Once again I've been too busy to comment on these during the week

Geek Speak

A collection of blog posts that I flagged for follow up this week.

  1. Aaron Margosis has a blog which explains why you shouldn’t run as an Admin user on Windows systems and how to work around the problems that you might face when you start running as non admin. This table of contents post is a good jumping off point if you’re interested in running as a normal user.

  2. Jeff Darcy on designing interfaces. Jeff cuts through the Asserts vs Exceptions debate and goes to the meat of the issue; “Interfaces should minimize burden on the caller. An interface that just requires a function call is generally preferable to one that requires a function call plus something else.” Sound advice.

  3. Jeff Atwood talks about how the fastest way to validate a GUID in .Net isn’t quite as obvious as you’d expect… Personally I think that in this kind of situation the class should expose a static method which can be used to validate the input data that you might wish to pass to the constructor. The static method could then be used by the constructor when it needs to validate the input data and by clients of the class if they wish to check input data for validity. This would allow the user of the class to validate the input data in a code path that doesn’t rely on an exception for failure and would mean that the user doesn’t have to craft their own code to do the same kind of validation that the class does already… This doesn’t alway work, but in the case of a GUID it would… Don’t Repeat Yourself; and don’t require others to recode functionality that you provide simply because you fail to expose it to them.

  4. Jeff Atwood again, this time on Windows 3.11, including a link to peteweb.com where you can download lots of old operating systems…

  5. Craig Andera on when to switch to .Net 2.0. I’m sure this is even more of an issue for people shipping “downloadable” software rather than hosted software. His main question is how long after the November release of .Net 2.0 will the majority of his users have .Net 2.0 installed… It’s the thorny problem of dependencies and one that will continue to be an issue as .Net evolves…

  6. Ian Griffiths on more new C# 3.0 and LINQ features. A very interesting analysis of how LINQ uses the new features in C# 3.0 to operate efficiently. The expression tree stuff is very nice…

  7. Why I Hate Frameworks - an amusing piece from the Joel On Software forums.

  8. The Cable Guy lots of good info on Microsoft networking via “Tales from a Trading Desk”.

  9. XML Sitemap generator - automatically generates a sitemap of a site by crawling the site.