/ blog / archive — 11 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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opinion
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2026 // current cycle
0x15
2026.05.21
VB on Avalonia: the VB6 form-and-handler model, cross-compiled to Linux from Visual Studio 2026
I spent a weekend proving the VB6 loop is alive outside Windows. Visual Basic on Avalonia 11, .NET 10, Visual Studio 2026, two update patterns side-by-side, and the same VB source publishing to a 47 MB self-contained win-x64 .exe and a 47 MB self-contained linux-x64 ELF. No first-party VB template for Avalonia, so the .vbproj is hand-rolled. Everything downstream behaves normally. Full source and two build guides on GitHub.
7′
0x14
2026.05.19
Is MAUI another Silverlight? A retrospective on every Microsoft UI framework, and why developers are tired
Microsoft has shipped more UI frameworks than any other vendor in computing history. Win32, MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, Xamarin.Forms, UWP, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor Hybrid. Each launched with a deck full of reasons this one was the future. Some are still here. Most are not. The real question is not whether MAUI is the next Silverlight; it is why a working developer in 2026 should ever again bet on a Microsoft UI framework as a strategic choice.
13′
0x12
2026.05.14
Why learn modern system design if the old ways still work?
The old ways do still work. WinForms in VB.NET 10 on Visual Studio 2026 is a perfectly modern stack. Modern system design is not asking you to give up forms, events, or any of the tools that already serve you well. It is a small set of techniques you can add behind them, when a project starts to want them.
6′
0x10
2026.05.12
Frugal again - rules for writing code that respects the machine
The hardware curve has flattened. The papering-over is ending. Here are the rules for writing code that respects the machine it actually runs on, with .NET specifics.
14′
0x0F
2026.05.05
The end of free hardware
Dennard scaling broke twenty years ago. The transistor density curve still has runway. The bill nobody warned us about is the complexity tax, and it is coming due.
9′
0x0C
2026.05.01
Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language.
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after thirty years of watching the difference.
9′
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′
0x08
2026.04.29
The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse
YouTube has tens of thousands of talented creators making careful, deep, useful videos. The home feed will not show them to you. There is no browse. Only a funnel, built from your laziest clicks and tuned to keep you watching, not to surface what's worth watching. A rant from inside the trap, and a sketch of the tool I'm building to climb out of it.
6′
0x07
2026.04.28
From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control, lived from inside
In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A practitioner's history of source control from someone who used every major system since 1990, and lost code in most of them.
10′
0x0B
2026.04.27
I use Claude Code, and here is how
I adopted Claude Code about four months ago to help with code and writing. The ideas, the anecdotes, the prose, and the opinions on this site are mine. The model edits. I want to say that out loud rather than leave readers guessing, and I want to be clear about why a force multiplier is a double-edged tool.
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′