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 [...]

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 [...]

To quote an article on annoyances.org about the new ClickOnce install support that MS has added to .NET: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update, pushed through the Windows Update service to all recent editions of Windows in February 2009, installs the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant firefox extension without asking your permission. This [...]

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 [...]

After a bit of searching, I found a way to have strongly typed constant parameters for C# functions. You know the situation, where you need to pass one of a limited set of strings or chars or other values to a function and you want to make sure somebody doesn’t just go and pass any [...]

This falls in the category “neat tricks” and definitely under “DRY” (Don’t Repeat Yourself). When you have a list of constants that you need to save or retrieve, typically settings, you easily get into a situation where you have say 20 constant strings defining the names of your constants, and then a block of code [...]