Comments on blogs irk me, but not for the reason you probably are thinking right now. There are two kinds of blogs, those with comments and those without. There are places for both, but blogs that posture an opinion should probably have comments and those comments should not be deleted because you disagree with that person’s stance.

For example, it seems that one of the favorite pastimes of A-list bloggers is to constantly complain about Twitter’s well documented outages. I don’t understand this behavior. If it doesn’t work, wouldn’t you find something that does?

This comment got my attention:

“Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.”

So I simply commented, “Why would you think Twitter owes you an explanation?”

To which I got the reply “…watch your accusatory tone.”

Hmm, I’ve already put them on the defensive, so I soften my reply a bit: “How is that accusatory? I just don’t think that a company is going to accept that they owe you something…” (or something very close to this).

Moments later, I was deleted – the entire thread I started with a simple question, was gone.

Further research seems to indicate that this particular person is notorious for this behavior. I don’t understand how a blog with comments is supposed to work when the only view is the unilateral one. I have a huge amount of respect for Jeff Atwood because of the simple reason that he makes bold statements based on research and then lets the comments come to life. More than half do not follow his reasoning, but that’s where the magic is – based on all this back and forth, I’m getting the story and then I’m hearing opposing arguments all in one thread.

My only recourse was to unsubscribe from those who would not open comments up to opposing views. I simply can’t trust what they have to say any longer. I voice unchecked is not something I am willing to listen to – if you are doing this, you are just shouting at me and to that I say, “no thanks”.

~ is the NOT operator in SQL, so for a bit column, to flip a value the statement would be something like this:

UPDATE dbo.Users SET Optin = ~Optin WHERE Id = @id

Just found this today and after using SQL for so many years, this will definitely come in handy going forward.

This is the simple way of doing "are you sure?" functionality in .NET:

<asp:button runat="server" id="btnSubmit" text="Do Something" onclick="btnSubmit_click" onclientclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to do this?');">
</asp:button>

Enjoy.

I often use simple base classes for things like address and name for more complex data structures, partly for readability and partly for easy formatting overrides. So a User class might look something like:

	class Subscriber
	{
		Base.Name Name;
		Subscriber()
		{
			this.Name = new Name();
		}
	}
	

and the Name class would look as such:

	class Name
	{
		string First = "";
		string Last = "";
		override string ToString()
		{
			return this.First + " " + this.Last;
		}
	}
	

Why not null or string.empty for the Name defaults? Quite simply those values don't play well in the UI and introducing them there seems to cause more code and potential gotchas than it solves. In the UI, this class structure is as simple as I think it can be made:

	User user = new User();
	something = user.Name.First;
	

Does the Law of Demeter apply here? No - the Name object cannot be null and cannot return null parameter values - those might be empty, but of course, we should probably checked if the User object was actually loaded correctly to catch if the entire object is null.

	User user = new User();
	if(user.Load(SomeId))
	{
		something = user.Name.First;
		somethingelse = user.Name.ToString();
	}
	else
	{
		//handle when User is still null
	}
	

I'm always looking for readability and simplicity, I think this solves both well, what do you think?

I've been trying to submit a very simple Skype Extra for a client. For what is such a digitally based business, this submission process is entirely analog and alltogether frustrating.

For the pages of developer documents that they have on their site, I found it overwhelming and really wasn't sure where to start. After building a simple ClickOnce application in C#, I later assumed that this type of application would not work as an extra. After pairing down the application to simple HTML, I submitted, submitted and accidently submitted again.

There are no contact email addresses that I could find anywhere on any of the corporate Skype sites. After resorting to posting on their forums, I have come to find that the extra will be manually reviewed, but that person is currently in Russia and will not be able to review until they return.

With no clear submission policy, no contact email addresses, and no mechanism to understand the status of your submission, I have to say I'm left entirely frustrated by this process and can't really understand how in this day and age, they haven't automated this process.

I understand the need to manually review extras, but if I were on the Skype staff, I wouldn't want to be answering the same question over and over on the boards. I'd put the ability to check the status in the hands of the submitter.