CodeBetter.Com Link Blog

Sysinternals' Mark's Russinovich Posts Shakes up World

Brendan Tompkins — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:27:18 GMT

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: More on Sony: Dangerous Decloaking Patch, EULAs and Phoning Home

My posting Monday on Sony’s use of a rootkit as part of their Digital Rights Management (DRM) generated an outcry that’s reached the mainstream media. As of this morning the story is being covered in newspapers and media sites around the world including USA Today and the BBC. This is the case of the blogosphere having an impact, at least for the moment. But, there’s more to the story, like how Sony’s patch can lead to a crashed system and data loss and how Sony is still making users jump through hoops to get an uninstaller. At the core of this story, however, is the issue of what disclosure should be required of software End User License Agreements (EULAs) and how the requirements can be made Federal law.

Community Server user interface to be powered by ComponentArt

Brendan Tompkins — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 17:27:19 GMT

ComponentArt - What's New

Today ComponentArt is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Telligent Systems Inc., creators of the very popular Community Server product. A managed platform offering moderated discussion forums, blogging capabilities, photo galleries and more – Community Server is the engine that powers some of the advanced collaborative aspects of such websites as Microsoft's www.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com, and domain registrar GoDaddy.com.

Beginning with the upcoming version 1.2, key aspects of the Community Server user interface will be powered by ComponentArt's Web.UI suite of controls for ASP.NET.

Coding Horror: Head First Design Patterns

Brendan Tompkins — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:55:30 GMT

Coding Horror: Head First Design Patterns

Filling 593 pages with rah-rah pattern talk, and then tacking this critical guidance on at the end of the book is downright irresponsible. This advice should be in 72 point blinking Comic Sans on the very first page.

Beginning developers never met a pattern or an object they didn't like. Encouraging them to experiment with patterns is like throwing gasoline on a fire. And yet that's exactly what this book does. Page 597 outlines how therapeutic it is for beginners to abuse patterns:

Quite possibly the first time I disagree with Jeff.

-BrendaN

ASP.NET Resources - Performance of Dynamic Object Instantiation

Brendan Tompkins — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:18:21 GMT

ASP.NET Resources - Performance of Dynamic Object Instantiation

As Provider pattern has been gaining more and more favor among developers, I’ve been wondering about performance implications of dynamic object (provider) instantiation it mandates. The most common mechanism to create providers on the fly has been via Activator.CreateInstance. Steve Maine did a nice perf test of Activator vs. the new operator, which showed that Activator was quite slow (which was reasonable to expect).

K. Scott Allen : What AJAX Should Not Be

Brendan Tompkins — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 14:21:02 GMT

K. Scott Allen : What AJAX Should Not Be

Continuing on the AJAX theme, I have a couple ideas about what AJAX should not be

Coding Horror: For Best Results, Don't Initialize Variables

Brendan Tompkins — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:08:37 GMT

Coding Horror: For Best Results, Don't Initialize Variables

I recommend avoiding initialization as a general rule, unless you have a compelling reason to do so. If you're only initializing variables to avoid the uninitialized variable compiler warning, check out the new #pragma warning feature to programmatically disable specific warnings in .NET 2.0.

A low-level look at the Asp.Net Architecture

Raymond Lewallen — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 09:07:00 GMT

An article by Rick Strahl

Dave Burke's Blog : Getting in on the What's Wrong with SharePoint Meme

Brendan Tompkins — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:04:28 GMT

My best friend Dave is trying to Get in on the What's Wrong with SharePoint Meme

This is like one of those "SEND ME TO THE PDC!" posts, telling you why I'm qualified to join the party. Let's just say I know SharePoint well enough to both love it and hate it. Been makin' bricks with the SharePoint Mud Dance since 2001, starting on SharePoint Portal 2001 and migrating 10 gigs of SP2001 Server docs (with all metadata) to Windows 2003 Sharepoint Services, something unsupported by Microsoft, but something I built because I refused allowing our small company to pay $30,000 for a Microsoft Server product we didn't need.

Language Workbenches

Raymond Lewallen — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 11:01:00 GMT

An interesting article from Martin Fowler on what he dubs "Language Workbenches"

Coding Horror: The Broken Window Theory

Brendan Tompkins — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 12:20:00 GMT

Coding Horror: The Broken Window Theory

In a previous entry, I touched on the broken window theory. You might be familiar with the Pragmatic Progammers' take on this:

Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a "Not Implemented" message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you're on top of the situation.

We've seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we'll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.

That's excellent advice for programmers, but it's not the complete story.

I always knew this as “Urban Decay” theory. It’s a very cool idea. Check it out!

Scott on Writing

Brendan Tompkins — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:37:25 GMT

Scott on Writing

In yesterday's blog entry I mentioned that I went to the company's office and was told, upon informing them that I was heading to the courthouse to file a small claims court case, that a partial payment had been sent earlier in the week. I felt I was being lied to, but didn't know what else to do than just wait it out and see if payment did arrive by the end of the week. After reading the comments in yesterday's blog post and a few private emails, I decided that I had a better chance winning the lottery then getting payment (or a truthful statement) from this company, so today I went and filed the paperwork. The courtdate is in early August, assuming everything goes to plan (i.e., the don't file for a later date, they are properly served, etc., etc.).

Scott Galloway's Personal Blog : Visual Studio Team System VPC due next week...

Brendan Tompkins — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:35:39 GMT

Scott Galloway's Personal Blog : Visual Studio Team System VPC due next week...

Just heard that there will be a publicly (well, MSDN subscriber) avaialble download of a Virtual PC image of Visual Studio Team System 2005 (plus all the bits you need to run it) avaialble soon. We've been using this internally for a while and if you want to really get to grips with this great product, it's fantastic...not sure about the memory requirements yet - but I'd guess 512MB won't cut it :-)

notgartner.com: Mitch Denny's Blog

Brendan Tompkins — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 15:19:21 GMT

notgartner.com: Mitch Denny's Blog

Repeat after me, my web-service is autonomous, I’ll tell you I’m not feeling well (error codes) but I won’t bend over so you can take my temperature (passing back stack traces). Is that colourful enough?

Steve Eichert's Blog - Encytemedia redesigns ActiveType (CMS)

Brendan Tompkins — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:40:55 GMT

Steve Eichert's Blog - Encytemedia redesigns ActiveType (CMS)

As I’ve mentioned a couple times on this blog I’m currently working on a .NET content management system. I’m targeting a release sometime around when .NET 2.0 releases, however, I’m hoping to have some beta releases in the next couple of months.

Web Services Home: WSE 3.0 and WS-ReliableMessaging

Brendan Tompkins — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:17:17 GMT

Web Services Home: WSE 3.0 and WS-ReliableMessaging

This article provides an overview of WSE 3.0 Reliable Messaging (WseRM). This is a sample code reference implementation for WSE 3.0 that implements the latest draft of the WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM) specification. The article first describes the scenarios where WS-RM is applicable, then provides an overview of the WS-RM specification, and finally it defines the scope and goals of WseRM. Detailed documentation, samples, and the complete source code for the WseRM reference implementation are provided in the associated MSI download. (17 printed pages)