When .NET arrived on the scene it promoted the use of events and delegates to decouple code. Chris Sells had one of the best early stories on how it all works (.NET Delegates:A C# Bedtime Story)*: Once upon a time, in a strange land south of here, there was a worker named Peter. He was a diligent worker who would readily accept requests from his boss. However, his boss was a mean, untrusting man who insisted on steady progress reports. Since Peter did not want his boss standing in his office looking over his shoulder, Peter promised to notify...

My latest article for MSDN Magazine appeared online and in print a few weeks ago. This article is about search engine optimization with the latest and soon-to-be released tools. It wasn’t so long ago that SEO experts would lambast the .NET platform as poor choice of technology for SEO work, but much has changed just in the last year. While working on the article I exchanged some emails with Carlos Aguilar Mares, who sold me on features in the SEO Toolkit and the URL Rewrite extensions for IIS. The SEO toolkit will crawl your site and warn you about...

I wrote the following prose in preparation for my fireside keynote at Concept Camp 2009. Concept Camp arrived at a time when I was asking questions about the software I’ve created over the years. I was wondering if the software I’ve created is truly successful, and how you measure success in software development.    I’ve written commercial software for many companies over the years. Some of the best software I’ve created was for companies that are now out of business. Was the software a failure? Some of the worst software I’ve created, as a developer working alone and just...

During the last week of August I was in Stockholm, Sweden to deliver two of the twelve workshops at Øredev's Progressive .NET Days. The workshops were split across 3 tracks and covered  prevailing software development topics like NHibernate, DDD, DSLs, Git, and dynamic languages. Based on the feedback I’ve heard, the workshops were considered a success by everyone who participated. But, what left a lasting impression on me was the unbounded hospitality of the event organizers, attendees, and Stockholm itself.  On the first evening that I ever spent in Stockholm I was greeted by Michael Tiberg, the CEO of Oredev....

The 36-Hour Day is a book to buy if someone you love is growing a little older, and perhaps growing a little confused, too. The book is about memory loss and dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. It will give you information and strategies you need to care for your loved one, but more importantly, it gives you a perspective and understanding of what your loved one experiences as their illness transforms their behavior and memory. I have an easy time finding quality technical content on the Internet, but I struggled finding good resources on this topic. The articles on dementia...