Scott Hanselman

Looks like Mike's new book called "Coder To Developer" is all set to launch April 9th.  A sample chapter on Unit Testing can be had here.  You can also order it from Amazon. 

It's got a great cover design and from the sample chapter, it looks like a winner.  It's written in Mike's non-nonsense, practical prose with the weight of a quarter-century of Software Development behind it.  So far it reminds me of the Pragmatic Programmers series which means it will be a must have on your shelf if you're looking to move your 'coding career' to that next level.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Malek, Moroccan RD and all around great person, has organized a fantastic conference this year.  If you're in the neighborhood (including most of Europe, it's just an hour or two from everywhere), check it out.  I'm bringing my wife along, and we'll also stop by RSA and Zim on our tour of the continent I can call my second home.

The greatest yet... The North Africa Developer conference this year features the future Microsoft technologies : Longhorn, Whidbey and Yukon, alongside the deep inside .Net development sessions covering most areas of interest for the developer, the software architect and the solutions decision maker... In this second edition of the NDC, we expect 1500 attendees at the 3 keynotes and 45 breakout sessions. Among the speakers, a strong Regional Directors presence including :

• Clemens Vasters
• Scott Hanselman
• Stephen Forte
• Yann Faure
• Andrew Brust
• Sylvain Duford
• Ingo Rammer
• Eric Groise
• Goksin Bakir
• Malek Kemmou

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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It's been one month since my LASIK surgery, and I went to the eye doctor today for my checkup. 

The conclusion is amazing to the point of disbelief, but we did the tests several times.  You may remember I was -9.25 diopters or roughly 20/1600. 

Tangent: What does 20/20 mean? (or 6/6 in metric)

If you have 20/20 vision, it means that when you stand 20 feet away from the chart you can see what the "normal" human being can see. (In metric, the standard is 6 meters and it's called 6/6 vision). In other words, if you have 20/20 vision your vision is "normal" -- a majority of people in the population can see what you see at 20 feet.

If you have 20/40 vision, it means that when you stand 20 feet away from the chart you can see what a normal human can see when standing 40 feet from the chart. That is, if there is a normal person standing 40 feet away from the chart and you are standing only 20 feet away from it, you and the normal person can see the same detail. 20/100 means that when you stand 20 feet from the chart you can see what a normal person standing 100 feet away can see. 20/200 is the cutoff for legal blindness in the United States.

So, my vision was fairly bad, but such is the life of the four-eyed geek right?  Everyone remembers not being able to see the blackboard and telling their parents.  Next thing you know you're 30, have worn glasses your whole life and didn't go to prom. Well, maybe not that last part, but you get the idea.

Anyway, went to the doctor today, and my vision is officially 20/10.  Yes, 10.  That means I see as clear from 20 feet as a person standing at 10 feet.  So, pretty amazing.  I still have some slight visual artifacts in the right eye in complete darkness, but that gets better every day.  All in all, a significantly better result than I could have expected, especially considering when I orignally decided to get this done 5 years ago, I was told "We don't recommend LASIK for folks more than -8."  Clearly that has changed, and the technology has improved.

Anyway, I won't sully this technology blog anymore with LASIK musings, except maybe for the six month and one year checkups.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Best quote from Windows vs. Linux Security Analysis:
"The scope of this analysis is to demonstrate that so far the subjects who expressed an opinion about the Linux/Windows level of security didn't have any idea of what they where talking about."

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Raymond Chen just gave me a "duh" moment, by pointing out the obvious-only-if-you-think-about-it.  Char.IsDigit() doesn't mean 'IsZeroToNineInEnglish', it means 'is in the decimal range of 0 to 9' and darnnit if there aren't other ways (other than 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) to express them! :)

So let's run an experiment.

class Program {
  public static void Main(string[] args) {
    System.Console.WriteLine(
      System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match(
        "\x0661\x0662\x0663", // "١٢٣"
        "^\\d+$").Success);
    System.Console.WriteLine(
      System.Char.IsDigit('\x0661'));
  }
}

The characters in the string are Arabic digits, but they are still digits, as evidenced by the program output:

True
True

Uh-oh. Do you have this bug in your parameter validation? (More examples..)
If you use a pattern like @"^\d$" to validate that you receive only digits, and then later use System.Int32.Parse() to parse it, then I can hand you some Arabic digits and sit back and watch the fireworks. The Arabic digits will pass your validation expression, but when you get around to using it, boom, you throw a System.FormatException and die. [Raymond Chen]

Arabic speakers (مرحبًا, كيف حالك ؟ and forgive me, it's been college since I studied Arabic) how to you handle numeric validation in JavaScript AND guarantee that the JavaScript you use on the client-side is semantically equivalent to the server-side code?

Either way, my friends, read, grok, and be enlightened.  Muy interesante.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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