Bits.Bytes.

The Windows PowerShell is probably one of Microsoft’s best innovations over the last few years. Really. It is a brilliant piece of work that finally gives the command line shell real power.
And what gives it even more power is its extensibility and its customization, as I shall demonstrate shortly with a few simple examples.
NOTE: This […]

I cut my development teeth with cutting edge technology like DBASE III+ (10 points to anyone that can remember what pack does!). I then moved on to even more cutting edge technology called Access 2.
Inevitably I found myself in Visual Basic 6. Which was pretty fine until a succession of rough experience on two projects […]

So I installed Internet Explorer 7 on Friday. I have despised IE ever since I can remember, and used Firefox even before it was called Firefox. Yes sir, I distinctly recall downloading and extracting the zip file that contained a browser called Phoenix. Version 0.4
I cannot begin to enumerate the things I find so irritating […]

Visual Studio’s immediate window, our old friend, is generally a very powerful debugging aid. A few judicious commands executed there can save hours of manually reading through source code that makes sense on paper on screen.
In fact the only place the immediate window fails to deliver is when dumping the contents of multi-line string variables. […]

It amazes me just how even the biggest companies continue to make a very fundamental mistake — failing to clearly label the versions of their software. How many companies release software and fail to indicate the release date and/or version numbers, leaving you wondering if you should download it or not? More than you’d think! […]

If you are one of those people that put “\r\n” in your strings to indicate a newline, raise your right hand and smack your head. Why?

You are assuming your code will always run on Windows. Unix uses \n alone, Apple (until OS 9) used \r alone. Your code might just end up being compiled […]