Makiwa

At work I use MKS Source Integrity and, more recently Borland Starteam, for version control - or, software configuration management (SCM) if you prefer. In my opinion, version control is essential for sane software developement - even for personal projects. Granted, you don’t need all the bells and whistles of an enterprise level solution, but […]

The problem
I have just had a couple of days of major hassle with Visual Studio. Starting both VS 2003 and VS 2005 Beta 2 resulted in an almost instant error dialog informing me that there was an “Unknown error”.

Both 2003 and 2005?? I had used them the day before with no problems. It didn’t […]

Morcheeba’s new album “Antidote” makes quite a break with the style of previous albums: mainly due to the loss of lead vocalist Skye Edwards, whose distinctive silky vocals really helped to set Morcheeba apart from other offerings in the genre. Good luck to her in her solo career!
Her replacement, Daisy Martey - formerly of […]

So, a Shanghai online gamer has been given a suspended death sentence for killing a fellow gamer because of a stolen virtual sword (Yes programmers, this is about virtual property…not virtual properties :grin:).
The killing was, without doubt, a distinctly naughty thing to do and I hope the guilty party rots in jail. That much is […]

I’ve never quite been convinced of the value of using structs (pun intended).
Sure, structs are

stack allocated instead of heap allocated
value types instead of reference types

But that doesn’t really help you when deciding whether to use them or not. And besides, I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that the CLR optimizes heap allocations to the […]

The inability to cope with abstract forms is probably my single biggest gripe about Visual Studio.
When I am building a reasonably-sized application I - like most sane developers - build a forms framework; basically a hierarchy of forms that abstract certain services and functionality. An extremely useful device is the ability to define abstract methods […]

Over the weekend a bank went live with a system I’ve been working on for the last year. The system is now in production and things are running smoothly, but that is not to say there weren’t any hitches.
The one problem was that the submit button on ASP.NET pages does not work after you install […]