Mike-Ward.Net

My two favorite .Net programming books just happen to be by the same author - Juval Lowy. The first book, “Programming .NET Components”, is a well worn companion that often is not on my desk...

Jeff Atwood, the author of the fabulous Coding Horror blog, has a great write up about buying DRM (Digital Rights Management) free software from Amazon.com. I never bought music from ITunes simply because of the...

I was updating some legacy Windows C++ code last night and the pain of using it hit me like a ton of bricks. In particular, the string handling was a nightmare. Here are all the...

Seems like there is a lot more to read as of late on the Web. Either that or I’m just bored. StuffSafe - Online home inventory. I made the mistake of using Microsoft Money’s home...

There are times when you don’t want your coverage level penalized for code not covered. Often this occurs with code that is produced from a code generator. Since TestDriven.Net invokes NCover with the //ea CoverageExcludeAttribute...

Lately, I’ve had to do a some interviewing for new positions that have opened up here. My interview style is to not ask too many questions and to try and get the candidate to talk...

I’m surprised how many of my colleagues don’t know about this little operator. Termed the null coalescing operator, it returns the left hand operand if not null, else the right hand operand. It makes for...

I’m asking the question because more and more my responsibilities are shifting into the area of architecture. As a developer, I’ve always eyed architects with a bit of suspicion. After all, they don’t program so...

Jeff Attwood recently blogged about how inexpensive it was for him to build a new Home Theater PC (HTPC) based on Vista’s Windows Media Center. As readers of this blog well know, I’m a Vista...

This is one of those Lifehacker type of tips my wife discovered a few years ago. Problem, we have a play house I built for our kids a few years back that attracts bees, nesting...