You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Friday, Feb 7, 2003, 8:23 PM
Saving Your Career
Here. A built-in Outlook XP feature to bring back those emails you wish you hadn't sent out 2 seconds after you sent them.
Friday, Feb 7, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
Saving Your Career
Friday, Feb 7, 2003
In response to Never Send An Email In Anger, Lars Bergstrom recommended that I set up a rule that defers sending an email for 1 minute. I set it for 2 minutes under Outlook XP like so:
- Tools->Rules Wizard
- New
- Start From A Blank Rule
- Check messages after sending
- Which condition(s) do you want to check? -> None
- This rule will be applied to every message you send. Is this correct? -> Yes
- What do you want to do with this message? -> defer delivery by a number of minutes
- a number of minutes -> 2
- Finish
And it works like a charm. It's always w/in the first second that I wish I could recall a message, so two minutes should be more than enough. Wahoo!
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003, 7:16 AM in .NET
.Net Framework XML Namespaces and Classes
Here. From Matthew Lewis: First of a series outlining the core namespaces and classes that cohesively implement the standards based XML processors in the Microsoft .NET Framework. This session will discuss each class in detail.
Tuesday, Feb 4, 2003, 11:11 PM
Shtoo
Here. How Stu Halloway pronounces his name.
Tuesday, Feb 4, 2003, 3:03 PM
Every OS Sucks
Here. "It was slow and it was buggy, so they wrote it again. Now they're up to OS 10. They'll charge you for the beta and then charge you again." "Bill Gates may be richer than Captain Kirk, but Windows blows. And sucks. At the same time!" "Linux... It's a great big mess for elitist, nerdy shmucks... Getting it running is half the fun, but I've got a girlfriend and things to get done." Equal opportunity bashing of "everything since the abacus." Also hilarious.
Tuesday, Feb 4, 2003, 2:40 PM
Wes's Internet Helpdesk
Here. "I could tell 'em to blow smoke up their USBs ports and they'd do it." Life from the working end of an ISP support desk. Hilarious.
Monday, Feb 3, 2003, 5:55 PM
Let The Language Wars Continue
Here. I think that the CLR languages *should* have different capabilities and that programmers should be proud of their choice of language! The skinning the pretends to separate two nearly identical languages must end!
Monday, Feb 3, 2003, 2:30 PM
Safe, Simple Multithreading in WindForms, part 3
Here. I thought that I had said it all in parts 1 and 2, but I still had a little more in me.
Monday, Feb 3, 2003, 12:00 AM in The Spout
Let The Language Wars Continue
A friend of mine pointed out to me the other day that the C in CLR stood for "Common," that is, the CLR provides the same services to all languages. In fact, at this date, C# and VB.NET are really just "skins" over the CLR and provide nearly identical functionality. With that in mind, why are we still fighting the language wars? There are several reasons:
- VB and
C# programmers are just culturally different. They come from different
backgrounds, different educations and different points of view. Remember
that VB was initially invented to let non-programmers program. C++
programmers came from folks building operating systems. Those roots are
still evident today.
- The VB and C# product teams are
different and gain benefits based on how many of each kind of programmer
there are. Based on that, do you think that those teams are going to pound
the "all languages work great under the CLR" or the "C#/C++/VB.NET rocks"
drum? Which message makes you look best at review-time?
- Languages *should* be different. Managed C++ does that cool managed code/unmanaged types thing. Eiffel# does Design by Contract. Perl.NET has obfuscation built in at the source code level, alleviating the need for a 3rd party tool. The fact that VB and C# are virtual clones of each other is a mistake that I hope is rectified. Frankly, I hope that VB goes back to it's roots of enabling non-programmers, as that's a huge hole in the current list of managed languages. Certainly C# is going back to its roots by adding generics et al in the next version.
I've found that the "Common" means that teams can use the same language at more levels of their system, i.e. no more VB for this, C++ for that, script for this other thing. Now it can be all VB or all C# (or almost all, 'til Yukon ships) and the number of different kinds of programmers needed for a single project goes down. That provides a real benefit to companies trying to keep costs down and quality up while still allowing the team to decide what language features are important to them. This is goodness.
With the increased shared capability at the runtime level, I'm actually hoping that language motivation will increase. I think that there's still a lot left to do to make the programmers more productive and the motivation for one language to gain ground over another is a good thing. Plus, I still have an excuse to make fun of semi-colon-challenged programmers and what could be better than that? : )
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003, 8:10 PM
White House adviser confirms resignation plans
Here. Apparently Mr. Clarke is/was President Bush's "top cyber-security advisor" and the recent SQL virus drove him to throw up his hands in dispair (or be thrown out on his butt). Even more disturbing is that he predicts that this is but the beginning...
Friday, Jan 31, 2003, 2:53 PM in .NET
.NET Bugs Registry
Here. It's nice to see that somebody is tracking and publishing bugs on my most favorite technology, although I suspect that many are as yet unlisted...
Friday, Jan 31, 2003, 9:18 AM
Blogs open doors for developers
Here. From Luciano Passuello: 1st page article on CNet's news.com talks about developers and blogs.
Thursday, Jan 30, 2003, 12:21 PM in .NET
Sam .NET Blog has changed locations and technology
From Sam Gentile: For people who were reading my .NET Radio Blog. I have moved to an ASP.NET based solution. The new location and feed are at: http://dotnetweblogs.com/sgentile/
Tuesday, Jan 28, 2003, 3:12 PM in .NET
Editor for Web.Config files in ASP.NET
Here. From Jim Corbin: Hunter Stone has created a useful tool for managing one or multiple Web.Config XML files in an ASP.NET application.
Friday, Jan 24, 2003, 11:33 PM
OOD (The D Stands for "Dead In The Water")
Here. In which I come to a startling conclusion on why OO databases never really happened and never will.