Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Raymond Chen - "The Old New Thing" (best book ever)

This is the most interesting non-technical (mostly) computer book I've ever seen! You owe it to yourself to check out Raymond Chen's blog (here) and buy his new book "The Old New Thing". It's great - I'm either laughing or totally nose down entrenched in reading this book - it's so interesting and at times funny too.

To save you having to look it up, it's a book on the historical development of windows and the 'why' in windows, rather than the 'how'. There are some really great insights here, especially about UI design, but there are also some amazing tidbits that explain questions that have been floating around in my head for some time (like what's the deal with GlobalAlloc, LocalAlloc, and all that crap!).

Anyway, check it out - you can buy it by going to his blog (here) and clicking the book image in the upper right corner.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Away for a while...

So, I've been away for a while. Sorry about that. I've got a bunch of new topics I'd like to write about, so many I can't choose which to do first.

1) OpenXML - this is way cool!
2) More about attributes and their use in .NET - building a binary file system engine.
3) WiX
4) .NET 3.0 System.IO.Packaging and it's use for custom apps...
5) .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 relationships and compatibility between them...
6) DLLs, dependencies, and best practices for COM objects that use non-COM dll's for inprocess use.
7) Benefits of MS Gold Partnership.
8) MG-ALFA planned improvements (at least the ones I can talk about)...

Not sure - any preferences - please email me...