A few years ago I was reading some books about biological evolution. At some point, probably reading something by Richard Dawkins, I was thinking about randomness and its ability to produce apparently non-random things. All you need is a little pressure that selects one random thing over another. So I wrote a little program that demonstrates the idea by transforming a black box into a picture through entirely random steps. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently finished reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. The book, as its title suggests, gives advice about writing good contracts through a set of principles applied in various examples. In addition to wanting to learn more about design by contract generally, I came to this book with a couple questions: Can you do design by contract effectively without built-in language support, and what is the relationship between design by contract and unit testing? In this article I’ll talk about design by contract generally, and discuss those two questions in follow-on articles. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like Microsoft’s typical entry into a market goes something like this. It sees an interesting market built up by someone else, and releases a product in that space. The product is crap compared to the existing market leader. Microsoft revs the product a few times until it is competitive, and uses whatever means available to push it. Then, they release something that is actually good, the former market leader starts to crumble, and Microsoft dominates. Then, Microsoft, having won the war, lets their product rot. Examples? Visual Studio over Borland development tools (though Java has spurred competition again), Internet Explorer over Netscape, Office over WordPerfect, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made some effort to understand the differences between the Struct Member Alignment compiler option /Zp, #pragma pack and __declspec(align()) with Microsoft Visual C++ in light of an odd bug that ultimately was caused by inconsistent packing options between compilation units. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote DeskMinder as a Christmas gift for my family and friends. It originated as just a bit of HTML and JavaScript as an Active Desktop component for reminding me when special occasions were drawing near, like family members’ birthdays and anniversaries. To make it easier to customize the events, I wrote a Windows Forms event editor that goes along with it. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve released the first version of my InspectionPrinter utility. We have been renewing our efforts to do more formal code inspections at NextPage recently, which finally motivated me to finish this thing off, having originally started it nearly two years ago. It can be downloaded from the software section. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on a context menu handler shell extension in C# lately. There are a few samples that people have produced on the web (for example, The Code Project, pek.com, and TheServerSide.net). I’ve found a better way of implementing IShellExtInit.Initialize than in the examples I’ve seen. Read the rest of this entry »

I noticed a while back that my Rise of Nations game CD had a big crack through it. This was likely owing to it being on the floor in close proximity to the wheels of the chair at the boys’ computer. Any hopes that it might still be readable were quickly dispelled when Windows Explorer locked up in the attempt. I figured Microsoft might have some kind of replacement policy, and in fact they do. What I didn’t realize is that their policy was carefully crafted for stupidity. Read the rest of this entry »