Items by Tag

I had plans to do the Blogging A-to-Z challenge this year as I've done the last two, but reality intervened. In theory I have more time to write than last year. In fact I didn't have the energy required to plan and start drafting entries mid-March, for obvious reasons. Things have stabilized since my office closed on the 17th, and I've gotten back into the swing of working from home every day. But I feel like a full 26-post series this month would not rise to my own standards of quality for permanent...

Here is the list of topics I wrote about for the 2019 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the topic of music theory: A is for A (April 1) B is for Bass (April 2) C is for Clef (April 3) D is for Deceptive Cadence (April 4) E is for "Ethnic" Sixth Chord (April 5) F is for Fugue (April 6) G is for Gregorian Chant (April 8) H is for Harmony (April 9) I is for Interval (April 10) J is for Jazz (April 11) K is for Key (April 12) L is for Legato (April 13) M is for Modes (April 15) N is for Notation (April 16) O is...

Here is the list of topics I wrote about for the 2019 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the topic of music theory: A is for A (April 1) B is for Bass (April 2) C is for Clef (April 3) D is for Deceptive Cadence (April 4) E is for "Ethnic" Sixth Chord (April 5) F is for Fugue (April 6) G is for Gregorian Chant (April 8) H is for Harmony (April 9) I is for Interval (April 10) J is for Jazz (April 11) K is for Key (April 12) L is for Legato (April 13) M is for Modes (April 15) N is for Notation (April 16) O is...

Today the Blogging A-to-Z challenge comes to a close, and for the fourth time this year, I have to punt. Search all you want: music theory really doesn't have any important terms starting with Z. So today, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite vocal works: Brahms' opus 103, "Zigeunerlieder" (Gypsy Songs). I performed three songs from the cycle with the Illinois Music Educators Association All-State Honors Chorus in 1987, 100 years after Brahms wrote it. (Yes, back then I was one of the 256 best...

Our penultimate Blogging A-to-Z challenge post this year features the person in your life most likely to continue learning music theory: you. If you like music, go hear it. CDs and downloads are fine, but really you need to go out to hear live music as often as you can. Go hear the symphony; go to a garage band; toss a dollar in a busker's case in the subway. (You never know who might be performing down there.) And keep learning how music works. This series has only skimmed the surface of music theory....

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge sometimes loses its way when the topic you want to write about doesn't really have anything interesting to say for one of the letters of the alphabet. So let it be with X. Further, it's finally spring in Chicago, so maybe the sunlight and warm weather have made me a little lazy. To that point, let me just say that the xylophone is a percussion instrument with wood bars that you strike with a mallet to make sounds. Like this:

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry examines the physics of music. Specifically, when a musician looks at a note on a page, what tone does she actually produce? Most people today have passing familiarity with the piano, which has one key per note. This means the frequency of each note remains the same no matter what key a pianist plays in. If she hits the A above middle C, the piano strings vibrate at 440 Hertz (cycles per second). The A below middle C is 220 Hz, the A below that is 110 Hz, and so...

We're finally putting together a lot of what I've covered in this year's Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today I'll touch on voice leading (known as "part writing" in the UK), which describes how individual voices in a composition work separately to create a musical whole. We already talked about counterpoint, in which we saw how two vocal lines interact while moving independently of each other. That's the essence of voice leading. But when you add more voices, the rules become a bit more complex. Open Music...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry today starts with a joke: what is the definition of a minor second? Two oboes playing in unison. Sorry, oboes. We already know what unison means: it's two voices sounding the same note. And earlier I mentioned that different instruments use different clefs. And we've covered key signatures. Now I'm going to tell you a dirt secret of the orchestra: unison sometimes looks like a bunch of completely different notes. The problem comes from the way that certain brass and...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post sits right in the middle of everything. The tritone is the interval between the perfect 4th and the perfect 5th. Depending on which direction you're going, it's either an augmented 4th or a diminished 5th. And it's always going somewhere. In the C major scale, the natural tritone is between F and B (where it's an augmented 4th) or B and F (where it's a diminished 5th). B, remember, is the leading tone in the key of C, so it really, really wants to resolve to C. The...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge will get a little funky today as we look at syncopation, which is nothing more than an unexpected rhythm. Here's a simple example. Take this clunky melody: Now let's syncopate it a little, by shifting some of the notes off the beat: Instead of hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, now it hits 1, and, and, and, 2, and, and, 4. It's harder to dance to but more interesting. More examples? How about Mozart's Symphony #40, third movement: Or the Rolling Stones? Beethoven? Scott...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will take a look at common musical forms. We've already seen some examples of common musical forms, even though I didn't call them out: the canon and the fugue. Both are imitative forms, though as you've seen the fugue is far more complex than the canon. "Row Row Row Your Boat" is a canon (but, of course, someone made a fugue out of it). When we talk about other forms, we usually note large sections of music with letters. So a form of, say, A-B-A means that you...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post explains how musicians keep time. Through all the examples I've posted this month, you may have noticed that a note's stem has a relationship to how long the note sounds. They do. Starting with a whole note (open, with no stem), each change to the stem reduces the length of the note by half. This also works when you start with a whole rest, except a rest means "don't do anything here." Example: (In the UK, those notes are called whole, half, quarter, quaver...

