http://www.polyweb.com/blog Technical things I think about Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:51:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/26 http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/25 Have you ever had a disagreement about when something is actually done (as opposed to “not done yet”)? I started learning about “done” when my parents started making me do chores around the house. Doing dishes: Walk to sink, wash dishes, put in drainer. Done. Am I right? I though I was ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/24 This post is based on a short demo/talk I gave at Vertigo recently. I have two main goals in this discussion: How VS2005 handles WPF projects/apps (showing some Blend / VS2005 gotchas) A way to look at the role of XAML in WPF architecture Petzold books Charles Petzold's books have always been a huge help ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/23 “In addition to our summer and winter estate, he owned a valuable piece of land. True, it was a small piece, but he carried it with him wherever he went.” From Woody Allen’s Love and Death. So, what HAVE I been spending my time on? My little piece of the Windows Vista ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/19 Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) graciously invited me to share in his recent Five Things You Didn't Know About [Jeff Atwood] (and [his] office) post. I too have been humbled and impressed by the other people's stories in the Five Things meme so here are mine: 1.  I am baffled by other people’s ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/18 One of the most common gotchas to getting any data driven application working is the database connection string. How many times in your development life have you heard “I can’t connect to the database” and the problem ends up a minor detail in the connection string? When I was working on ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/17 The story of ATL and WTL (fit for a cocktail napkin): In the beginning, (at least in *this* beginning) there was COM. As developers embraced COM programming for Windows applications Microsoft created the Active Template Library (ATL) as a framework to simplify and envelop the routine tasks in the creation of COM ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/16 Sci Fi literature is happening again. Ok, I’m sure some of you are saying "it’s been happening, where were you?" All I know is that in the 90's my wife was a librarian and we had good visibility on the fact that Science Fiction was being completely overwhelmed by Fantasy Fiction ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/15 One of our PCs died last week. What a chore. The machine was about three years old and there were no warning signs. The machine is at a desk in the bedroom and while I was watching TV one evening I heard it stop. I tried restarting; it whirred for a ... http://www.polyweb.com/blog/index.php/archives/14