Porting old posts, part 4
I'm continuing with my project to port over, reformat and update a decade of old blog posts. Today, a few days in mid-October 2003; this is still my second month of blogging and I am writing at what I would consider today to be a ridiculous rate.
Once again I fail to understand the customer mindset.
How do I script a non-default dispatch?
First, COM is too complicated. Second, sometimes defense in depth can go too far.
What everyone should know about character encoding
I had been meaning to write this post, and then Joel ended up doing a far better job than I would have. That's a win in my opinion.
Some thoughts on memory leaks and language design to avoid them.
Long jumps considered way more harmful than exceptions
Whether you should use exception handling or not is a decision to be made on its merits; but trying to mix code that uses exception handling with code that uses return codes is going to be a mess. Pick one.
The first of what will be a lot of articles describing the JScript .NET language design process.
Microsoft's under-funding of this language and the long-term strategic ramifications of that choice continues to be the corporate strategy decision affecting me directly that I most strongly disagreed with. It's super irritating to have a vision of the future, try to build towards it, and have all those efforts rebuked, only to see many aspects of that vision realized a decade later at many times the cost. I'm glad Microsoft got there eventually, but it could have been a lot sooner, a lot cheaper.
Expect to see a bunch more of this rant as I port over those articles; you've been warned.
Wrox is dead, long live Wrox
Digging a security hole all the way to China
Dead trees vs bits
Some thoughts on the economics of publishing computer books in 2003, before the e-book revolution.
VBScript is to VB as ping pong is to volleyball
Is it more important to learn the language, or the object model? Plus, some musings on the 2003 mobile phone operating system business.
The first of many rants about how to think about improving performance of software.
More soon!