“It works on my machine” is not a very solid defense. And when something baffling is happening in your code on a non-development machine, and logging doesn’t give enough clues, it can be a good time to take advantage of remote debugging. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t generally buy music or ebooks online, even though I would like to. I just can’t bear the restrictive copy protection that comes attached with online purchases. In fact, I get angry as I think about the experiences I’ve had with DRM, and the ever encroaching control that content owners leverage with it. So I was surprised to discover a use of DRM that I’m actually not too bothered by. Read the rest of this entry »

At times it is useful to keep tabs on what is happening (or has happened) in the file system. This is a brief overview of all the ways I know of to track activity on a Windows file system. Read the rest of this entry »

I noticed the other day that the pages on this site had double body tags in the HTML. As someone who favors standards it was kind of embarrassing. But what started as a quick fix turned into a few days of ruminating about how I’m putting this site together. Read the rest of this entry »

I noticed again this morning that Quicken was still unable to download my credit card transactions online. It hasn’t worked since some time in February. The error message said that my PIN or Customer ID was wrong. I know I’ve double-checked the PIN previously, so I figured it must be the user name that was the problem. This led me to think about a few ways that the Quicken user interface is deficient. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was asked to enable the Windows XP visual styles for our application. No problem — I’ve done that for applications many times. Just drop the appropriate manifest file in the right place, call InitCommonControls and all should be well. When I tried that this morning, though, I got an error message: “An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the application’s support team for more information.” I suspected our support team wasn’t going to be much help on this one. The Visual C++ 2005 runtime library configuration strikes again. Read the rest of this entry »

In February I went up to Washington for a visit to Microsoft, to get some partner training about Office 2007. Among the typical freebies I got for attending (laptop bag, USB hub, CD case, etc.) was a pass to the Microsoft company store. I was pretty stoked as I started thinking about what I might be able to get my hands on for super-cheap. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago I got really frustrated trying to maintain a schedule for my current development assignment. I personally think that having a schedule, or work plan, is a very good thing. But it was too painful to maintain one, so I started writing a tool that would help. The result, now in its third major revision, is the esmithy.net Work Plan Editor. Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked for Folio and NextPage, companies that have specialized in full-text indexing using custom search engines, I have an admitted knowledge liability with regard to relational databases. It never really made sense to have a relational database and our own search database coexisting in an application. But it never occurred to me that such a knowledge liability could be considered a benefit in terms of thinking about how applications should be designed. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a continuation of thoughts after reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. This time I want to write a little about design by contract without direct language support. What do you give up without language support, and is it still worth it to struggle through defining contracts without that support? Read the rest of this entry »