Events

Welcome to the antepenultimate day (i.e., the 24th) of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today we'll look at how communicating between foreign systems has evolved over time, leaving us with two principal formats for information interchange: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Back in the day, even before I started writing software, computer systems talked to each other using specific protocols. Memory, tape (!) and other storage, and communications had significant costs...

Earlier this week, the Post reported on data that one of the scariest predictions of anthropogenic climate change theory seems to be coming true: The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming “the densest water on the Earth,” in the words of study lead author...

We're in the home stretch. It's day 23 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge and it's time to loop-the-loop. C# has a number of ways to iterate over a collection of things, and a base interface that lets you know you can use an iterator. The simplest ways to iterate over code is to use while, which just keeps looping until a condition is met: var n = 1; while (n < 6) { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++; } Console.WriteLine("Done"); while is similar to do: var n = 1; do { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++...

Longtime readers know how much I loathe Eddie Lampert for what he did to Sears and for how perfectly he demonstrates the dangers of slavishly following a philosophy that owes a lot to the thought processes of adolescent boys. Well, my longtime predictions seem to be coming true. Lampert has offered to buy the best bits of Sears (i.e., its real estate and Kenmore brand), which would quickly kill the company. Crain's Joe Cahill outlines some of the offal in this awful person's proposal: It's not clear...

For my second attempt at this post (after a BSOD), here (on time yet!) is day 22 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: the var keyword, which has sparked more religious wars since it emerged in 2007 than almost every other language improvement in the C# universe. Before C# 3.0, the language required you to declare every variable explicitly, like so: using System; using InnerDrive.Framework.Financial; Int32 x = 123; // same as int x = 123; Money m = 123; Starting with C# 3.0, you could do this...

For day 21 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I'm going to wade into a religious debate: UUIDs vs. integers for database primary keys. First, let's define UUID, which stands for Universally Unique Identifier. A UUID comprises 32 hexadecimal digits typically displayed in 5 groups separated by dashes. The actual identifier is 128 bits long, meaning the chance of a collision between any two of them is slightly lower than the chance of finding a specific grain of dust somewhere in the solar system. An...