Edit and Crash

Isn’t that what EnC stands for? 🙂 We had a beautiful October East Tennessee afternoon today, so I ditched the word processor for a while and flew my new Hangar 9 AT-6 Texan for the first time. It flew like it was on rails, although not surprisingly, the retracts are junk. Hangar 9 sells great…

Now I’ve Seen Everything

Jeffrey Richter alerted me to this little beauty: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/asmil.htm Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

I Love October!

It’s October–my favorite month of the year. After having had a wonderful time last week visiting user groups in St. Louis, Bloomington (IL), and Little Rock, this week I’m enjoying some time at home and using the respite from travel to catch up on work. My big task this week is to write a Wicked Code column,…

Canonicalization Bug in ASP.NET

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Little Rock, Arkansas preparing for a user group meeting tonight. This morning I flew Southwest Airlines for the first time. The pilot got on the P.A. system before we took off and said this: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks for flying Southwest Airlines. Your copilot and I…

Midwest Madness

I’ve been away from the blog for a few days taking some time off from work. In a couple of hours I catch a flight to St. Louis–the first stop in a short tour through the Midwest on behalf of INETA. Tonight I speak to the St. Louis .NET user group. Tomorrow night I speak…

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

Found a link to this funny article in Bill Evjen’s blog: http://mindprod.com/unmain.html One of the gems I picked up from the article is “Pass all data as a void * and then typecast to the appropriate structure. Using byte offsets into the data instead of structure casting is fun too.“ Too often I have made…

Obfuscated URLs

While killing time waiting for epoxy to dry (I’m repairing one of the landing gear mounts in the wing of my P-51), I came across this document, which provides a lucid answer to a question I’m often asked these days: http://www.rain.org/~mkummel/stumpers/08dec00a.html The document explains how scammers and spammers obfuscate URLs so that clicking a link that…

747 Trivia

Anybody know why the 747 has a hump on the front? I had an aerospace professor in college who worked for Boeing before becoming a professor. He participated in the design of the 747, and he told our class why the hump, which gives the 747 a distinctive look, is there. Just wondering whether this is general knowledge or a closely held…

The Right Way to Search MSDN

While we’re on the subject of e-mails seeking answers to technical questions, you’d be surprised at the number of e-mails I receive that could be answered by spending 10 seconds on Google. I’m amazed at the number of developers that don’t know about site-specific Google searches. To search MSDN for references to RewritePath, for example,…

Why We Write Books

Everyone who writes books and magazine articles, speaks at conferences, and teaches classes gets a lot of unsolicited e-mail from developers needing help and wanting questions answered. I try to provide at least a short response to all such e-mails, but this morning I received an e-mail message that just left me shaking my head.…

There’s No Place Like Home

I’m enjoying a week at home following several hectic weeks of travel. Last week I was in Atlanta with Jeffrey Richter, John Robbins, Peter DeBetta, Jason Clark, and several folks from Wintellect’s business unit. We were there for Devscovery. It was good to hang out with other Wintellect folks. Since we live all over the place–Richter…

Beta Burps

Wouldn’t you know it? Tomorrow I begin a 3-day speaking tour through the Northeast and I’ll be demoing lots of ASP.NET 2.0 code. But suddenly the Visual Studio 2005 beta is crapping out every time I ask it to launch a Web app. The symptom is an unhandled exception, which is apparently coming from VS’s built-in Web server. Reinstalling…