows Vista: The Incredible Shrinking OS According to this article, Windows Vista is losing yet another feature. Reading further, PC-to-PC …
: RSS Publishing It shouldn’t be a big deal at all with apps like Community Server 2.0 or WordPress available, …
: Dad wants an MP3 player, but not an iPod :-( Since I own 2 iPods (the 2GB nano that came with my new Passat, and a 20GB I bought myself), I hope …
: ASP.NET Calendar Customization My latest assignment is to help redesign this website into a true blog for the office of the drug …
: A general theory of design “Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they …
: Community Server 2.0 Patching Telligent sent out an e-mail last Friday afternoon about a critical security patch. These were the …
: Paging in Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures Today I found out that an old boss of mine at Ciena Corporation has a blog (thanks to Plaxo). I …
: IntelliSense for SQL Query Analyzer Red Gate Software is giving away a tool called SQL Prompt until September 1, 2006. If you work with …
: Amazon "1-Click" Patent Challenge According to this article, Amazon’s patent is being reviewed because it looks like the U.S. …
: Stored Procedures vs. Ad-hoc SQL I saw this insightful article on the subject in a “most popular articles” list. The …
: Apple's business model beating Microsoft's So says Walt Mossberg, the man with the job I envy most in technology. I agree with what he says for …
: Removing time from a datetime field in SQL I’ve got a small project at work that required me to use the date, but not the time in a …
: ASP.NET Configuration File Handling One of things I like the least about working with multiple development, QA, and production …
: Downside of Certification According to this eWeek article pay premiums for skills that don’t have a certification grew …
: Amazon.com and A9.com switch to Microsoft Search I hadn’t noticed this until yesterday, but Google is no longer the guts of A9 & Amazon …
: Mac OS X gets its first virus According to this article in MIT Technology Review, the Apple operating system got it’s very …
: .NET Social Security Number Validation Writing code for work on a Sunday is certainly not my idea of a good time. Especially when our …
: Ether Beta Test Awhile back, I read a blog entry (probably from Robert Scoble) about a venture called Ether. If …
: VS.NET 2003 Annoyance VS.NET really annoyed me today. When I changed my custom page base class to be abstract, the web …
: Ads coming to iTunes I came across the article today in Advertising Age (via a Wall Street Journal link). The article …
: Open Source on the .NET Platform (part 1) Open source on the .NET platform is a topic I’ve been thinking about for awhile. My current …
: First bilingual application In the nearly 11 years I’ve been writing software for real money, I haven’t had any …
: We need heroism These are the words I least want to hear, especially when it comes to my job. I heard them today …
: Akismet Rules Akismet is a ruthless comment spam killer :-) Moderating comments is super-easy now (since I’d …
: iPodding my car (part 3) According to Antwerpen VW, Volkswagen says that the way the iPod adapter hooks into the stereo …
: Buying my car I should have written this back in February, since I don’t have nearly as many recommended …
: iPodding my car (part 2) The ugly continues :-( The sound on the satellite radio is back, but now some information on my …
: iPodding my car Last month, I bought a new VW Passat from the folks at Antwerpen VW (who gave me a great deal on a …
: The acquisition continues Lockheed Martin’s deal to buy Aspen Systems was finalized back in February, but until this …
: Windows Live Again This morning I came across an article that asks whether Windows Live is better than Google. I …
: Blogging and Podcasting for ONDCP Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the RSS, Podcasts, etc! workshop along with a colleague. Our …
: .NET User Groups are Good Before yesterday, I didn’t know what I was missing. I’d always gained my knowledge about …
: Bosses 'are deluded' over success of deals An interesting title for this story I read in the Times this morning. The acquisition of my current …
: What Corporations Know About Us This morning, when I was listening to the umpteenth radio story about the Justice Department …
: Advice from Warren Buffett Buried deep in this article about the dangerous size of the U.S. trade deficit was this bit of …
: 32 Today is my 32nd birthday. To me, it doesn’t seem like a particularly special birthday. It …
: .NET Development Tools Richard Slade came up with a great list of free tools he thinks .NET developers should be using. I …
: Ruby on Rails Progress I finished Curt Hibbs' first Rolling with Ruby on Rails tutorial today. After getting phpMyAdmin …
: Trying out Ruby on Rails I made it one of my resolutions to learn Ruby this year, so I took a bit of time yesterday and today …
: Who got money from Jack Abramoff The entire list is here. It includes how much he gave and when.
