Mokka mit Schlag » 2006 » June

What’s the best book discussing the proper writing of .NET code in general and C# in particular? I’m thinking of something along the lines of Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java, but for C# instead of Java. That is, I want a book that assumes I already know the basic mechanics of the language, and am quite familiar with general object oriented principles like polymorphism, but need to know things such as “classes begin with lower case letters and methods begin with upper case letters.”

Here are a few possibilities:
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When I installed XCode on my Mac, I also picked up a Projects menu on the right side of the menu bar that I almost never use:

For the life of me I can’t figure out how to turn this off. Surely someone must know how to remove this. Any ideas?

Have you ever noticed how many bird song mnemonics involve beer?

White-eyed Vireo: Chuck, pick up the beer… Quick!
Olive-sided Flycatcher: Quick! Three Beers!
Common Nighthawk: Beeer
Black-throated Blue Warbler: Beer Beer Beer Beeee
Alder Flycatcher: Free Beer!

I don’t think this says much about the birds, but it may say something about the birders.

1've decided that as pretty as Gill Sans is, it’s not going to work. On rereading an older post in the new font, 1 noticed a major flaw in its design that makes it unsuitable for production use. 1f you’re reading this post in Gill Sans, you may want to switch your font to see what 1'm talking about. 1f you’re reading it in another font, doubtless you’ve already noticed the problem.

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Last week’s ABA convention was a lot of fun. I made new friends, learned a lot about birds, saw quite a few species, and heard more. Interestingly, although I got twelve new life birds, I whiffed on all my target species: Boreal Chickadee, Gray Jay, and Black-backed Woodpecker. All three birds were seen by various attendees at various times. I just managed to always be in the wrong group, on the wrong bus, or looking the wrong way to spot any of them. Life birds I did get included:
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I was so taken by the clean look of Mark Pilgrim’s latest blog entry that I just had to look at his stylesheet, and figure out what font he was using. It seems to be Gill Sans at a large size. I’ve now revamped this site to use that as its body font. (Optima is the backup for those deprived PCs without Gill Sans installed.)

On the other hand, he’s using 180% line height which looked a little too big to me, so I’ve set the line height at 140%.

I still need to play with the heading, sidebar, and comment fonts so they match–maybe I should just steal Mark’s choices for these too–but overall this font feels quite a bit more readable and modern to me.