In Absentia

One of the most controversial decisions Microsoft made with regards to Windows 8 was the removal of the classic Start Menu, and replacing it with the new MetroStart screen. Furthermore, Microsoft made it impossible to go immediately to the desktop upon login in Windows 8 - it must be done via the new Start screen too.

There has been some excitement last Friday, as JetBrains’ .NET tools program manager Ilya “orangy” Ryzhenkov announced via twitter that JetBrains are bringing on board the team behind the Nemerle programming language. This happened a few days after hinting on twitter that a major announcement is coming.

I speak Russian, but I never bothered to learn how to properly type it on the keyboard. Every time I needed to search or write something, I would use a transliteration service, such as translit.ru, then copy the translated text to clipboard and paste it to the target window (such as a Skype chat session).

Note: I wrote this post before watching Uncle Bob’s excellent NDC 2011 talk called Transformation Priority Premise, which talks exactly about the subject below, however I am still not convinced. I will write a follow-up to this post.

I remembered a story from a few years ago about some guy who tried to build a Sudoku solver using TDD (Test Driven Development) five times, failing and giving up, while another guy simply wrote a solver that worked.

Sometime ago my friend @omervk and myself created Plain Text Offenders - a wall of shame for websites that store and email your own password to you in plaintext. I didn’t expect this kind of explosion - hundreds of submissions already posted and dozens of new ones arriving every day!

In popular culture, computer programmers, sometimes confused with sysadmins, are often described as teenage punks, sitting in a dark, lit only by the glow of their monitor, empty cartons of pizza and Mountain Dew bottles scattered strategically around, frantically hacking away on their keyboard.

TestDriven.NET is a free (for personal use) test runner for Visual Studio, that allows you to run unit tests from the context menu (“Run Tests*) using any unit testing framework. What I like particularly about TestDriven.NET, is that it allows running or debugging any arbitrary method as well!

I blog about ReSharper a lot, mostly due to it’s being an awesome product which greatly improves my productivity. One of the major tips any ReSharper user is given - use the keyboard shortcuts. A lot. Some even go completely mouseless!

I’m writing a PublishNotificationHook plugin for Windows Live Writer (don’t worry, I will soon reveal what it is), and I noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a way to control the contents (text or HTML) of the blog post in this type of plugin.

In the worst security breach in Gawker Media history, a 500mb file containing Gawker’s source code, and employee passwords was released to the internet, compromising email addresses and passwords of hundreds of thousands of users.