: Goals for 2006 Improve My Health Exercise 3 times a week Cook 3 times a week Maintain My Hobbies Shoot 36 film …
: Teaching the Clinton Presidency I admit it–I’m a C-SPAN junkie. The purpose of the open phones topic this morning was to …
: Windows Live Beta vs Google Homepage My office gives us the day off tomorrow, but it’s pretty much a ghost town already. I had a …
: Busier Ads from Google :-( This article from the NY Times (free subscription required) tells us that those of us who use Google …
: Acquired Last Friday, just before the end of the day, I found out that my current employer had been acquired. …
: Skiing Yesterday, I got on a pair of skis for the first time since 8th grade. A friend and I went to Wisp …
: Microsoft doesn't get Test-driven Development That’s what Scott Bellware contends in this blog post. He does a very thorough job of explains …
: Gmail signature graphic I came across an application that generates signature graphics for Gmail, Yahoo, and other e-mail …
: When clients (and bosses) go bad ... I came across this article via the Signals vs. Noise blog. While the entire piece is 100% on target, …
: Bush's Latest Appointment: Harriet Miers Trying to find some information about Bush’s latest appointee to the Supreme Court, I found …
: Debugging With two of the projects I’ve been working on finally out the door, I’ve finally got …
: $44.92 That’s how much it cost me to fuel up the Volkswagen Jetta I drive today. $3.59 a gallon, and …
: Refugees? I was listening to C-SPAN on the way into work and one of the callers had an interesting question: …
: Taking Time to Think Came across this blog post via digg.com. The management tips seem quite reasonable in isolation. But …
: A Leap of Faith I had a chat with a former co-worker at Ciena Corporation yesterday. I was surprised to discover …
: Robin Curry - AJAX and ASP.NET Resources When my employer moves to the latest version of VS.NET, this article will get a lot more …
: VB.NET Coding Guidelines My current project is the first one where I had to write a substantial amount of VB.NET code (I …
: 4GuysFromRolla.com - Retrieving the First N Records from a SQL Query Our development team found this article quite helpful during development of a custom portal. …
: Housing Bubble Burst? Paul Krugman seems to believe so. Check out his complete column in the New York Times online (free …
: 188 Megabytes All the papers, projects, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets of three years in the University …
: Map Hacking A friend of mine came across this page with a bunch of interesting googlemaps-related hacks. I …
: Bush Jumps into "Intelligent Design" Fray I wrote about “intelligent design” at length back in March. If anything it’s taken …
: Never expected to see a cellphone here ... I finally dragged myself to the gym for the first time in awhile. The combination of business school …
: Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress A quick note of thanks to the author of the illustrated tutorial, and Andy Skelton, the author of …
: Exceptions in .NET Hunting for best practices info on creating custom exceptions, I came across a post titled …
: Configuring multiple files in web.config I was hunting for information on security settings in web.config files when I came across this link. …
: Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens I first read about the Discovery Institute in a Wired magazine article last October. At the time, I …
: Fixing the C# IssueTracker SDK Beta My boss wanted to use it to track issues with projects we develop internally and for clients. So I …
: Giant Steps, Animated Came across this via Scobleizer (who came across it via Tim Bray). It's a recording of John …
: "Free" Project Management Software I was looking for information on the right way to modify the ASP.NET Issue Tracker starter kit to …
: Mac OS X Address Book Once I got over trying to import a CSV file into it (silly me), getting contacts out of my Yahoo …
: The mini has landed The Mac mini I ordered online back in February finally arrived tonight. The only real problem …
: "Free" Project Management Software I was looking for information on the right way to modify the ASP.NET Issue Tracker starter kit to …
: Why Your Broadband Sucks A good column by Lawrence Lessig on a problem with Wi-Fi access in the U.S. In short, lobbyists are …
: White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs I came across this story late, but it has to be one of the most bizarre and sad stories I've read in …
: More Mac mini Ideas 1. Make it a low-cost recording studio. 2. Make it a media center. I've already got a digital piano …
: Howard Dean: DNC Chairman Even though I haven't been a registered Democrat for some time now (switched to independent 5+ years …
: Cult of the Mac Membership++ About half an hour ago, I purchased a Mac mini. If you've read anything in the press about the "iPod …
: Gmail Invite Anyone? Google recently dumped 50 each on current members. I plan to donate some to our troops overseas, but …
: Blog Mapping I across a Scobleizer post about this and thought I'd give it a try: An interesting use of MapPoint …
: Three Paper Town? To the Washington Post and the Washington Times we can add another paper: The Washington Examiner. …
: Solution Spheres: How To: turn your Mac mini into a Media Center PC Some very interesting ideas on what you can do with a Mac mini.
