I just realized that on my list of features missing from JScript.NET "fast mode" I forgot about the caller property of functions....

The other day I noted that extending the built-in objects in JScript .NET is no longer legal in "fast mode". Of course, this is still legal in "compatibility mode" if you need it, but why did we take it out of fast mode?...

Any new feature which does not serve a large percentage of users is essentially stealing valuable resources that could be spent implementing features, fixing bugs or looking for security vulnerabilities that DO impact the lives of millions of people....

My entry the other day about fast mode in JScript .NET sparked a number of questions which deserve fuller explanations. I’ll try to get to them in my next couple of blog entries. For example, when I said that it was no longer legal to redefine a function, I wasn’t really clear on what I meant. ...

The other day a reader suggested that I "make a blogentry about how you started at MS and so on!" You asked, but I'm warning you: it's the most boring story ever....

Earlier I mentioned that two of the design goals for JScript .NET were high performance and compatibility with JScript Classic . Unfortunately these are somewhat contradictory goals! JScript Classic has many dynamic features which make generation...

Michael Howard has started blogging. If you're interested in writing secure code (and these days, who isn't?) you could do worse than to read anything he writes. ...

I hate octal. Octal causes bugs. I hate bugs, particularly stupid "gotcha" bugs....

Every now and then -- like, say, this morning -- someone sends me this mail: "I'm getting an error in my JScript program. The error number is -2147024877. No description. Help!" Making sense of those error numbers requires some delving into the depths of how COM represents errors -- the HRESULT....

A reader asks "is there any reason why VBScript doesn't change "1234567890" & "hello" to "1234567890hello" since they are both constants?" Good question. Yes, there are reasons....

JScript and VBScript are often used to build large strings full of formatted text, particularly in ASP. Unfortunately, naïve string concatenations are a major source of performance problems....

Peter's not the only one who's kept up at night worrying about this stuff. Last night I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about how his characterization of the ActiveX Control Of Ultimate Destruction really isn't bad enough. If this is going to be the ULTIMATE in destruction, let's think about just how evil we can get....

I keep talking about script performance without ever actually giving my rant about why most of the questions I get about performance are pointless at best, and usually downright harmful. ...

In the dark days before exception handling you could always use setjmp/longjmp to do non-local gotos. In fact, the script engines are compiled in C++ with exception handling turned off and the mainline loop of the bytecode interpreter uses setjmp-longjmp exception handling to implement error handling....

often it really doesn't matter what language you learn. For many programmers, the language is just the thing that stands between you and the object model....

Speaking of books, people keep telling me and Peter and Raymond that we should write books based on our blogs. Well, I probably am going to write another book this winter, but it will have pretty much nothing to do with the stuff in this blog. The natures of a blog and a book are very different ...

Joel and Ned are having a spirited debate over the merits of exception handling. Oddly enough, I agree with both of them....

A while back a reader asked for a rundown on some of the design decisions we made when designing JScript .NET. That's a huge topic, but fortunately I started writing a book on the subject a few years ago that never found a publisher. Tell you what -- whenever I can't think of something more interesting to post, I'll put snippets of it up on my blog....

I mentioned earlier that I wrote one of the last books published by the now-bankrupt Wrox Press....

A number of people have expressed surprise to me that Wrox is out of business. Here's the scoop....

The whole point of developing a garbage collected language is to decrease the burden on the developer. Because the underlying infrastructure manages memory for you, you don't have to worry about introducing leaks. Of course, that puts the burden squarely upon the developer of the underlying infrastructure, ie, me...

Thank goodness Joel wrote this article -- that means that I can cross it off of my list of potential future blog entries!   Thanks Joel!   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html   Fortunately...

In JScript and VBScript, when you create an object the creation code always returns the default dispatch. Furthermore, in JScript, when you fetch a property on an object and it returns a dispatch object, we ask the object to give us the default dispatch. So in JScript, there is no way to script a non-default dispatch. What about in VBScript? There's an irksome story here, again featuring a really bad mistake made by yours truly. At least I meant well....

A common and entirely sensible programming practice is to put commonly used utility functions in one file, and then somehow link that file in to many different programs. In traditional compiled languages you can compile a bunch of utilities into a statically linked .LIB file or a dynamically linked .DLL file. But what do you do in script, where a program is just text? ...

Following up on this morning's entry, a reader asked me why Windows Script Components don't have access to the WScript object. "it IS running in an instance of WSH isnt it?" No, it isn't. That's a common misperception....