Community developer blogs

Martin Parry

Recent Posts

• What am I doing?

  Posted: 17 Jun 2009 at 14:09 by martin

  I guess I should start with an apology. Faithful readers have probably left my blog in their droves because it’s been so long since I posted anything. Here’s the thing. When I worked at Microsoft, my job required that I was always looking at new technology. It seemed reasonable to me that I should write about it, because other people picking up that technology might gain something from my writing. These days, I don’t do much with new technology from Microsoft.

• Creating a process in another user session

  Posted: 02 Dec 2008 at 13:43

  In my last post, I talked about how a process' access token determines which user session it belongs to. With that information, and if I have sufficient privilege, I can programmatically start a process in any running session. In my scenario I have a highly-privileged service that wants to comm

• Windows user sessions, Winstas and Desktops

  Posted: 02 Dec 2008 at 13:41

  You know the feature that Windows has had since XP, that allows "fast user switching"...? I knew it was implemented using some variant of Terminal Services, but until recently I thought that different users' sessions were contained inside separate Window Stations (Winstas) and their a

• Microsoft Azure as a driver for efficient programming

  Posted: 28 Oct 2008 at 11:58

  Microsoft announced Azure at the PDC yesterday, and it's got me thinking in all kinds of directions.I've been an occasional visitor to StackOverflow.com since it launched a while ago. I can't say I've been an active participant - my reputation is only 271 at the time of writing, but even with my occ

• Some Thoughts on Software Performance

  Posted: 27 Oct 2008 at 19:17

  In recent years I've done quite a bit of performance and scalability testing of apps on the Microsoft platform. I know plenty of people who are more knowledgeable about software performance than I am, but at the same time a little knowledge about how to measure and affect performance in softwar

• Mac vs. PC

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 22:04 by martin

  I have a Mac.  Nothing fancy, just a small MacBook.  I don't think it was a reaction to leaving Microsoft.  In fact, I dual-boot it with Windows Vista.  I need Vista because I am a Windows developer, after all.  Having said that, I have grown to like the Mac.  These day

• Microsoft's Bad TV Advertising

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 21:59 by martin

  I just saw one of the latest batch of Microsoft TV adverts (I'm in the UK by the way).  As usual, it's banal, and leaves me wondering what the heck it was trying to say.  For such a wealthy company, Microsoft has some shockingly-bad TV commercials.  When I worked there, I seem to reme

• Source Code Management Changes

  Posted: 25 Sep 2008 at 13:24 by martin

  I currently spend a lot of time working on a development project with a client, and on that project we recently changed our source control system.  We were originally using ClearCase, and it's hard to be too critical of ClearCase.  I mean, it's been around for a long time, and it's still i

• Debugging FileNotFoundException

  Posted: 15 Aug 2008 at 16:54 by martin

  Recently in our app we were getting a System.IO.FileNotFoundException.  The trouble was, the exception detail didn't tell us what particular file was missing.  Our .NET app has a dependency on a COM DLL, which in turn has good, old-fashioned, dynamic-linkage dependencies on other DLLs. Ini

• On the Nature of Blogging

  Posted: 08 Aug 2008 at 14:55 by martin

  When I look at the viewing statistics for my blog I see that last month was the biggest month ever, in spite of the fact that I didn't post much, and that I was on holiday for half of the month.  Actually, there was quite a big increase compared with the previous month.  This leads me to s

• Visual Studio and Stability

  Posted: 09 Jul 2008 at 12:33 by martin

  I was just reading the lastest MSDN UK Flash newsletter, and was very interested in the survey results.  For the uninitiated, each issue of the Flash contains a survey that readers can respond to.  In the next issue, they show the results of that survey.  The most recent survey questi

• Herding Sheep

  Posted: 24 Jun 2008 at 18:32 by martin

  One of the things I find most interesting about software development is the people who do it.  I think you can spot personality traits by reading people's code :-)  A few years ago, I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and I was interested that it seems to categorize people

• SQL 2008 and SQL Compact 3.5

  Posted: 20 Jun 2008 at 13:33 by martin

  I've been using SQL Server Compact Edition v3.5 for a little while now, and while the database engine has performed faultlessly so far, the same cannot be said of the management tool that's built into VS2008.  Perhaps that has improved with SP1 of VS2008, I haven't checked yet. Today, I downloa

• DesignMode in Windows Forms control development

  Posted: 17 Jun 2008 at 14:21 by martin

  I'm currently working on an app that has to run on v2.0 of the .NET platform (with no SP applied).  The particular behaviour I'm talking about may have changed in more recent versions - I haven't had time to check - but I was struck by something and just had to write about it. When you're worki

• The Campaign Against .NET Obfuscation

  Posted: 13 Jun 2008 at 13:27 by martin

  I've started a one-man campaign. In fact I started it years ago when .NET obfuscation first appeared. I don't like any of the .NET obfuscation technologies. I don't think obfuscation is worth bothering with, and it makes the developer's life just a little bit harder. So don't do it. Think about it..

• Why I Don't Use Windows Forms DataBinding

  Posted: 13 Jun 2008 at 13:25 by martin

  I have two reasons to eschew Windows Forms databinding. Complexity and Performance. As is usually the case, these two are related. You see, Microsoft designed databinding to accommodate a wide variety of controls, and an equally wide variety of datastructures. Because they couldn't predict exactly w

• Simplicity in Software

  Posted: 13 Jun 2008 at 13:21 by martin

  I think most of us developers would agree that keeping our software as simple as possible is a noble aim. I guess there are some developers who like to make things unnecessarily complex, but I for one hope not to spend too much of my life maintaining their code. I'm sure that no reader of my blog wo

• Rant about "Quiet Carriages"

  Posted: 28 May 2008 at 13:38 by martin

  Moving away from my normal topic of software development, I just wanted to vent some annoyance about "Quiet Carriages".  On the rail service I use, the operator designates 2 of the 8 carriages in the train as "quiet".  They request that you don't use mobile phones or personal audio equipme

• Consulting Nightmares: The Right Tool for the Job

  Posted: 15 May 2008 at 08:21 by martin

  If I was a builder, and there was a tool in my toolbox that I didn't understand, couldn't tell you what it was for, then I think that tool would stay in the box.  I wouldn't decide one day to get that tool out and start trying it out for jobs that I already knew how to do with other tools. 

• BOPS ?

  Posted: 14 May 2008 at 18:21 by martin

  Earlier, I was looking at this page about quad-core processors from Intel.  I know, I must have been bored :-) Anyway, I spotted something interesting.  Towards the bottom of the page, they publish numbers of "Billions of Operations Per Second", and they claim 153,500 of those BOPS.