Steve Hiner Talks About .Net

Interesting new programming QA site - StackOverflow

2008-09-17T13:16:57Z

StackOverflow.com

It’s a cross between a programming web forum, Wikipedia and Digg. Basically people ask questions, people answer questions and people vote on the answers to push them higher or lower in the stack. If more clarity is needed the original question and answers can be edited as needed rather than posting new responses. Theoretically this means the good answers will float to the top and they will be complete answers so you don’t have to read through dozens of responses to figure out the complete answer. It also means that old, obsolete questions and answers will tend to sink to the bottom of the stack. Also, questions and answers can be tagged so you can do more targeted searching. It’s free too (no Experts Exchange bait and switch tactics).

You can read about the idea behind it here.

The more time I spend on the site the more impressed I am with their ideas. As you post questions and answers and those posts get voted up or down you gain and lose reputation. At certain reputation levels you get more power on the site (ability to vote posts up/down, ability to comment, etc). It really should cut down on the noise since new users can't comment at all and they can't vote the questions/answers up and down until they've spent some time on the site. That means, hopefully, it will be harder to "game" the site like people try to do with slashdot and digg.

Check it out, it's going to be a killer site. They should branch out into non-programming sites too.

Out-Treemap - PowerShell treemap cmdlet

2008-07-07T15:42:07Z

In order to use the cmdlet first you'll have to grab the Microsoft Visualization Components from Microsoft Research.

If you don't want all the visualization components here is a zip file of just the treemap generator dll. Unzip it and put TreemapGenerator.DLL in your scripts folder.

Grab this file to get the scripts I demoed at the meeting.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I'm hoping to do a full writeup for the blog soon.

Who am I? What am I doing here?

2008-07-07T15:37:56Z

Hi, I thought I'd start my blog by introducing myself. I'm Steve Hiner. Christian, father, family man and programmer.

I started writing code back in grade school. It was in the early 80s so I was about 10-12 years old at the time. I believe it was on a TRS-80 and I'm sure it was some form of BASIC. A while back I ran across an old audio cassette tape with one of my first programs on it, a sci-fi text adventure game. I remember my mom helping me read through a programming book while sitting at our home PC (a Heathkit system my dad built - with 128KB RAM and dual 5-1/4 floppies - at the time that was quite a system).

Fast forward to college where I got a Civil Engineering degree. While getting the degree I started taking every programming class I could get credit for. Because of learning in the college of engineering my first serious programming was in FORTRAN77.

After graduation I worked as an engineer for a couple years but got bored with it. When my current boss offered me a job programming I jumped at the chance. That was 10 years ago.

Now I'm a Windows developer focusing on .Net technologies. Most of my time is spent writing the UI to interface with hardware the company develops. I've worked on everything from a stock trade sorting app to a machine vision app. As systems integrators we do a little bit of everything so projects are always new and interesting.

I've become something of a PowerShell fanatic lately so I'm always looking for problems I can solve with a bit of PowerShell scripting. I'm really blown away by Microsoft's new shell - it really is an amazing piece of technology.

Well, that's me. Who are you?