A Billion Mice
On December 3, 2008, Logitech (my employer) announced that it had shipped its billionth mouse. While I didn't contribute much to that as an employee (I work in a non-mouse division), I have helped as a consumer: I think I personally own four Logitech mice.
As part of the company …
QCon SF 2008 Day 3
Friday was the third and final day of the QCon conference.
On Friday, I spent most of the day in the Domain Driven Design track, hosted by Eric Evans. The first speaker was Tim McCarthy, who has recently written a book on using DDD with …
QCon SF 2008 Day 2
It's another day of industry stand-outs at QCon.
The day started with a keynote from Tim Bray, of XML fame. Tim spoke about the application stack from this perspective:
He mainly focused on the …
QCon SF 2008 Day 1
QCon is a software development conference sponsored by the InfoQ site and software consultancy Trifork. I am in San Francisco attending it, and here is a summary and some thoughts on the first day's sessions I was able to attend.
As much of …
Goodbye Money
The current stock market makes the title generally appropriate, but I'm specifically talking about Microsoft Money here. I used to use Quicken pretty heavily, but I got tired of forced upgrades so I've been using Microsoft Money for a little while. Now I'm happy to be done with both of …
User Stories Are Not Narratives
The "story" in agile development's "user story" is not a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Many are short on verbs, which is a big hint that something non-narrative is going on. "User story" is shorthand for a set of concepts and principles. The danger with taking a …
UI Horror: Birthdays
Last year I wrote about my dislike for cell phones. Despite that, I actually have one now. Maybe I'll write more about that at some point, but I was just recently reminded (irony to be revealed later) of a particularly sloppy user experience associated with adding birthdays to contacts and …
.NET Cold Startup Performance: More
A few months ago I wrote about an approach to improving .NET cold startup performance. Here's a little more information that I've learned since then.
Another useful tool for optimizing cold startup is Microsoft's free CLR Profiler 2.0. While this tool has the aesthetics of a wadded-up paper sack …
Are .NET Properties a Mistake?
As I mentioned the other day, I'm reading Jeffrey Richter's book CLR via C# right now. I was kind of surprised to read this statement by the author: "If I had been involved in the design of the .NET Framework and compilers, I would not have offered properties at all …
Guidelines for Method Parameter and Return Types
I've been reading Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# lately, and just read a section titled "Declaring a Method's Parameter Types". That title doesn't exactly promise a riveting read, but it did a nice job of articulating some guidelines for method parameter and return types, independent of any particular programming language …