Every once in a blue moon I find myself needing to do some development work on the Mac. The tools I use vary depending on the job at hand, but there are a few Mac OS apps that this Windows developer can’t live without.
Inside COM for the WinRT!
I noticed I still had a copy of Inside COM on my shelf the other day. I guess I held on to it because I fondly remember COM as a simple and elegant technology that had the potential to be the vehicle of true Component-Based Software Development, or at least give C++ developers a usable Application Binary Interface that it still lacks to this very day.
Unfortunately the elegance was quickly lost under the clutter of IDL and COM+ and ActiveX and IDispatch and the rest of the kitchen sink that was piled on top of it.
But seeing how COM is making a comeback with WinRT, and how new copies of this book are selling for US$60+ on Amazon, I’m glad I kept it. It might come in handy in the near future.
Updating cached CSS files in ASP.NET MVC 3 using dotLess
I had an issue with caching in an ASP.NET MVC3 web site that I was working on recently where users weren’t getting updates to CSS and image files. CSS is rather easy to resolve using the well-known query string hack, but doing the same for images referenced from within the CSS files is a bit trickier. Luckily the solution becomes trivial with a little help from dotLess.
Das Keyboard: When badassery trumps productivity
This lovely Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate Silent Keyboard came in the mail earlier. I have a few weeks of increased Typos Per Minute to look forward to, but it’s totally worth it.