There's a balancing act in testing between automation and manual testing. Over my time at Microsoft I've seen the pendulum swing back and forth between extensive manual testing and almost complete automation. As I've written before, the best answer lies...

This is part 4 of my ongoing Design Principles series. When designing the classes in your model, it is important that they each have a specific role to play. Cohesion means joining together to form a united whole. Classes and methods should be highly...

It's been a while since I posted my list of podcasts and my tastes have changed since then. Here's what I'm listening to on a regular basis right now: Audio: This Week In Tech - Tech news round table This Week in Media - Mac news round table The Dave...

There seem to be two opposing views of coding standards. Some think that they should enforce uniformity in code. Everyone should use K&R braces, leave two lines between functions, and have a space after the if and before the opening parenthesis. Others...

According to reports , Toshiba will soon stop manufacturing HD-DVD equipment. The writing has been on the wall since Time-Warner's January announcement that it would go exclusively to the BluRay format. More recently Netflix and WalMart have announced...

Someone recently characterized for me one way leaders are evaluated. This certainly isn't the only way and it doesn't catch everything, but it is a good place to start. The list is succinct and the questions thought-provoking. Here is the list: Results...

Over 6 years ago Paul Graham told the world that he was working on a new programming language called Arc. It would be some derivative of Lisp, but otherwise not much was known about it. Graham is the author of 2 books on Lisp and a popular series of essays...

Clayton Christensen's second book, The Innovator's Solution, produces several important theories in the realm of innovation. Like his first book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the second book should be required reading for anyone in technology and especially...

One of my readers tipped me off to an interesting interview with Noel Borthwick, CTO of Cakewalk. He talks about the improvements made in Vista for lower-latency audio via the WaveRT driver model it introduced. To date, support for this mode among non...

Project BBQ is the premier interactive music industry think tank. Everything from PC-audio to game audio to audio creation is covered. I attended this past October and the final reports are finally released. This year's subjects included suggestions for...