I just submitted a little job to RentACoder (converting an ASP.NET site to PHP for easier hosting – I’m not much of a PHP developer) and part of their new wizard has a bit about estimates. You can supply a deadline, or you can ask the bidders to estimate how long the job will take, […]
Here’s a blog post by Jim Springfield at Microsoft about IntelliSense in Visual Studio 10. I like to hear that IntelliSense is going to be fixed, but I’ve been hearing that for many versions of Visual Studio now, and I have a hard time believing it. IntelliSense for C++ code has always been unreliable in […]
I just finished reading Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability on Safari. The first edition was written in 2000, but it’s amazing how much of it still applies. And not just to web usability. The book is about web design, and how to create sites that users […]
It’s cool that Microsoft has announced that IE8 passes the Acid2 test (in “IE8 Standards Mode” – I sure hope that mode is enabled by default. But what I found interesting is how they announced it: By showing the check-in mail that signified the committing of the code that implemented the fix into the main […]
It’s great to see a serious update to MFC coming. Check out this video with Pat Brenner where he describes some of the new stuff happening, with demos. I’m really torn on C++ these days. Some people believe it should basically be retired, in favour of one of the better alternatives like C# or Java, […]
Every release Microsoft promises something that’s going to make it so now you can really positively absolutely kill processes that you want to kill. With Vista, the feature that would help was I/O Cancellation, the ability to cancel an I/O request without having to wait, in case it was hung in the kernel. And yet.. […]
Intrinsics in C++ are places where the compiler knows how to generate code for common C++ operations, including function calls, and does so inline rather than generating a call. For example, a simple copy of a string from one buffer to another looks like this: strcpy(dest, src); 00419123 lea eax,[ebp-54h] 00419126 push eax 00419127 lea […]
When I got a new machine at work about a year ago, it came with Vista 64 bit installed on it. Not long before receiving this machine, I’d tried to upgrade my home machine to Vista 64 and ran into so many problems that I had quite a negative impression of Vista 64. I didn’t […]
Computerworld has an article entitled “10 Things you Should Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight”. I just wanted to add a few notes comparing things to Flex, since the author doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of Flex. 1. Silverlight Avoids Cross-Browser/OS Issues As long as you don’t count Linux as an OS. Flex spans Windows, Mac, AND Linux. […]
How’s that for an analogy? But I think there’s a bit of truth to it. Dr. Atkins defined a low-carb diet that many people have considerable success with. The diet involves a small set of restrictions that, when followed, help you lose weight. In my opinion, however, what makes Atkins successful isn’t the specific food choices that it requires, […]