/ blog / archive — 17 entries
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Field notes from 35+ years in the trenches. Mostly C# / .NET / Avalonia,
some Rust, rants about OOP, retro emulation, and whatever weird thing has me up at 2am.
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dotnet
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2026 // current cycle
0x0D
2026.04.30
What did you love about VB6, and what frustrates you about modern .NET?
Two open questions for anyone who shipped real work on Visual Basic 6 and is now writing C# against modern .NET. What specifically did VB6 get right that you miss? And what do you find frustrating about the modern toolchain that VB6 didn't make you fight? I shipped about a hundred VB3-through-VB6 line-of-business systems between 1995 and 2010, and I'm trying to get to the root of what was actually good before too much of the institutional memory leaves the room.
4′
0x09
2026.04.27
Mea culpa, I shipped a draft-book feature that hid every chapter inside it
M12 said draft books are public works-in-progress. I updated the book-level visibility filter and called it done. The article-level filter, which lived in seven other queries, was a separate code path. Anonymous visitors saw the book, saw the chapters, and every chapter rendered 'no published articles'. Here's what I missed and the fix.
3′
0x06
2026.04.27
Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
Every UI framework Microsoft has shipped since WinForms (2002) was sold as its successor. WPF, Silverlight, UWP, MAUI, Blazor desktop. Twenty-four years on, WinForms is still there, on modern .NET, with a designer that any VB6 developer would recognise on sight. The Cooper and Geary form-designer architecture from 1987 is still the path of least resistance for a working line-of-business app in 2026, and that is not an accident.
12′
0x05
2026.04.26
Turning an SBC's OTG port into a real USB keyboard — and the three traps that ate days of mine
A $20 single-board computer can pretend to be a USB keyboard the host OS can't tell from real hardware — but only after you survive the descriptor cache, the layout-on-the-host gotcha, and Windows silently dropping the first keystroke. Here's the working setup, the three traps, and the warm-up that fixes them.
15′
0x02
2026.04.24
Building EvilGeniusLabs.ca: from mockup to production in a week
Five days from domain purchase to a live site with blog, wiki, books, authenticated comments, container registry, and CI. The stack choices, the design mockup, the milestone-driven plan, and an honest accounting of how I used AI as a pair programmer to ship it.
10′