This morning, my Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will discuss a composer whose music I absolutely loathe because of its insipid, simplistic, earwormy pabulum, Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706). You have, no doubt, heard his Canon in D, which, thanks to its inclusion in an otherwise forgettable film 51 years ago, continues to besmirch weddings and other cultural events with its demonstration of what happens when you strip music down to the essentials and add nothing back. In a way, the Canon in D resembles a...

This morning's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry will take a quick turn and possibly trill your heart with a brief overview of ornaments. You got a glimpse of two of the most common Baroque ornaments on Saturday as the Bach snippet I posted contained a grace note and a mordent: The grace note tells the performer to add the note within the duration of the main note. For example, the grace note in the first measure would be played out as shown in the second measure: A mordent tells the performer to do a...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will, like yesterday's, take us back in time. Almost every day I've shown samples of music using modern notation. Any contemporary musician should have no trouble reading them. Almost a thousand years ago, in 1025, the monk Guido d'Arezzo decided to record music on paper in a way that would enable people to read it even if they'd never encountered it before. He used blocks on lines with stems indicating how the notes were connected, and it looked like this: The...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry goes back in time a little bit. Before there were keys, there were modes: the original scales used in Ancient Greece that still pertain today. Our C-major scale roughly corresponds with the Ionian mode. (I say "roughly" because while the fifth, octave, and probably fourth notes would have sounded the same back then as they do now, the rest of them probably would have sounded slightly out of tune to modern ears. This is a topic for next week.) If you start on D...

I don't always have time to write Blogging A-to-Z challenge posts ahead of time. This week I've had almost no free time until just now. Today I'm going to slide into the topic of  markings. Music involves more than just the notes on the page; it's an artistic expression. Composers use a whole palette of markings and (usually Italian) words to convey to performers how to express the music. Take this snippet of Bach's Invention #1 in C: First, I should point out that Bach famously almost never added...

For day 11 in this year's Blogging A-to-Z challenge, we take a look at keys. Not the ones on a musical instrument, but the ones on a staff sheet. A key designates which scale the piece (or part of the piece) uses to establish its tonality. In this year's very first A-to-Z post, I showed you the four principal scales (major, natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor) that Western music uses most of the time. In that post, you may have noticed that the major scale had the notes C through C without...

Now that you know everything about harmony...oh, wait. Because regular old harmonies have nothing on jazz. So for today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry I'm going to lift up the curtain on some pretty wild stuff. I'm actually not going to have a lot of musical examples today. I'm merely going to point you toward other places that do it better. I will, however, draw your attention to the greatest jazz musician in history: Bach. He improvised the way that other people breathe. And he influenced modern...

