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Whenever I teach a debugging class, the first thing I talk about is one of the most important points I make though the entire class: read Steve McConnell’s masterpiece, Code Complete 2nd Edition. I ask for an honest show of hands as to who hasn’t read Code Complete, and it always amazes me how many…

Another new and notable feature of Silverlight 3 is support for hardware acceleration. In Silverlight 1 and 2, all rendering was done in software, which meant that the performance of complex animations and video playback depended heavily on the capabilities of the host PC. Silverlight 3, however, can take advantage of hardware GPUs. You can…

Silverlight 3 is loaded with new graphical goodies, and one of the goodies I’m most excited about is pixel shaders. A pixel shader is an object that transforms pixels output from the rendering pipeline before they’re rendered to the display surface. Silverlight 3 Beta 1 comes with two pixel shaders: BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. The following example…

I’m packing up my stuff to head for Atlanta tomorrow and speak at MSDN’s Southern Fried Roadshow. If you attend, you’ll get to see a demo that I just put the finishing touches on. It uses dynamic Deep Zoom (that is, Deep Zoom with image tiles that are generated on the fly rather than by Deep…

I have recently been spending a great deal of time writing code that communicated with RESTful services (Microsoft’s Live Framework, in particular). Towards this end, I’m using the HttpWebRequest class to communicate and, for scalability and responsivenss, I want to perform my I/O operations asynchronously. This has caused me to look into the [Begin]GetRequestStream methods.…

Microsoft recently published the RC release of their ASP.NET MVC Framework, and I’ve updated my “Jeff’s Hangar” MVC sample accordingly. The RC contains some cool new features, especially with regard to tooling support, but mostly it adds polish to features that were already there. I’ve rewritten the sample to be as true to the spirit…

After installing Windows 7, I also installed the Windows 7 SDK as I wanted to poke around the updated headers and documentation files to see what was new at a low level. Additionally, I wanted to make sure all my code compiled against the new headers and libraries in case someone taking my native debugging…

You can tell how long someone has been around computers by mentioning “FDISK” and seeing if you’re met with a blank stare. Not many people remember FDISK. But for those that do, that knowledge can still come in handy today. Two weeks ago, I was packing my bags to head for the airport when my…