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. Crazy — well, let’s just say that you won’t get far unless you manage to ignore the obvious…

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. …

What happened with .NET and Microsoft developer tech in 2022 — It’s hard to pick just one theme from 2021. Quiet evolution? Open source controversies? A surprise operating system update that divided developers? When I glance back, I’m surprised to see how much happened in just 365 days. Yes, if you’re looking for obvious earth-shattering changes, 2021 has nothing on 2020…

Can Edge offer a better debugging experience than Chrome? — Ordinarily, I don’t give much thought to Microsoft’s Edge browser. I appreciate that it turned the WebView2 control into a system component, thereby giving legacy desktop apps a powerful way to bolt on new content. But beyond that, Edge feels like a reskinned Chrome with a few annoying quirks. Yes…

It’s concise, practical, and unopinionated. But what about games? — Regular readers of this publication know that I have a couple of favorite tech topics: the Microsoft developer stack, and teaching coding to kids. And yet, these two subjects rarely meet. …