Philosophical Geek

I’ve recently been learning WPF. This is a huge topic that is uncontainable by any single book, tutorial, or web-site. The complexity and breadth of this framework is nearly oppressive, but the results are incredible. Or rather, I should say, potentially incredible.
From everything I’ve read, people who have suffered through the WPF learning curve have [...]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Filed under: Software Development, Tips | 6 Comments »

NDepend is a tool I’d heard about for years, but had yet to really dive into recently. Thanks to the good folks developing it, I was able to try out a copy and have been analyzing my own projects with it.
Here’s a brief run-down of my initial experience with it.
Installation
There is no installation file—everything is [...]

Popularity: 14% [?]

Filed under: Link/News, Software Development, Tips | No Comments »

I’ve been having a great time at Microsoft over the last couple of months, but the ramp to full productivity is very steep. Recently, I’ve been working on an important improvement to some monitoring software, which requires a fairly good understanding of part of the system. It can be a little overwhelming trying to design [...]

Popularity: 12% [?]

Filed under: Software Development, microsoft | 1 Comment »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every [...]

Popularity: 11% [?]

Filed under: A Better Future, Books, Software Development, Thoughts On Tech and More | 1 Comment »

I had been planning on writing a blog entry on the apparently sad state of our CS industry these days, and the complete lack of qualified American resumes that come across my desk, when we actually got a decent one today.
Still, there is much to be said about the poor quality of education. At some [...]

Popularity: 8% [?]

Filed under: Software Development | 4 Comments »

My last post was well and good (definitely read the comments), but I think I should be serious about my new employer because I really am excited to work there. Here are some reasons why:

The opportunity to work with people smarter than me. The chance to meet some of the people I admire in the [...]

Popularity: 8% [?]

Filed under: Software Development, microsoft | 3 Comments »

If you are following the instructions to build log4cxx 0.10 in Visual Studio 2005, and you have the Windows Platform SDK v6.0 installed, you may get errors compiling multicast.c in the apr project.
I found the solution, and it’s pretty easy. Open up multicast.c and edit the lines:
136: #if MCAST_JOIN_SOURCE_GROUP
148: #if MCAST_JOIN_SOURCE_GROUP
to [...]

Popularity: 9% [?]

Filed under: Software Development, Tips | 1 Comment »

Change is a fact of life. Nowhere is this more obvious in a medium where the very thing we make is completely intangible and malleable: software development. There is almost nothing that is impossible in software–there are only limited resources.
This malleability has been one of the reasons for the enormous pace of change we’ve seen [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Filed under: Software Development | 1 Comment »

I saw this book when I bought Programming WPF a few weeks ago and it looked promising enough to buy. I’ve been doing unit testing in C# for a few years now, but I thought there were always things to learn and maybe I’d pick up a few new ideas.
It is easy to contrast this [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Filed under: Books, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Using just these links as a guide, we quickly (less than a day) put up a data source over https for our customers to download GIS data to Google Earth.
KML reference and tutorial – KML is the XML language used to describe features that can be displayed in Google Earth and Google Maps.
Sample code [...]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Filed under: Software Development | No Comments »