I was checking my web logs looking for interesting search terms – like anyone who has a commercial web site should – and I found that someone got to my site after looking for “destroy the web”. I checked and it turns out that I’m on the top of the second page of Google for this term (with the blog post Will URL Shortening Services Destroy the Web as We Know It?). I’m posting this for two reasons, first, I want to clarify that I’m not going to destroy the web and I don’t in any way support...

A newer version of this post is at Improve Your Estimation Skills in the Time Management Tips section Most of us are really bad at estimating how much time something is going to take and without good estimates things take longer then planed, we spend all our time fighting to save our schedule and productivity goes down the drain – But there is a solution, just follow those easy steps to become better estimators: Step 1 - Break down projects into small tasks The biggest problem with estimation is that people are really bad at estimating big things, ask a carpenter how much...

and every single dinky little class that you need to split a URL into four parts becomes an engineering project worthy of making a bridge (Joel Spolsky, StackOverflow podcast 38). Developers love to write software, but there's something some developers (and software architects) loves even more – to design software – and if you can skip designing something specific (that might actually be useful) and create some over-reaching principle for the design of every conceivable piece of software it’s even better. Now, when you leave practical considerations behind and head for the principles things tend to go bad, for an example take...

A lot of software acts like it knows better than the user operating it GUI HTML editors are especially bad at this, they will happily take the user’s input and completely rewrite it into something completely different that is supposed to look the same when viewed in a browser, most of the time nobody notices because after all HTML is supposed to be viewed in browsers. But sometimes this HTML is part of a sample and I need the HTML itself to be nicely formatted in the “view source” window, sometime I have some special CSS or JavaScript...

Sometimes you have writers block, it happen even if you need to write an e-mail, a blog post or some software, not just if you are writing books, you are sitting on your chair, your hands are on the keyboard but nothing comes out, one way to get past that is to find a simpler easier version of what you have to do and do that first, for example: Writing a good long blog post about technical subject that requires research is difficult, writing a short rant about some minor computing annoyance is easy. Designing a new web site is difficult, tweaking...

This is the 4th post in a series about printing in WPF, you may want to take a look at the previous posts about printing WPF visuals, using FixedDocument objects and WPF pixel sizes. There are many ways to print in WPF, in this series I’m constructing FixedDocument objects and then print them, at first it may look like there are easier or more powerful ways to print – until you need a to the print preview feature. WPF has a DocumentViewer control that can display a FixedDocument on the screen with paging, panning, zooming and a print button – exactly everything...

In the blog post Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002 Jeff Atwood complains about URL shorteners and all the evil they do. As someone who does e-mail technical support I can tell you URL shortning services are very useful (even without twitter), for example the link to download the .net framework from Microsoft is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&displaylang=en Copy-paste this into an e-mail message and this will be broken across (at least) two lines, clicking this link or easily copy-pasting it into the browser is out of the question, on the other hand this link http://go.nbdtech.com?FD95A574 will redirect you to the same location and is...