Code (S)talkers

I bet there must be more than a few people you know who seem to have a solution for all your programming (software development in general incl. design et all) problems. In fact listening to them you almost always end up agreeing that they are correct, this is until you actually try putting their suggestions into practice. They almost never work. The solutions usually involve less work, but they screw up the design, all the beautiful decoupling you had done, everything good the project ever had suddenly goes up in smoke.

You'll also notice that such people rarely write any code themselves, what I mean is that you must be writing tonnes of codes while making cool utilities, reusable classes etc, but this bunch never does any of this. They just talk.

So, beware of the code (s)talkers!

DVD for Developers

Good bye CDs, hello DVDs.

We still get Visual Studio installation disks in the form of CDs so also MSDN cds.
I prefer having just one DVD containing both Visual Studio and its MSDN documentation. Here is a link to an article which tells you how make such a DVD.

Also, having a Directory synchronization for such tasks really helps. I wrote my own folder synchronizer which is pretty easy to use. All you need is to have Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework installed on your PC.

You can download DirSynch here.

Happy burning!

Closing the box

As software development matures, doesn't it look like developers are becoming less and less programming-literate?

No offense, but when was the last time you thought about writing a linked list? Isn't it all there already? Our dependence on ready-to-use libraries is increasing at an alarming rate. Hell, once you program in C# you don't even feel like touching C++!

This of course is a natural evolutionary path for software languages. Isn't this what reuse is all about? Having utility classes like collection classes, windowing classes etc. help the developer to concentrate more on the business logic instead of spending large part of development time on such code.

This is good, but not always. Traditional knowledge of computers like pointers, memory, paging etc. are being lost quite fast. Only a small amount of developers are left who attempt working on stuff like compilers, OS, database systems etc. With lesser developers working on such projects, there will be lesser new operating systems, databases and other important software leaving end users with very little choice.

Here is a link to a very good story by Richard Stallman. It almost makes me think of various Asimov novels I have read.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Installing VisualStudio 2003 in MY folder

I have been trying to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 on my machine for some time now.
Usually, its pretty easy, just select the components, their folders and there you go but this time the installer wasn't allowing me to choose the folder for the main (root) component.

I used to have it installed at c:\program files\... but I had uninstalled this few weeks back. Now I wanted to install it in f:\program files\...

I tried searching google for finding a solution for this problem but couldn't find much. Finally, I manually removed all registry entries having the path to the previous installation of Visual Studio 2003 and it worked!

Bad Wafers

Has anyone noticed that the quality of Lay Wafers (take any flovor) getting worse since the last few months?

I noticed that this phonemenon coincided with the introduction of the 'Pringles' style of new wafer by Lays.

I shout 'not fair'! since the older packs (big size) is for Rs. 20 while the new ones is for 55 odd rupees.