January 2006 Entries
As Raymond says, most development teams face some kind of “tax” in their day-to-day work. Taxes are things that a programmer has to do or take into consideration that are usually: a) not specifically assigned for him to do, b) not specifically accounted for in his schedule, and c) not specifically very much fun. The first example Raymond used was power management — something that pretty much every Windows application should take into account but which a very great many applications don’t.
One of the wonderful things about working on a compiler is that, by and large, you escape most of...
This has been bouncing around a bit on blogs, but I thought it was funny… Billy Hollis, a longtime VBer, has posted some of his historical ruminations on VB and C-style languages:
If you like VB, look at the history of the C family [of languages] first. If you like C#, Java or C++, look at the history of the BASIC family first.
But who’s got the Star Trek game? I loved that game…
Just a FYI, I’ve changed the title of the “VBParser” category to “Samples,” in preparation for what I hope are several new samples in the coming months. The main thing I’ve been working on so far is an update of the VBParser sample that I wrote for VB 7.1. Besides updating the parser to parse VB 8.0 language features, I’ve also changed it to use nifty CLR 2.0 features like generics. My hope is to have it out in the next few weeks. Unlike last time, I don’t think I’m going to use GotDotNet as a distribution medium — since...
I’ve been thinking about coining a new verb:
go steveb tr.v. To suddenly escalate an issue to the CEO/President/Senior VP of a company out of frustration when dealing with a low-level employee of a company. (steveb is the email address of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.) As in, “Yeah, we were talking about the fact that we cut that new feature the customer wanted and I said there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so he went all steveb on me and emailed my VP.”
To go steveb is really kind of the Hail Mary pass of the corporate world: you’ve exhausted...
Jeff Atwood’s little entry on cheatsheets sure brought back some memories... I loved Beagle Brothers. As a general measure of comparison, I think Beagle Brothers had more cool in one little tip/trick box than Google has ever had with their cute variations on the Google logo. Definitely one of the things I look back on with fondness…
I’ve also thought about trying to create a VB.NET language cheat sheet one of these days, but it’s on that list of “things to do when I have time.” Yeah, right…