Rick Spencer’s post on how developers use the debugger is very enlightening. I didn’t even realize how I use the debugger, but when he talks about things that developers typically do, all I could do was find myself agreeing with him. I haven’t used the debugger in Visual Studio 2005 yet, but it sounds like it’s a substantial improvement over the current one. It looks like a lot of this is thanks to people like Rick performing usability studies. He’s a great read, talking about all of the ways that the team is improving the IDE to help increase developer productivity. Read more »

Not that you couldn’t find these at these at either StarWars.com or Cartoon Network, but this is a great compilation of the Clone Wars micro-series airing on Cartoon Network, currently in season two. It’s a vanilla page, but every episode from season one is available and season two is available as the episodes air. The Quicktime movies are available in 320×240 and 480×320 versions, as well as with commentary. They are only five minutes in length, but this is cool stuff. You’ve got to see Episode 13; Mace Windu doesn’t need a lightsaber to kick some serious behind. Read more »

Interesting forum discussion on tweaking the SQL in phpBB to handle 5000-10000 concurrent users in a forum with almost 50 million posts. Read more »

Some changes are coming to Forever Geek and I am looking for your feedback. Comments are open. Read more »

Tweak-o-Matic is a tool for MS Windows that’s somewhere between TweakUI and Group Policy — it lets you change some of the same settings as TweakUI and push them to remote computers. The download page is one of the funniest I’ve seen in a long time (and definitely the funniest on any Microsoft product ever). Here’s a sample: Warning: Don’t ever change a value in the registry. Ever. We know we just told you to do that, but would you jump off a cliff if we told you to? Don’t ever change a value in the registry. Don’t even say the word registry. We know a guy once who said Read more »

The .NET Framework’s Trace class lets you record details about your application’s runtime behavior. Tracing gives you insight into your running code, but using it “as is” produces unwieldy code and nearly useless traces. I’ll show you how to get around these problems with a trace class library to maximize the value of tracing in your development. The wrappers in this library enable you to articulate precisely what trace entry you’re making or what assertion you’re checking within the calling code. You’ll get a high level of consistency in your traces, and you’ll get a single location for modifying the output format as your needs evolve. Read more »

Tempest for Eliza lets you use your computer monitor to transmit AM radio signals. Read more »

Assuming all of this is true, then I can not wait to get my hands on this. I spend way too many hours playing on my GBA SP and could only imagine how much time I would spend on the PSP. Read more »

Looking at these screenshots shows me two things: Sun is actually doing something that geeks can be proud of A cool 3D interface does not hide the fact that the applications still look ugly and cheap. Reminds me of CDE or something. Read more »

CodeSmith is a code generation tool. You create templates that specify the code to generate, and add properties (such as class name, namespace, etc.) to the template to further customize the output. It gets even better – you can even use most the functionality of the .NET base class library as well. For ASP.NET developers, the template syntax is apparently very similar to this, so it shouldn’t be hard to pick up at all (I don’t know ASP.NET, and I didn’t have any problems). The CodeSmith UI is also very similar to Visual Studio, as well. While CodeSmith is freeware, there is a professional version. The only differences between the Read more »