Needless to say, computer science is still in its infancy but has made incredible strides in just over half a century. During this time, it's striven to get the respect it deserves as a disciplined subject. Even just 14 years ago, when I started my undergrad in this subject, I recall reading articles...

Had some fun today exploring Google 's new Code Search engine ... /** Windows has some of the most ridiculous HTTP_USER_AGENT strings */ # gad, this is getting ridiculous 175: Here is a ridiculous function, which uses all of the special meta-parameters: 99: we must resort to a different escape method...

The Problem... For a (personal) project I'm currently working on, I decided to use the Logging and Instrumentation application block from the Enterprise Library to handle logging. The problem I ran into was that I wanted my log destination to be an XML file. Why is that a problem? Well, there's...

In developing any software application, it's important to keep things as simple as possible and add complexity only when needed. (I spoke about this in a previous post, Planning for vs. Reacting to Change .) On the flip-side, a certain amount of architecture may be assumed at the start of a project...

[Update, 3/28/07: Changed recommendation to not use conditional compilation constants to vary behavior between debug and release mode.] There are two things I loathe during development: spending any time at all with the VS.NET debugger and seeing "object reference not set to an instance of an object...

I'm somewhat of a n00b when it comes to object-oriented development and C# , but that is what I've been doing for the past couple of years now. My background is in more procedural type programming languages, like PL/SQL (I did a lot of Oracle development early in my software development career...