Alex Papadimoulis' .NET Blog

I think I may have been a bit harsh yesterday in my review of Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers. Although I stand by my statements, I wanted to expand on and clarify things based on some of the feedback I received (especially one from the author).

As you may or may not know, I generally critisize things on a daily basis. But this post is much different than my normal (hopefully witty) commentary on bad code. Today I'm pointing out some serious flaws in a book I came acrossed called Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers that make the book not only bad (which I can live with) but dangerous for an inexperienced developer. Not only does it fall short of "best practices," but it actually advocates bad practices. In summary, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. And if an enlarged & emboldened statement isn't enough, read on ...

And here I thought everyone had already jumped on the GMail train. Aparantly not ... Scott Dockendorf  gave away six in a very short time. Wow. Since they're still needed, have some of mine.

I posted some code the other day at TheDailyWTF.com that used some pretty intense error handling for a function that simply returned "True". Of course, the way to do it would have been:

(Try #2 ...)
I'm pretty excited to see that there is some real error handling for T-SQL code in SQL Server 2005. It's pretty painful to have your wonderfully architected .NET solution tainted by less-than-VBScript error handling for stored procedures in the database. The big difference being  the addition of TRY..CATCH blocks. Let's take a look:

So I opened up IE tonite and was quite surprised to see this come up. It's an alert from the AMBER system, which is responsible for alerting the community anytime a child goes missing and is serious danger of harm. We're used to seeing them on the local channels or on the radio, but this is the first time I've seen one show up on the web from the local ISP.

A few months ago, I decided that it was time for me to upgrade my desktop PC. Unfortunately, my knowledge of all-things-hardware has been reduced to a simple rule: if the numbers are higher, it must be faster and better.

I posted this to the IHOC, but thought it was of general enough interest. So, here's a slightly tamer version of the original post.