Speaking of weird JScript gotchas, here's a weird VBScript gotcha that I alluded to earlier . foo = "1" bar = 1 If "1" = 1 Then Print "True!" Else Print "False!" If "1" = bar Then Print "True!" Else Print "False!" If foo = 1 Then Print "True...

Every non-trivial language has "gotchas". Here's one. Consider the following JScript, which creates an object and sets some fields to zero: var x = { 0 : 0, 123 : 0, 1.23 : 0, blah : 0, "dude!" : 0, "-1.23" : 0 }; A little weird, but it works just...

I've just now learned that my colleagues Andrew Jewsbury and Mohit Gupta will be talking about the recent beta release of our product -- Visual Studio Tools For Office -- July 27th in a web cast. Mohit and Andrew are responsible for much of the design...

First, the technical stuff. Here's a recent question I received about missing data in JScript. I’ve seen it stated that in order to determine if a variable is undefined, you have to use if("undefined" == typeof(x)) I attended a presentation...

Q: What's a pirate's second favourite mode of transportation? A: A caaaaargh! Preferably a Jaguaaaaargh, but an early Oldsmobile Cutlass will do. Q: Very amusing -- but what's a pirate's favourite mode of transportation? A: A pirate ship, silly...

Back in May we were discussing the merits and drawbacks of recursive programming techniques -- that is, writing functions which break down problems into sub-problems, and then call themselves. The drawback of such an approach is that in some...

Oddly enough, my posting on how to handle a mad crush has become the third most popular article I've written so far. Who knew there were so many 10 year old girls interested in programming language design? I may have to turn this into an agony column...

Quick, what's the difference between If Blah = True Then Print "True!" Else Print "False!" and If Blah Then Print "True!" Else Print "False!" Is there a difference? Yes, there is a big difference. If Blah is True or False , then both statements...

Moving away from the problems of junior high school … Here's a question I've gotten many times over the years: how do you design an object so that it can be easily called from both VBScript and JScript? COM defines a fairly...

I'm back, and I've almost made it through the 525 not-automatically-sorted email messages, caught up on my blog reading, and so on. There are a number of interesting technical questions in my backlog that I'll start getting to later this week once I dig...