Blogs|Apr 1, 2005

Jeff’s Thrills Were Fake

A few weeks ago, Jeff Prosise wrote about his “thrill of a lifetime” piloting a 737 simulator.  Well a buddy of mine forwarded me a link that has some of the best movies I’ve ever seen of my actual thrills of a lifetime.  Jeff lives for virtual thrills, mine were real (sorry, Jeff!).  I can’t…
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Blogs|Jan 1, 2005

Totally Awesome i-mate SP3 and Mostly Fixing ActiveSync

My good friend, Dave Nanian, (of Brief editing fame, Track Record, and now Shirt-Pocket software (where he just won an Eddy award for NetTunes!  How cool is that!?)), made me a bet that I couldn’t turn down.  He’s a gadget freak and totally loves the i-mate SP3 phone.  I’ve known Dave for years and I’d…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 31, 2004

Veritas to John: “Screw You!”

In a previous post, I mentioned my amazing problem with Veritas Backup Exec 8.6 disabling my fully legal working copy because I had upgraded the OS it was running on to Server 2003.  The email exchange with Veritas support showed that it wasn’t a bug in their product, but that they were an evil company. …
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 22, 2004

How *NOT* to keep customers

Sometimes you have to wonder why companies can stay in business.  I use Veritas Backup Exec 8.6 on my home network to take care of my backup and data recovery needs.  It’s worked great for years and saved my behind on numerous occasions.  Tonight I needed to install their remote agent (RA) on a laptop…
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Blogs|Nov 9, 2004

New FxCop 1.312

The busy folks on the FxCop team have posted a new release, 1.312.  There’s 43 new rules and some of those rules look outstanding.  A couple of my favorites are the “Avoid unnecessary string creation” (which looks to see if you are creating extranious strings on the heap) and “Do not raise reserved exception types” (which ensures…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 17, 2004

C# Edit and Continue Announced

If you hadn’t seen the announcement EnC is coming to C#.  While I know that everyone and their brother has asked for it, I still think it’s a bad idea.  EnC is a bug-introducing machine. Why?  Because you get to focusing on that one bug and twiddle the code to fix that one bug and introduce six…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 30, 2004

Even Easier Google Searching

I see Jeff mentioned the ultra cool site:msdn.microsoft.com trick for searching Google in a previous blog post.  In a case of shameless plugging… If you want the great searching from right inside Visual Studio .NET, take a look at the Google Add In I did for one of my Bugslayer columns.  With it you can…
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Blogs|Sep 9, 2004

SOS – Now with 20% More Commands!

In the process of working on some really interesting future stuff about SOS (Son of Strike), the WinDBG extension for REAL .NET debugging, I see Microsoft has included their internal PSSCOR.DLL extension with the latest release of WinDBG.  (The version with WinDBG is later than the one mentioned by Michael Stanton in his blog).  Instead…
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Blogs|Aug 2, 2004

Bugslayer Tips!

Many people have asked over the years if I had a collection of all the tips I listed at the end of my Bugslayer column.  Amazingly, I didn’t, but Sairama Jamalapuram took the time to extract them off of the MSDN Magazine site so they’d all be in one place.  We’ve hosted them at https://training.atmosera.com/resources/bugslayer/ and…
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Blogs|Jul 24, 2004

Windows XP Tablet PC 2005 Thoughts

For a guy who hand writes nearly everything, you’d have thought I’d been using a Tablet PC right from the very beginning.  Up until now, the usage model didn’t work for me, but that’s all changed with Windows XP Tablet PC 2005.  It totally rocks!  Between it and the new OneNote 2003 SP1, I’ve completely…
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Blogs|Jul 11, 2004

Cool Regex Stuff

Knowing your regular expressions is the secret elixir of development.  In the Bugslayer column, I’ve already mentioned Jeffrey E. F. Friedl’s phenomenal Mastering Regular Expressions, but found some great resources on the web I had never seen.  The first is Steve Smith’s excellent repository of regular expression examples at www.regexlib.com.  It’s a great place to…
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