Recent Feature Articles

Nov 2025

Using an ADE: Ancient Development Environment

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One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.

For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-25

Secure to Great Lengths

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Our submitter, Gearhead, was embarking on STEM-related research. This required him to pursue funding from a governmental agency that we’ll call the Ministry of Silly Walks. In order to start a grant application and track its status, Gearhead had to create an account on the Ministry website.

The registration page asked for a lot of personal information first. Then Gearhead had to create his own username and password. He used his password generator to create a random string: D\h.|wAi=&:;^t9ZyoO

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-11

Future Documentation

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Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!

He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-15

Undefined Tasks

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Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.

The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-07
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