A friend of mine just told me about what an MS evangelist said at a symposium on multicore (paraphrased), after getting the question: “Did MS consider that cache awareness for programmers in multicore development?” …and he answered: “The average developer is not capable of handling that kind of level of detail. … Most developers are [...]

Over the last week or so, I’ve spent a lot of time with the WDC 2009 sessions, and Dashcode, at least in its upcoming 3.0 version, seems to be amazingly capable. The results are almost indistinguishable from SDK apps (for want of a better label). And, they don’t go through the app store. And, they [...]

This morning I started developing for the iPhone (it arrived two days ago, what took me so long?). After watching a load of presentations from WWDC 2009 (you have to pay for that, but boy is it worth it), I got really curious about Dashcode. This environment lets you develop web applications and it looked [...]

So I’ve used a Mac for a while and I’m just starting on iPhone development and a blinding flash of the almost-obvious strikes me. This is not the Blackberry killer or the Palm killer, it’s the long-fuse Microsoft killer. Remember the monkey dance? Ballmer yelling “Developers, developers, developers!”, while jumping around like a neurally defective [...]

Had to use the Directory.GetFiles() method in .NET, so I read the description. Now, take a moment and read the following about how an asterisk wildcard character works in the search pattern parameter. Then tell me if this description is of a feature or of a bug. Windows, largely due to legacy, is full of [...]

Ok, I admit, that title is a bit over the edge, but still that is how I feel. Developing for .NET is increasingly becoming not fun and far too expensive. The only reason to do it is because customers expect products for .NET, but under slowly increasing pressure from developers, that is going to change. [...]

I finally got around to putting up the source code for x2c under GPL. No, you haven’t heard of this thing and it may not seem immediately useful, but when it is useful, it’s incredibly useful. The hardest thing is coming up with full samples of what it can do, so I’ll just outline it [...]

“Meatloaf code” is code that is there since a long time but nobody remembers why it’s there but everyone still respects it and keeps writing things that way. I call that “meatloaf code” based on the following anecdote that I read in one of my books, except I can’t remember which one so I apologize [...]

… can read and understand several books with contradictory or complementary content without having their heads explode. … and thus fear the one-book-religion as much as it deserves being feared. … can understand, appreciate, and follow more than one methodology at the same time. … know that no single book or methodology or language or [...]

There is a problem with Test Driven Development (TDD) and security. Even though I’m a severe proponent of TDD and do my own development (largely) that way, I notice a strong conflict between good architecture and TDD. I’ve also seen mention of this effect in the journals lately, so I’m not alone in this. What [...]