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“How many times have you had to debug your web pages on virtual or multiple machines running different versions of Internet Explorer? Or had to wait for a slow web service to return renderings of your pages? You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can debug your pages on multiple versions of IE on the same machine that you use for Web development.” From the MSDN Blog about Microsoft... 
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“Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t. Charles Simonyi, the brilliant programmer who co-invented WYSIWYG word processing, dated Martha Stewart, made a billion dollars off of Microsoft stock and went into space, first tried to solve the Mythical Man Month problem of... 
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“Busy practitioners are sometimes reluctant to spend time examining a colleague’s work. You might be leery of a coworker who asks you to review his code. Does he lack confidence? Does he want you to do his thinking for him? “Anyone who needs his code reviewed shouldn’t be getting paid as a software developer,” scoff some review resisters. In a healthy software engineering... 
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“In the past days I received several requests from my readers to suggest some CAPTCHA scripts and services quickly to embed into a web page. This post proposes a list of ten interesting scripts and services you can use to provide protection from spam bots and ensure that only humans perform certain actions.” From Woork. This is a good canonical list. The comments include a link to a variation... 
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“While CSS can be used to create sexy websites, writing CSS can actually be an artform by itself. The way in which CSS is created, structured, and maintained can be a thing of beauty.” From ThinkVitamin, from a few years ago. Depending on how you learned CSS, it is fairly hard to tell if you code CSS efficiently or not. This article describes some best practices. And I intend to write an... 
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“Code refactoring is not to be confused with code optimization. Code optimization is a completely different ball game, where the goal is to run the program as fast as possible by using as few CPU cycles as you can. The focus during optimization is to speed up the program, if it impedes code understandability then so be it. On the contrary refactoring may at times make your program slower, albeit... 
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“Have you ever wanted to create a simple multi-person blog, but didn’t want to bother setting up an entire WordPress installation? If so then we’ve got just the answer. By combining Twitter Search, Atom feeds, hash-tags and PHP, you can create an RSS-enabled, micro-blog using Twitter and be up and running in less than 10 minutes.” From Think Vitamin. This is a simple and utterly brilliant... 
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Jurgen Appelo has a Knol page with his list of the best software engineering books. It’s got some things old and some things new. My favorite software books tend to focus on teams, how they do and do not work well together to use software to solve problems. But his list includes a lot of books that dig into the details of software programming, for example, cryptography and regular expressions.... 
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“The user experience team members learned to speak the same language by collectively discussing our ways of working and our deliverables. This process started with the kick-off workshop, continued during the review process of the diagram and deliverables descriptions and continues to this day when we discuss how to combine smaller ... 
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“The Broken Window Theory proposes the idea that if we do one bad thing in our code (i.e. break a window) then it becomes more likely that the next person who encounters that code will do something bad as well eventually leading to the degeneration of the code. This is the same when commenting out code - if people see that there is code commented out then it becomes more acceptable for them to... 
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“Noah’s case was only the most dramatic example of a question that has long intrigued me: How do you pay employees based on performance when performance is so hard to quantify? The very idea that you can rate knowledge workers on their productivity is highly suspect and always problematic. If you mess up, the consequences are very real. Psychologists talk about two kinds of motivation:... 
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“Let’s say the adoption of programming languages has very often been somewhat accidental, and the emphasis has very often been on how easy it is to implement the programming language rather than on its actual merits and features. For instance, Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic... 
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“In my mind, there’s really two points. One: You can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don’t want it, then you will fail. This is roughly what happened with the Segway, for example. Perhaps that seems a little discouraging.... 
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“Browsers have garnered renewed scrutiny from security researchers in recent years. In 2007, computer-science students at Stanford University found a way to bypass the same-origin policy in browsers, allowing an attacker to use the browser to access data on other computers on a victim’s network. This year, researchers Robert Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman uncovered a method, known as clickjacking,... 
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“If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community.... 
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“Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it! This document includes the following interesting comment: Each Excel workbook is stored in a compound file. [...] If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending... 
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“Unless you limit yourself to one-page web sites, you’ll need to design navigation. In fact, navigation is among the most important parts of any web design, and requires a great deal of thought if visitors are to move around your site easily.” A great step by step explanation how to code fairly complicated navigation links with stylesheets that work as well or better than javascript... 
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“It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for! After five years without changes to the rendering engine that defines (and limits) what the Web can do, Microsoft has released IE7 Beta 2 Preview for download by developers everywhere. If you have anything to do with the design and layout of a web site, you need to download this and get started on correcting any obvious compatibility issues. Why... 
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When a prospect or customer uses Google to find a product or service you offer, ideally you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 search results. There are many excellent articles online that describe different ways to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages. My goal is not to write yet another how-to article about search engine optimization. Today I want to describe basic steps... 
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“Databases are by no means an easy product category to understand. Many of the big players now offer free or “light” versions of their databases, but comparing them all is no easy task — as we found out. For many businesses, a database is the vital organ that lives, breathes, and protects precious data — the treasured jewel of their enterprise. Everything they know, and... 
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