September 2011
1 post
Dear Microsoft: It's About Time
Mr. Sinofsky, I’d like to thank you. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
Win32 is an old warhorse. In its heyday, it was dependable, useful, and let us as developers do whatever we needed. But the world has moved on, and while development got easier and better everywhere else, Win32 stayed the same.
For good reason, mind you. Keeping backwards compatibility is hard,...
February 2011
1 post
Native Win32 for fun and profit
All the cool kids these days are playing with awesome dynamic languages, or on cool frameworks. I’m stuck with C++ at work, but every now and then I get to do something cool with it.
That’s the Wacom radial menu, which is implemented as a fully alpha-blended window in native Win32. Something like this is dead simple in WPF, but with native code it’s a bit trickier. I used...
August 2010
2 posts
Git: Grafting repositories
We recently evaluated replacements for our VSS-workalike source control system at work. We have about 14 years of history in our current database, though, and it seems like a good idea to preserve that.
The problem is that all that history takes time to import, and shutting all development down for a week while we get the data into the new system was just not an option. I knew there had to be a...
July 2010
1 post
/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ tests for primeness! →
Ugly and beautiful at the same time. Beaugliful?
June 2010
3 posts
Git for other purposes
Git is usually used to manage source code, though it’s described by its creator as a stupid information tracker. When my team was looking to rework our CM system, I was able to apply my spare-time dabbling with git.
CM is a software engineering discipline all its own, and a large company can easily have several people whose full-time job it is to manage software configurations. CM...
