The promise is any art you want… if you can ask the right question — As a programmer and general tech tinkerer, I’ve seen plenty of AI projects. Some were impressive (GitHub Copilot). Others much less so (like the AI bot that digested all the world’s Christmas…

Here’s the last word on what made the cut for .NET 7 — We have a tradition around here, and it has two parts. First, we speculate madly about future C# features by snooping through the C# team’s GitHub (yay for open source!). Then, when the release happens, we take stock of which predictions came true and what is left unfulfilled. In C#…

.NET 7 gives you JavaScript interop without Blazor — If you’ve been a .NET programmer for a few years, you’ve seen some remarkable changes. ASP.NET became modular and modern. C# absorbed new techniques from functional programming. And the entire .NET platform reinvented itself as a cross-platform, open source project. But few developments have been as dramatic as the introduction…

C# is thriving. So why are so many people ready to write it off? — Another day, another clickbait article about why C# is sick. Or dying. Or already dead (you just don’t know it yet). As a person who’s written a lot about dead and dying Microsoft technologies (see my pieces on Silverlight, Access, VB, Expression Studio, and ASP.NET Web Forms), I’ll be the…

Can a single programmer make a successful computer game — all on their own? — When it comes to great feats of coding, it’s hard to match the difficulty, creativity, and sheer audacity of building a modern computer game entirely on your own. Ambitious, yes. Lonely, definitely. …

Don’t overlook the most important password rule — Security theatre is the name for a technique that may make people feel safer, but seldom does anything more than waste time and resources. Taking off your shoes for inspection in the airport, a brief trend of the early 2000s, is security theatre. Spraying restaurant seats with antiseptics, a supposed…

What stays in? What gets cut? Let the speculation begin! — Today, it’s called C# Next. It’s still just a bundle of ideas struggling to make it out into the world. But in nine months, parts of C# Next will become the official C# 11. (Side note: That’s a relatively solid deadline, because the evolution of C# is tied to .NET’s…

Sometimes it’s the little things that count — When .NET 6 dropped this November, a few top-line items grabbed all the attention. I’m talking about C# 10, hot reload, Blazor’s AOT compilation, and some serious inner loop performance improvements. All of them are worthy enhancements. But if you look beyond the marquee items, you’ll see that .NET 6…

We often use Python to teach programming. But what if it isn’t the best starting point? — If you want to learn the black magic of making metal and silicon bend to your will, no language is a bad starting place. In fact, you don’t even need to use a traditional programming language — you can learn plenty writing shell scripts or hacking Minecraft mods. …