Writing ... or Just Practicing?

I can't honestly say that I've ever been much of a patron of the dark arts. Mind you, a few years ago I was fascinated to see a chapter for a book on ADO.NET that I'd written come back from review with fifteen paragraphs about devil worship in the middle of it. I was about half way through editing this when I suddenly realized it sounded unfamiliar, and seemed to have little to do with asynchronous data access and stored procedures. I assume that the reviewer had got their Ctrl-somethings mixed up, and I still can't help wondering if there is a Web site out there somewhere that has a detailed description of the behavior of a DataReader in the middle of an article about witchcraft and sorcery. Read More...

One of the features of working from home is that, if you aren't careful, you can suddenly find that you haven't been outside for several days. In fact, if you disregard a trip to the end of the drive to fetch the wheely bin, or across the garden to feed the goldfish, I probably haven't been outside for a month. I suppose this is why my wife, when she gets home from work each day, feels she has to appraise me of the current weather conditions. Read More...

There's a well known saying that goes something like "Please engage brain before shifting mouth into gear". And another that says "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen". Yet, after what's now more than a year as a fulltime 'Softie, I've managed to avoid being flamed for any of my weekly diatribes; and neither has anybody pointed out (at least within earshot) how stupid I am. So I suppose it's time to remedy that situation. This week I'm going to throw caution to the winds and trample wildly across the green and pleasant pastures of generics, and all without a safety net. Read More...

I remember when I first started writing books about "Active Server Pages" how we had no end of problems creating sample code that users could easily install and run. There was no SQL Server Express with its auto-attach databases mechanism, no built-in Web Server in Visual InterDev (this was the days before Visual Studio as we know it now), and you couldn't even assume that users had a permanent Internet connection (the vast majority were on a dial-up connection). So you had to create complicate set of scripts and a setup routine, even for ASP samples, that registered the components you needed and populated the database, as well as providing a long list of prerequisites. Read More...

Despite being a writer by profession, and regularly castigating my colleagues for being recalcitrant in reviewing stuff I write, I actually dislike doing reviews myself. When I was an independent author (before I signed my life away to Microsoft), I was often approach by companies offering to pay me to write reviews of their products for their Web sites and literature. Even taking into account the presumed integrity of the author, this type of review seems somehow to be tainted when compared to an independent review by someone who doesn't stand to gain from it. Read More...

In between the usual spates of frantic two-fingered typing of exciting new guidance this week, I've been attempting to expand my brain to the size of a small asteroid (with appropriate apologies to Douglas Adams fans, the size of a planet seems a rather optimistic aim). All this comes about because an increasing amount of stuff in the project I'm working on at the moment, the upcoming version of Enterprise Library, depends on new whizz-bang features of the .NET languages such as lambda expressions, nullable types, anonymous delegates, and implicit typing. As an upgraded VBScripter, much of this might as well have been written in Klingon for all the sense I could make of it. Read More...

It's a good thing that Tim Berners-Lee is still alive or he'd probably be turning in his grave. I was hoping to find that my latest exploration of Web-based Interfaces for Kommunicating Ideas would lead me to some Wonderfully Intuitive Kit Intended for sharing knowledge and collecting feedback, but sadly I'm Wistfully Imagining Knowledge Instruments that should have been around today - and aren't. And, yes, I'm talking about wikis. Read More...

As a writer, I enjoy the weirdness of words. In the English (and US English) language, and particularly in technical writing, words often mean something distinctly different from their initially apparent meaning. When I'm looking at text provided by other members of the teams I work with, such as developers and architects, I often come across a word or phrase where the usage and context is obviously familiar, yet the real meaning is totally inappropriate. And fixing the text sometimes takes a determined effort as I try to bend my brain away from the obvious to look for the appropriate. Read More...

Maybe I've been asleep for the last few months, or just head-down working on my current project, but it seems I am the only person in the world who wasn't aware that a new version of Windows was on the way. Well, the only geek anyway. I don't mean the "Mojave" stunt - I mean what is currently referred to only as "Windows 7". And, rather strangely, my first thought when I read about it in a UK computer magazine was "Wow! Has there only been two and nine-tenths other versions since the Windows 3.1 that we all knew and loved? That introduction to millions of the Windows world of GUI seems so long ago now... Read More...

I was party to a discussion a couple of weeks ago that wandered off topic (as so many I'm involved in seem to do) into the concepts of whether a programmer is actually "OO" or not. I guess I have to admit to being a long-time railway (railroad) fanatic - an unfortunate tendency that has even, in the past, extended to model railways. So in real life (?),"OO" is the gauge of a model railway. But then someone suggested that many programmers, especially those coming from scripting languages such as classic ASP, are more "OB" than "OO". It turns out that what they mean, I'm given to understand, is that a large proportion of programmers write code that is object-based rather than object-oriented. Read More...

A couple of years ago I (somewhat inadvertently) got involved in learning more about software design patterns than I really wanted to. It sounded like fun in the beginning, in a geeky kind of way, but soon - like so many of my "I wonder" ideas - spiralled out of control. Read More...

I suppose most people have a "natural" language. I pride myself on the fact that I speak three languages: English, American, and Shouting (used in all other situations). However, while the majority of us geeks are probably mono-dialectic or bi-dialectic in terms of spoken languages, we do tend to be multi-syntactic in terms of computer languages. In fact there can’t be many older members of the geek fraternity who don't have a passing knowledge of some dialect of BASIC. It might be GW Basic, Commodore Basic, or some variety of Visual Basic. Of course, these days, many refrain from admitting this, especially if they spent time working with what they see as "proper" languages (and I'm thinking C++ here). Read More...

Sometimes you just have to feel sorry for developers. They slave away with their high-powered computers, multiple monitors, and earphones stuffed into their ears; glued to the same chair day after day as they battle with endless lines that basically all say the same thing. With only a hundred or so different keywords they can use, they are forced to try adding some variety to the content by dreaming up exciting names for variables, varying the number of spaces between words, and maybe (in a fit of carefree adventurousness) putting those curly bracket things on the same line as a word... Read More...