Eric Newcomer doubts that visual programming is viable. I disagree. Visual programming is usually conceived to be executable UML, which is a terrible concept. I've argued against visual programming in the past, pointing out that developers value information density and won't embrace something that takes half a screen to express …

Microsoft and Sun have announced that it was all a sad misunderstanding and that from now on, they're best friends for life. Okay, stop smirking and play along: If Sun and Microsoft were to decide to cooperate closely to serve the needs of the entire development community, what would be …

I'm very excited to announce that as of today, April 1st 2004, I've become the world's first micro-outsourced developer. I've hired great developers in Bangalore (GMT +4.5), Cameroon (GMT +1), Brazil (GMT -3), and Vanuatu (GMT -7). My job is to write the unit tests. I post them as …

After downloading the gigantic Whidbey Preview (available at MSDN Subscriber Downloads) and attempting to install it on my sacrificial machine, I reliably get a problem while installing .NET Framework 2.0: "RegSvcs.exe triggers "Memory at 0x00143cb0 tried to write to 0x00143cb0. The memory could not be 'written.'" This happens …

IronPython doesn't (yet?) use lightweight code generation, a forthcoming facility in the Whidbey CLR, but Joel Pobar shows "Hello, World" using LCG.

Jim Hugunin has posted a paper on IronPython, a fast Python implementation for .NET. This has triggered a cascade of posts.

The money quote: "[A]s I carried out my experiments I found the CLR to be a surprisingly good target for dynamic languages...."

More: "High system performance is the …

No, not really. That's just April 1st shorthand for my point.

Peter suggests an interactive drawing tutor as a great application for the TabletPC, a more dignified concept than my "Draw Draw Revolution" game. He suggests text and a voice-over, simple animation, some way of evaluating the learner's input, etc …

P.J. Plauger was awarded Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. He richly deserves it. There's his tremendous contribution to the C and C++ standardization projects, but I personally feel that his Programming on Purpose column for Computer Language was simply the best programming column ever written. It's the reason …

I receive a lot of press releases via email. Here's a note to PR people: I'm probably not the only writer/editor in the world who doesn't casually open Word documents sent via email. I know that you write the press releases in Word and it makes them look prettier …

Argh! I am writing an article for publication and need some eye-candy for the application. I was going to use my Amazon product-similarity graphing tool but I just realized that I use C# 2.0 generics throughout! The thought of bowdlerizing it to use object-based collections is ... just ... repugnant. But …