Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Cut the HealthCare.gov people some slack

On October 1, 2013, HealthCare.gov was opened to the nation. As one of the more tangible aspects of the Affordable Care Act (aka ACA, Obamacare), the glitches it has experienced are getting lots of negative attention. It's been described as an "inexcusable mess" and a "disaster".

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Threading (But...)

In this talk, Elliot discusses the history of threading in Windows and surveys thread scheduling, threadpool internals, UI thread behavior, the new ASTA UI infrastructure, and the WinRT async pattern.

Five Tips to Make Your Code Better

Below is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter The Trendline. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing. Today I want to lay out five tips you can start doing to automatically make your code better.

How not to validate email addresses

This post first appeared in my weekly-ish newsletter about building awesome software. One task I've seen in nearly every web project I've worked on was: make sure this form field is a valid email address.

How to develop unmaintainable software

I get paid to take on technical debt. In my work I see a lot of hard-to-maintain code, and I see many of the same avoidable problems over and over. I specialize in debugging, fixing, maintaining, and extending legacy software systems.

.NET team makes Portable Class Library (PCL) available on all platforms

We’re happy to share this news from our friends on the .NET team – an update that will make it easier for developers to work across platforms. Check out Rich Lander’s post from the .NET Framework Blog today. By Rich Lander, Program Manager on the .NET team at Microsoft Corp.

'Spaf' On Security

He was one of the first computer scientists to dissect the game-changing worm that hit the Internet 25 years ago and took down thousands of computers. He's also credited for defining software forensics and shaping other security technologies.

What I Learned From Getting My Side Project Acquired

I started Asterank in May 2012. Earlier that week, Planetary Resources announced its intent to mine water and valuable materials from asteroids. Like many others, I was intrigued. It was an inspiring, impossible long-term vision.

2013-11-14 07:11:57

In the previous article on ARM64, I mentioned that one advantage of the new architecture is the fact that it has twice as many registers, allowing code load data from RAM less often, which is much slower.

I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake

When you wrote code for 16-bit Windows, one of the things you spent time doing as part of performance tuning was deciding which functions should be grouped together in which segments. Code in 16-bit Windows executed out of code segments, each of which could be up to 64KB in size.