Archive for September, 2005
Why writing truly international software is hard
You cannot trust a thing. Forget intuition. As I recently posted, you can't just go about thinking every date value is representable under the current culture. Well, there's a lot more, and I'm learning some of it the hard way. You just cannot assume a case-insensitive comparison between "bit" and "BIT" would be true. "What?" [...]
September 27, 2005
Posted in: Misc. programming 
Comments Closed
MSDN downloads now supports Firefox and Opera
Microsoft now supports Firefox and Opera for downloading stuff in MSDN subscriber area. I'm certainly not praising Microsoft for making a simple download service work with any browser – it should've done so a long time ago. Yet still, I do see a significant attitude shift here. Even with IE7 and all that coming out, [...]
September 17, 2005
Posted in: Web One Comment
Swimming against the tide… and losing
Not like it's anything new, but I'll repeat it anyway: There's much too much going on in Microsoft world. Of course, at the time of PDC05 all the news channels naturally pick up… but still, this is getting ridiculous. I'm a fast reader and in a position where information flows are rather organized and readable [...]
September 16, 2005
Posted in: .NET Comments Closed
Bad code bites in an unexpected way
I've always known bad code bites you back in a number of ways, but this one was new. See the following code snippet:
string lastHeading = DateTime.MinValue.ToShortDateString();
foreach (Item i in GetItems()) {
if (i.Date.ToShortDateString() != lastHeading) {
lastHeading = i.Date.ToShortDateString();
Console.WriteLine(lastHeading);
}
Console.WriteLine(" " + i.Text);
}
So what does it do? Quite nicely, it takes care of printing date headers for [...]
September 14, 2005
Posted in: .NET 2 Comments