December 14th, 2007
I read a lot of blogs, mostly technical ones. IMHO it’s the best place to broaden one’s knowledge.
But I observe very different approaches in two different programming “camps”.
Open Source “camp” - very structured, often maintains well driven projects. Rather opened for the community. On blogs, one can read deep thoughts and cool ideas in comments. It’s not a perfect world but projects are developed well. Projects have their milestones, one can participate if he feels skilled enough. Documentations grow very fast and at some stage it is possible to use a program or library.
Microsoft “camp” - or rather people who work there, sometimes MVP’s. It’s so called “mutual friendly society”. Each blog looks very similar to one another. People have many crazy ideas, often very good and acceptable. But there are things that piss me off.
Every project or feature is in fact very simple thing - like “we have just added ‘get latest version on checkout’ in TFS CTP 43523424.1432123 version”. And comments like “Oh, you’re great”, “You rule, man”. Rest of comment’s are “pingbacks”. The most funny thing is that when somebody tries to criticize any idea or a project the comment is just not approved by “almighty” owner. Many projects released as CTP or presented as screencasts are just unusable. Many of them are bloated with so many unused features. But everything looks great, many screenshots, only “wow” and “it’s amazing”.
I personally am more and more dissapointed when many good ideas are wrapped in shitty piece of paper. For example, LINQ to SQL - introduced as something amazing but in fact, it’s only a poor version of Java’s Hibernate. I think that in 5 years it should be able to operate on something more complicated than “Northwind” database.
December 11th, 2007
Today I fixed annoying bug in EasyXML. It crashed when it was pinned to the start menu in Windows. I also added “Start with Windows” option and changed starting behavior a little bit. Now, EasyXML starts minimized.
Go to EasyXML project’s page
November 26th, 2007
“Unexpected Error 0×8ffe2740 Occurred” - this message appeared today on my PC when I was trying to start IIS. A while of “googling” revealed that this is rather normal behavior of the server 
According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816944 this error occurs when some other application uses port 80 (default for a web server).
Instead of expressive error message they create KB article with explanations
September 20th, 2007
Working with the code is not a piece of cake. Especially when one must read and understand "WTF an author had in mind?"
Every day I encounter good code, crazy ideas, stupid constructions and totally fucked up architecture. Unfortunately, the most common is inheritance used where it should not be. Maybe I am too touchy?
Let's assume that we have an object which should be accessible across a project (or among several classes). Normally it's a good idea to create a singleton / static class and initialize it with specified object. I often encounter another approach... I call it "composition by inheritance". There is a class which has the object as a field / property. Then any other class that can use that object... derive from a base class when this object is placed! It looks like below (do not pay attention for types - it's an example only):
C#:
public class Foo
{
public object SharedObject =
new object();
}
public class Bar : Foo
{
public void DoSomething()
{
SharedObject.Consume();
}
}
And the main question - what do you think about it? In my opinion inheritance does not serve this purpose. It should not be used like that because there is no polymorphism here and potential changes in a base class can have many unforeseen consequences.
Any other pros / cons?
September 9th, 2007
When a coder is bored, stupid ideas go into his mind. And it happened to me this Sunday.
In polish only - sorry for english readers 
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_36ccd4wec4
