Hey all, at the end of this week I'm heading off on vacation for two weeks, I've got a metric boatload of work to get finished before I go, and (thankfully) there are no computers where I'm going. Therefore the blog is probably going to go dark until...

Here's a question I got a while back: In a VBS or ASP file, the following code doesn't work, which I understand: Option Explicit s = "hello" However, the following code works fine: Option Explicit s = "hello" Dim s Why can we use a variable...

I'm heads-down today trying to figure out a complicated new feature in Whidbey -- working out the differences between the spec and the code is proving to be quite a challenge! -- so today, another entry in my series on the wit and wisdom of the Visual...

I was thinking about this a bit more and talking with Larry Osterman yesterday, and I came up with some perhaps slightly more germane tips on how to read and debug code that you didn't write. First, it is highly likely that the machine code...

Escalation Engineer JeremyK asks in his blog this morning : how do you teach people this “art” of digging deep very quickly into unfamilar code that you had no hand in writing? I myself, I come from a very traditional process...

I want to spend some time addressing the security implications of private reflection in response to recent comments, but that is a big topic that will take some time, and work is absolutely crazy busy right now. Design Change Request Season opens today...

I am totally amused that the comments on yesterday's entry are nigh-isomorphic to the argument that we had over this in October 2000. As noted, f.bar(f); does in fact call the base class function, not the derived class function as some might expect. ...

When you're designing a new programming language, the "main line" cases are easy. It's the "corner" cases that bedevil language designers -- the little fiddly bits where two language features that make perfect sense on their own interact in some weird...

Q: How do pirates keep their socks from falling down? A: Thumbtacks. I am insanely busy with bug fixing and performance testing today, so once more I'll dip into my endless archive of rants about irksome coding practices I've seen one time too many...

A few short takes today before I get into the actual subject of today's entry. *************************************************************************** Kids Today My teenaged cousin has apparently accidentally reinvented pseudolocalization...

A reader asked me last week I have always used Server.CreateObject in ASP scripts and WScript.CreateObject in WSH scripts, because I was unable to find any *convincing* information on the subject and therefore assumed that they were there...