Back in June, I posted my own version of the Joel Test – updated for 2010. [See Here.] Do you have a change management system? Can everyone make a build in one step? Do your daily builds include automated tests? Is work item tracking integrated with source control? Do you fix bugs and write new code? Do you track progress and manage change? Do you have ......

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I know I’m late to the iPhone development party, and consequently I’m also late to the Objective-C debates. But I can’t help but chime in; so here goes . . . Back in the Day Back in the C programming days (while I was apparently sleeping), there seem to have been two directions: The C++ road, and the objective-C road. I have never seen Objective-C until ......

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2009 Edition. No. 1 Solid State Disk The crucial CT64M225 64GB ($234) or CT128M225 128GB ($429), or the ultimate Intel X25 160GB ($549) for the notebook machine. Improve performance, improve battery life. Best of all, you don’t have to wait a few seconds after closing the lid for the HDD to spin down before you pick up and go. No. 2 Roku Player The ......

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New Apple iMac Arrives The latest edition to the growing home computing center is an Apple iMac (Intel E7600 Core 2 Duo/8Gb RAM/1Tb HD/21.5"), which I promptly setup to use Boot Camp with Windows 7 as the default OS. This makes a great Family Room machine, in Windows or MacOS (despite missing HDMI port), and doubles as the iPhone development platform. ......

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My first thought – who needs another language? Are new languages the new rage? If I were to design a new language (I am not qualified, trust me), what would it address . . . It would be garbage collected (no brainer) It would run in a VM (actually, many different VMs ) It would also be statically typed (I think many would disagree these days) Threading ......

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One of the things I have always hated was “Windows Search”. Why the heck would I need “instant results” – instant as in donating countless CPU cycles and disk churns to background indexing operations running all day long on my box? YUK! I am never actually “looking” for something – I know where everything is. It’s right where I put it. Who are these ......

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Visual Studio 2010 beta2 + Framework 4.0 . . . with a few comments on Windows Virtual PC. Installation I don’t “work” on my laptop – mostly used for travel, library, watching Hulu and channel 9, etc. Since I will be out of town for a while, however, I decided to install VS20101b2 in a winVPC for the trip on the laptop. The only complaint about the new ......

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Static Reflection in .Net Where have I been? I recently took a few minutes to look through the latest MSDN magazine and ran across a nice article by Jeremy Miller on “Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Development”. The section titled “Lambdas as Data” was my first introduction to static reflection in .Net. Where the heck have I been? I don’t ......

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Designing Software for Scientists Creating a software design for scientists can be tricky business. Unlike the businessman, who is better off looking at the pretty database report or marveling over the catchy name of the latest Forms over Data application, the scientist can actually contribute to the implementation – provided you use the right architecture. ......

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Three’s a Charm It looks like the third iteration of Team Foundation Server might be a good one. I just finished reading Brian Harry’s post on TFS 2010 and it contains some interesting references. SourceSafe Replacement? I never could understand why TFS was often compared to SourceSafe. All the sessions on migrating from VSS to TFS, TFS for VSS users, ......

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The Process class in .Net makes it easy to run command line tools from within a .Net program. Here is an implementation with a couple of twists: Environment variable expansion Optional asynchronous execution Transformation of output into an enumerable collection of objects The implementation takes the form of an object named CommandLineTool with the ......

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Remember when a program was termed a “GUI Application” - a program with a Graphical User Interface? It had features like menus that “dropped-down” (or “popped up”), scroll bars to reveal more of the virtual surface area, a pointing device (still called a cursor), and lots and lots of Drag & Drop. Thankfully, that moniker has mostly died. Now it ......

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Below are a few thoughts on the upcoming framework 4.0. I am not sure if the feature set is finalized, but I’ll comment on what I think are some of the more interesting features being planned for this release, as seen in the beta. Managed Extensibility Framework Plug-in architectures are a fairly common pattern for many scenarios, and I have seen quite ......

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There have been a few famous quotes on the subject – how much memory do you really need; how many GHz is enough; how much storage to hold all the books in the world; how many personal computers are enough for planet earth (let alone a single family), etc., etc. - I’ll stay away from predicting the future and just talk about what I need today. 2 THz ......

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As my home router’s “blocked web sites” list slowly began to fill up with open proxies (kproxy.com, getus.in, vtunnel.com, browse007.com, and anonymouse.org, etc.), I realized that it’s time to stop blocking and start monitoring. DLink DIR-655 Event Logging My DLink DIR-655 (great little router) contains an event logging feature that can send events, ......

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