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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Close But No Cigar

I just got a 71% on a Microsoft 70-536 practice test (80% is required to pass). I got creamed in Globalization and Security topics (things I've never had an occasion to use before). I guess I should probably read over the material before I take the tests for real. (I figured since I've been a .NET programmer for several years now I should get some certifications to that effect.)

Company Smell

I found this recent post on ASP.NET Weblogs sort of funny: Please question the need for whitespace. This person is actually suggesting that blank lines in your source code (which, for most normal people, are used to improve readability) could be a "code smell." Then at the bottom of the post we learn that they are hiring. Hrm. Coincidence? Or company smell?

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Open Source Licenses

I've been thinking about releasing some open source stuff, so I've been reading up on Open Source licenses. They all seem to have a significant hole in them: It looks to me like a nefarious person could slap any GPL software onto a CD and sell it to the nearest gullible corporation for $5000. Granted, anyone could get the software from non-nefarious sources for free, but still, the nefarious person would probably be able to con a few people into handing over money for the free software, which is bad, but it's even worse that the actual author -- the person who did all the work, in other words -- gets absolutely nothing out of the transaction. That doesn't seem quite right to me. If someone is willing to pay $5 or $500 or $5000 for a product, I think the creator of the product deserves some portion of that.

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Sunday, March 9, 2008

The Magic Two-Faced File

I was in a store recently where the clerk vehemently declared that we should stick with XP and not install Vista until there was absolutely no choice.

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NAnt MissingManifestResourceException Tip

With NAnt 0.86 Beta 1, I found that I couldn't use the <resources> element to include *.resx files in my <csc> task. For example, this didn't work.

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

Design By Contract and Spec#

I've ragged a bit on The Pragmatic Programmer lately, but I wanted to mention one concept in the book that I really liked: Design By Contract.

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Text Manipulation Languages

I said before that The Pragmatic Programmer seems biased toward Unix environments and lacks much real-world experience with Microsoft environments. Here's another example of that.

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