: Yahoo! News - NFL Game Broadcasts Coming to iPods Interesting news for current and future members of the cult of iPod (I'm in the former category). I …
: Forbes.com: When IPod Sales Run Out Of Steam Not exactly a doom-and-gloom piece for Apple, but it does project a time when the gap between the …
: Social Security Formula Weighed (washingtonpost.com) If I'm reading this article correctly, it sounds like Social Security benefits are certain to be …
: Feasibility of Missile Defense This study from a trio of physicists does an excellent job of highlighting the incredible …
: DC Baseball in Doubt Whoever reads this should take my comments with a grain of salt. I've worked in DC on multiple …
: Unconventional Wisdom on Staying Put Instead of Off-Shoring This article from McKinsey Quarterly takes a look into why some companies continue to manufacture in …
: A Fight for Shiites You can read Charles Krauthammer's whole commentary to get the context, but he essential begins his …
: Situational Ethics Defined According to this article in The Hill newspaper, the House GOP will change a rule they enacted in …
: Gonzales' Secrecy Thing Eric Umansky, sometime author of Slate's "Today's Papers", gives another reason for concern about …
: Dispelling Malpractice Myths For anyone concerned about the state of healthcare in this country (which is probably just about …
: Loyal to a Fault? This excellent piece by Phillip Carter, author of the Intel Dump weblog, is a very worthwhile read …
: Yet Another Technology Plug--Bloglines Bloglines is a wonderful service that allows you to keep up with all your RSS feeds without having …
: My plug for Mozilla Firefox I've been using this browser since version 0.7, and it's great. No random pop-up advertising from …
: My 2 cents on the election It's easy enough to say it now, but I didn't see Kerry winning this election against George W. Bush. …
: Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide Excellent analysis of the actions of our government in both countries.
: Next Stop: Iran? Dr. Cole seems to believe so. Read the whole post. It's worthwhile if only to get the historical …
: For Some Soldiers the War Never Ends Very interesting commentary on the Defense Department's use of stop-loss orders and activation of …
: Gen. Anthony Zinni's Remarks at the Center for Defense Information Board of Directors' Dinner He lays out a series of excellent ideas to be considered for solving the mess that Iraq has become. …
: Tax and Drill Now here's something you don't read every day--a conservative columnist arguing in favor of a …
: No Flinching from the Facts Very well-written column by George Will that touches on the actions at Abu Ghraib, the lead-up to …
: Moral Clarity, Courage Needed, Bush Aide Says From the article: America needs people who have “the moral clarity and courage to do …
: Casualty of War A fascinating piece in GQ about Colin Powell.
: How to get out of Iraq This feature by Peter W. Galbraith makes a compelling case for how the U.S. …
: The U.S. reaps a whirlwind in Iraq This article does a good job of laying out the mistakes that both …
: Iraq duty deters re-enlistment We can only hope this is a one-time blip instead of a signal of a …
: Moody's cuts Ciena Corp ratings to B2 This provides perhaps the best summary I've seen anywhere of …
: Our Last Real Chance Excellent column by Fareed Zakaria on how the situation in Iraq might be …
: Self-serving Gasoline Complaints Good column on the current debate over what to do about the high …
: Bush Admits Misleading Nation April Fools' Day column by Gregg Easterbrook.
: Killing Iraq with Kindness Excellent column on the unintended consequences of armed intervention, …
: O'Reilly, O'Franken, oh no! | csmonitor.com A thoughtful piece that talks about the downsides of …
: Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind This story from MSNBC indicates that the White …
: VoIP - Plan A vs Plan B Article by Clay Shirky on possible outcomes in the voice-over IP market. He …
: Radio Hosts to Pay for Lewdness I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I'm not a Howard Stern fan. But if he didn't …
: Prosecutor in Terror Case Controversy Sues Ashcroft This can't be good news. Even with the expanded powers they've received due to the Patriot Act, the …
: Secret Report Warns of Iraq "Balkanization" Financial Times scoop on a secret report indicating fears of Iraq dividing into multiple regions …
: Bush on Meet the Press: A Rebuttal from Juan Cole Fantastic analysis and rebuttal to President Bush's statements on "Meet the Press" this Sunday. …
: The CIA: Method and Madness Ok column by David Brooks in the NY Times today about the problems with the way the CIA analyzes …
: Scott Ritter was Right All Along I heard him this morning on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb. It's very interesting that he was perhaps the …
: An Absence of Legitimacy Excellent commentary by Fareed Zakaria on what's happening in Iraq. The point that he makes at the …
: NASA Cancels Trip to Supply Hubble, Sealing Early Doom NASA Cancels Trip to Supply Hubble, Sealing Early Doom It figures. One of NASA’s most …
: The Troublesome, Vote-loving Ayatollah The troublesome, vote-loving ayatollah This story from The Economist covers a lot of ground on …
: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years Great essay by Peter Norvig that begins by talking about the …
: Fiber to the People Fiber to the People A Lawrence Lessig article on customer-owned networks. He uses examples from …
: USB FM Radio I wasn't even aware such a thing existed until my friend Rob told me about it. The one I bought is a …
: Stored Procedure Naming Don't name your stored procedures with sp_ I found the following note: Note: Do not preface your …
: Presenting Data and Information Presenting Data and Information (a 1-day course by Edward Tufte) I attended this presentation last …
: Presenting Data and Information Notes from Presenting Data and Information A basic Google search will reveal all kinds of pages of …