…when you get excited that your order number at Taco Bell is 2^8.(And you hope the workers will shout it out like “two to the eighth!”)

I’m ready to confess. It’s time to lay it all on the table. Ready?
I can’t keep up!
Wow, that was liberating! I think I should start a taxi service for developers.
There is so much going on in the world of software, how can I keep up with it all, while still making progress in my [...]

My boss has a good sense of humor, and we like to have fun with him. (And by that I mean "at his expense". It’s our way of showing love and respect.)
My friend and co-worker Mike coined a phrase today: speed prank. Our boss was in Europe for business for 2 weeks, and came home [...]

Frequently in web applications there’s a requirement like this: “Every page should display [foo].” Where “foo” can be literally anything: a list of favorites, sponsors, news, or whatever – it’s data. In what I’ll call “normal, by a long shot” ASP.NET cases, universally displayed data will probably be encapsulated in a user control and [...]

I think I watched the first 2 seasons of American Idol before I got tired of it. I’ll pick up a few highlights every now and then, but somehow I’m largely able to live my life ignorant of its existence, and thank God for that. But Rhett and Link brought a little piece of it [...]

I just saw that the registration site for the Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 launch event is up and accepting registrations. (via DotNetKicks) And I was really happy to see that Indianapolis is going to be hosting one on April 3rd! The last I heard it was up in the [...]

It’s amazing how the process of making an application localizable can be both simple and confusing at the same time. At a basic level, the Visual Studio designer makes it very easy. Set the "Localizable" property on your form to True and you’re good to go. It’s very convenient.
On the other hand, there are a [...]

Yes I know it’s boring to blog about blogging. Forgive me.
I started writing this blog as a way to document my “journey” through software development. Intended partly as a reminder to myself and partly as a source of hopefully helpful information to others, I’m pleased overall with how it’s gone.
But I’ve run across an interesting [...]

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 have built-in support for refactoring code, including renaming namespaces, classes, variables, and more. Add-ins like Resharper also have support for refactoring by renaming. These tools work great, and have good integration into the Visual Studio IDE, for example being able to preview each change and exclude false positive matches. I [...]

(For those who’d rather just download the code, the link is at the end.)
Lately I’ve been delving into the ASP.NET MVC framework, the timing of which has been interesting as I am about to finish reading RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. It’s an excellent book that I’d highly recommend to anybody [...]