Matthew Spivey

Presenting scientific graphics on the web has always been a challenge. Fortunately, new web technologies simplify the process. For the purposes of this article, graphics include line art and mathematics, such as those found in academic journal articles: charts, diagrams, and maps.
Visual design is important. Web audiences are accustomed to colorful, interactive content. Because readers …

This disturbing code snippet comes from the Daily WTF.
public boolean isBooleanFalse(boolean value) {
   boolean response = false;
   if (value == true) {
       response = false;
   } else {
       response = true;
   }
   return response;
}

.NET developers should consider replacing guard clauses with code contracts.

Maybe I’m the last to know, but I recently learned this little trick. When temporarily commenting out a block of code in a C++ flavored language, close the comments with // */. This lets you to toggle the code on and off using only the opening /*.

Back when LINQ was the next big thing, I remember the excitement of showing it to a fellow developer. He frowned and said it looked to slow to be usable. Not wanting to have my new toy taken away, I set out on a quest to justify it.

LINQ hides the gory details of how algorithms work, making code measurably more maintainable. Maintainability is correlated with both cost[pdf] and defects[pdf]. In the following example, we’ll use Visual Studio 2010 to measure maintainability.

Microsoft LINQ integrates queries directly into .NET languages, making it easy to work with collections. The best part about LINQ is that it allows us to say what we want to do to a set, without telling it how. This decreases code complexity, without losing any functionality.