On Thresholds

5 Oct 2008

I had a production system go down this week - one minute no problem, the next, critical functionality stopped working. Worse, it didn’t die because something broke - it went down by design. And did so without warning.


Foundations of Programming

8 Oct 2008 random

Karl Seguin, one of the CodeBetter bloggers, has written a book on programming fundamentals, covering topics from ‘YAGNI’ and Unit Testing, to Domain Driven Design and Dependency Injection.


Understanding the Office UI

11 Oct 2008 ux

So I’m involved with a project that’s includes finally deploying Office 2007 throughout the office, and the #1 source of comments from users is the Ribbon. While some like it, most don’t - and some are downright creative in their commentary.


Whatever happened to responsiveness?

24 Oct 2008 ux

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend - it seems that all kinds of systems are getting slower and slower, almost as though usability is being deliberately sacrificed for other factors.


The right knowledge for each problem ...

25 Oct 2008 professional

A friend emailed me an interesting quote:


Contravariance and Covariance at last

29 Oct 2008 csharp

It seems the information deluge has started, and the first piece of good news about C# 4.0 is the introduction of contravariance and covariance for delegates and interfaces.


Linq Aggregates

30 Oct 2008 smart-code

Catching up on my blog reading, I came across a gem demonstrating use of the Aggregate() method from Linq’s Enumerable static class.


WiX Techniques Updated

30 Oct 2008 deployment

My whitepaper on WiX techniques has been updated to correct an error.