Just to try out this idea I wrote out CSBat.cs, which allows C# code in bat and cmd files. Here is the problem this solves: Frequently I just want to write a short C# snippet. I don't want to write it as a source file, compile it, and run it. I'd rather...

I recently had the need to debug some code and was looking for an easy way to generate the call graph of the application. For a given function I wanted to see who its callers were and who the callers of the callers were, etc. Turns out Microsoft has a...

Ward Cunningham has some interesting comments about simplicity in his interview with Bill Venners. Here is a link . Here is an excerpt: A friend of mine once said that there are problems and there are difficulties. A problem is something you savor. You...

Here are some neat password manager products: Microsoft's Fingerprint Reader : Microsoft now has a cool hardware-based password manager, that uses your thumb print to figure out who you are and then automatically types in your internet passwords. This...

Here is a talk by Adam Bosworth on software simplicity . His assertion is that simple sloppy systems with weak rules are more likely to be useful in unforeseen scenarios and therefore are more likely to succeed in unexpected ways than systems with strong...

Here is a video demo on the experience of flying in Halo2 .

You can now download free beta versions of Visual Studio. Here is a link to the Visual C# Express Edition Beta . Here is the link to all the Express Edition products (Visual Basic, C++, J#, etc). Also while you are at it you can also grab the free SQL...

John Archer has made a really neat time lapse video of the recent lunar eclipse using Microsoft Movie Maker 2. Click here to see it.

Another humorous KB (knowledge base) whitepaper ; this one's on Barney.

See videos of the Crabby Lady taking on reader's comments about Microsoft Office tools.

The Developer Division now accepts direct feedback (feature suggestions, bugs) about VS (Visual Studio), the .NET framework, and other developer tools, here on their LadyBug site .

I recently read Don Knuth's "Literate Programming". It seems to me that a lot of writing on the web ignores the main point of literate programming. The main point is not to mix comments and code. That is pretty easy to do in most languages. What Don is...