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I don’t often read Haaretz , but there are from time to time articles that friends share on Facebook or come up in search results – and I find myself on the Haaretz website. Often enough, it happens on my mobile phone – and every time I find myself redirected to a very primitive version of the website. Compare for yourself: (Screenshot on the right obtained by changing the user agent in the Chrome Canary build . Very nice built-in feature.) I was curious what were the criteria used by the Haaretz...
I keep telling junior software developers that the only way to maintain their expertise and to become better developers is a continuous learning process. 2011 has been a very productive year for me (and many others at SELA !), and I am looking forward to 2012, the year of Windows 8, in eager anticipation. Below are some of the things I learned in 2011 and some of the things planned for 2012. Learned in 2011 Most of Q1 2011 I was working on the brand-new Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 course with...
Suppose you are sending mass emails (legitimately, no doubt) and want to know which % of recipients actually viewed the email. The standard trick here is to embed a 1x1 image into your email’s HTML source, with the <img src= pointing to a location on your Web server with part of the URL unique to the user (e.g., <img src="http://example.com/track/12345" /> where your mailing system knows that 12345 is associated with john@example.org). When the user opens your email, most email...
A couple of days ago I got a phone call from my dad at 7:30AM. He asked “Are you guys OK?” and immediately scenarios of terrorist acts or missile launches started running through my head. It scared me – this unnatural but immediate reaction to an innocent question. The reality of living in Israel during the last 20 years has conditioned all of us to think in terms of surviving yesterday’s bombing or tomorrow’s war, and the periods of relative peace sometimes spanning months in a row aren’t enough...
…Your sprint planning meeting begins with a condescending description of what The Methodology looks like, and ends with “meet me here at 4PM – you will be assigned tasks and pairs”. …You switch task management tools every week, never failing to surprise your developers and upper management. (Hint: more tools is not necessarily better. Bugs on the whiteboard, tasks in Excel, projects in TFS, and resource scheduling in a custom tool is confusing .) …You have a heterogeneous team with young developers...
I don't typically rant about security or "The Cloud", but as an avid Dropbox and Instapaper user I've had some comments building up inside for the past few weeks. Dropbox is a simple private file sharing service which gives you access to your files from a variety of devices (I use it on my Windows laptop, Windows desktop, MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPad). Instapaper is a tool for saving web pages for later viewing – when I don't have time to read a long blog post or interesting...
I just received my renomination letter for the Microsoft MVP award for Visual C#, 2011. This is the third year in a row, and what a blast these years have been! I firmly believe that 2011 could be an amazing year for C#; what with the introduction of async methods in C# 5 , which is a clear demonstration of how frameworks and fluent interfaces pale in comparison to the convenience and power of language keywords. This time I am humbly receiving the MVP award as the CTO of Sela Group , where I am constantly...
I just received a letter notifying me that I was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for Visual C# for 2010. I’m very honored to receive the award ( the second time ). Here’s to hoping that 2010 will be a good year for C# and anything else technological that I’ve been talking about on this blog, in online communities, at UG meetings, and at various conferences! I would never have made it without the help and support of several people I would like to call out here, as well as many friends and colleagues...
Ten years ago, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas published the incredible book, “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” . It’s not that I like this book because it has taught me so many things; I mainly like this book because of what it has not taught me. And one thing this book has not taught me is to use Add New Item –> “Some Amazing Technology” Class Template and then just adjust the grid on the control ever so slightly, and bam – there’s your user interface in all its glory. Here...
What does every geek need to get through the PDC, or any technological conference for that matter? I have the simple answer that works for me and that you might be interested in :-) First and foremost, I need a laptop. It has to be lightweight but usable, so a high-end netbook could do it but a mid-range notebook does a better job. My choice for this conference was the Dell Latitude XT , a multitouch 12.1” laptop that served me well for Windows 7 courses and demos in the past. It has a decent form...
Over the last three years, I’ve had lots of experiences as a speaker at conferences, courses, private presentations and other opportunities. Among them, I had the chance to present at the Microsoft Developers Academy, TechEd and IDCC; I taught 54 courses for Sela, including Windows Internals, .NET Debugging, .NET Performance, C++/CLI and many others; and I lectured at short half-day MSDN events on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, performance, debugging and concurrency. Almost every training session...
I find it really sad that three years after Windows Vista, there’s still active software out there (distributed by leading industry vendors) that doesn’t comply with UAC guidelines and tells users to log in as administrators or to disable UAC. Here’s Adobe Updater telling me that there’s a new version of Adobe Updater available. (Why I would need a piece of software constantly running on my system and trying to see if I want to update the software that is trying to update my software is another question...
Every time I see Pavel working on his laptop, a question pops into my head: Why don’t you use the Aero theme of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and instead use something that closely resembles Windows Server 2003 – especially considering that your laptop is such a beast of a machine? Today I got my answer, well, kind of. Pavel writes : But if I don’t use Aero I don’t get thumbnail previews and other goodies. Why is that? I asked around and didn’t get a satisfying answer. I’m going to call a Raymond...
Another title I’ve considered for this post was: When measuring something, make sure you’re really measuring it. Micro-benchmarking is the art of measuring tiny operations, and as always when measuring something tiny – there’s the problem of making sure that you’re actually measuring it. Let’s take a couple of “trivial” examples, because usually trivial examples end up being more convoluted than the difficult ones. Example 1 – Measuring the time of the getpid() system call Assume that we want...
Two hours ago, I received an email presenting me with the Microsoft MVP award! The award is given for sharing expertise with the online and offline developer community, which is what I have been doing (or at least trying to do) for the last couple of years through this blog, through online forums and through my consulting and training work. (Here’s my MVP profile .) I am very honored to be an MVP, and I give you my word that I will strive to continue contributing to the online and offline...
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