Today I'm going to write about a topic that would have come second in any reasonable course on music theory. But in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, sometimes the cart does come before the ox. Because even though I've already shown you the German 6th chord, fugues, and a reasonable harmonization of a simple melody, today I'm going to show you intervals. An interval is simply the distance between any two notes. If the distance is one note, we call that a second; two notes, a third; and so on, up to seven...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry builds on yesterday's by adding a third voice to a simple two-voice example to create harmony. Simply put, harmony is any two notes sounded together. But in practice, harmony involves chords, which comprise groups of 3 or more notes sounded together. Let's start with a recognizable melody: Now I'll add a bass line, to give it a little more depth (and, for astute observers, outline the chord progression that we'll hear in step 3): So there are implied harmonies in...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge now takes you back about 1,100 years to the beginnings of Western music: Gregorian chant. Simple plainchants go back before people generally wrote music down. In the late 9th and early 10th centuries—around the time of Pope Gregory I—we start to find some of the earliest written examples of simple monophonic chants. Some remained part of general liturgical music well into the 18th and 19th centuries, like this example: Here it begins a performance of the second movement of...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will discuss a form of music that, sadly, doesn't turn up much anymore. I say "sadly" because the fugue is one of the most intricate and difficult-to-write musical forms, but also one of the most satisfying when done well—and no one did it better than old J.S. Bach. At its most basic, a fugue takes a short musical subject and tosses it around two or more voices in counterpoint; that is, each musical line (voice) stands on its own as a melody, but the melodies...

One problem with the Blogging A-to-Z challenge becomes obvious when you try to cover a field like music theory that has concepts building on other concepts. You wind up posting things out of order. Today, for example, I'll cover a somewhat esoteric bit of harmony that I find interesting and difficult, but that the previous four posts could not possibly have prepared anyone for if they have just started studying music theory: augmented sixth chords. I'm joking that anyone would call them "ethic" sixth...

Today in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I've used a bit of sleight-of-hand to sneak in a discussion of a large topic by highlighting one example of it. A cadence resolves or pauses a musical phrase. The simplest cadence, called the authentic cadence, uses only the 1st and 5th notes of the scale: You have a C major chord, followed by a G major chord, ending in a C major chord: tonic, dominant, tonic; I-V-I. (If you need a refresher on what those terms mean, read Monday's post.) The second-most-common...

Today in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge we'll take a look at clefs. Yesterday I introduced the concept of a bass line, but skimmed over how that gets written down. Let's take another look at it: Take a look at the first symbols on each line. The top one is called the "treble" or G clef: It's actually a highly-stylized letter G. Notice how it wraps itself around the second line up from the bottom, which is the G line. Thus the name. The bottom line starts with this symbol, called the "bass" or F clef: It...

Yesterday's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post introduced the four principal scales used to create melodies in Western music for the past five or six centuries. Today I want to talk about the opposite of a melody: the bass line. Take this familiar melody: It's pleasant enough, but a little thin. It needs...more. So let's add a bass line below the melody, just using the notes C and G: Hey! It's almost music now! So what's going on here? Without going too much into how harmony works (the topic for next...

Welcome to the Daily Parker's first entry in this year's Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Basic Music Theory." Today: A is for A. In Western music, A represents the note that all other notes are based upon. The other notes in Western music are B, C, D, E, F, and G. Putting all those notes in sequence is called a scale: That scale is called "A natural minor," and sounds like this. The first note in the scale is A; in the attached midi file, and generally in music today, it has a frequency of 440...

It may appear that blogging will slow down a little bit going into the last week of March. That's because Blogging A-to-Z entries take a little more time to write. This year might be a little ambitious, also, because I plan to provide musical snippets to go along with the text (otherwise what's the point?). My goal today: get through a chunk of the first week of April. And figure out when I can write the rest for that week. I've also written an entry for an historical anniversary mid-April. Stay tuned.

Once again, the Daily Parker will participate in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, this year on the theme: "Basic Music Theory."  For the A-to-Z challenge, I'll post 26 entries on this topic, usually by 7am Chicago time (noon UTC) on every day except Sunday. I'll also continue my normal posting routine, though given the time and effort required to write A-to-Z posts, I many not write as much about other things. This should be fun for you and for me. Music theory explains how and why music works. Knowing...

Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#": A is for Assembly (April 1) B is for BASIC (April 2) C is for Common Language Runtime (April 3) D is for Database (April 4) E is for Encapsulation (April 5) F is for F# (April 6) G is for Generics (April 7) H is for Human Factors (April 9) I is for Interface (April 10) J is for JetBrains (April 11) K is for Key-Value Pairs (April 12) L is for LINQ (April 13) M is for Method (April...

Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#": A is for Assembly (April 1) B is for BASIC (April 2) C is for Common Language Runtime (April 3) D is for Database (April 4) E is for Encapsulation (April 5) F is for F# (April 6) G is for Generics (April 7) H is for Human Factors (April 9) I is for Interface (April 10) J is for JetBrains (April 11) K is for Key-Value Pairs (April 12) L is for LINQ (April 13) M is for Method (April...

Today is the last day of the 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Null. The concept of "zero" only made it into Western mathematics just a few centuries ago, and still has yet to make it into many developers' brains. The problem arises in particular when dealing with arrays, and unexpected nulls. In C#, arrays are zero-based. An array's first element appears at position 0: var things = new[] { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; Console.WriteLine(things[1]); // -> 2 This causes no end...

I should have posted day 25 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. yesterday, but life happened, as it has a lot this month. I'm looking forward to June when I might not have the over-scheduling I've experienced since mid-March. We'll see. So it's appropriate that today's topic involves one of the things most programmers get wrong: dates and times. And we can start 20 years ago when the world was young... A serious problem loomed in the software world in the late 1990s: programmers, starting as far back as...

Welcome to the antepenultimate day (i.e., the 24th) of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today we'll look at how communicating between foreign systems has evolved over time, leaving us with two principal formats for information interchange: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Back in the day, even before I started writing software, computer systems talked to each other using specific protocols. Memory, tape (!) and other storage, and communications had significant costs...

We're in the home stretch. It's day 23 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge and it's time to loop-the-loop. C# has a number of ways to iterate over a collection of things, and a base interface that lets you know you can use an iterator. The simplest ways to iterate over code is to use while, which just keeps looping until a condition is met: var n = 1; while (n < 6) { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++; } Console.WriteLine("Done"); while is similar to do: var n = 1; do { Console.WriteLine($"n = {n}"); n++...

For my second attempt at this post (after a BSOD), here (on time yet!) is day 22 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: the var keyword, which has sparked more religious wars since it emerged in 2007 than almost every other language improvement in the C# universe. Before C# 3.0, the language required you to declare every variable explicitly, like so: using System; using InnerDrive.Framework.Financial; Int32 x = 123; // same as int x = 123; Money m = 123; Starting with C# 3.0, you could do this...

For day 21 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I'm going to wade into a religious debate: UUIDs vs. integers for database primary keys. First, let's define UUID, which stands for Universally Unique Identifier. A UUID comprises 32 hexadecimal digits typically displayed in 5 groups separated by dashes. The actual identifier is 128 bits long, meaning the chance of a collision between any two of them is slightly lower than the chance of finding a specific grain of dust somewhere in the solar system. An...

Day 19 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge was Saturday, but Apollo After Hours drained me more or less completely for the weekend. So this morning, let's pretend it's still Saturday for just a moment, and consider one of the oddest classes in the .NET Base Class Library (BCL): System.String. A string is just a sequence of one or more characters. A character could be anything: a letter, a number, a random two-byte value, what have you. System.String holds the sequence for you and gives you some tools to...

Now that I've caught up, day 20 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge is just a few hours late. (The rest of the week should be back to noon UTC/7 am Chicago time.) Today's topic: Types. Everything in .NET is a type, even System.Type, which governs their metadata. Types exist in a hierarchy called the Common Type System (CTS). Distilled, there are two kinds of types: value types and reference types. I alluded to this distinction Saturday earlier today when discussing strings, which are reference types...

OK, I lied. I managed to find 15 minutes to bring you day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, in which I'll discuss one of the coolest feature of the .NET ecosystem: reflection. Reflection gives .NET code the ability to inspect and use any other .NET code, full stop. If you think about it, the runtime has to have this ability just to function. But any code can use tools in the System.Reflection namespace. This lets you do some pretty cool stuff. Here's a (necessarily brief) example, from the Inner...

Day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge...is postponed until tomorrow. And day 19 will be late as well. (Good thing I have Sunday off!) But hey, if you find yourself near Uptown Underground tonight and want to contribute to an excellent chorus, come on in!

Posting day 17 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge just a little late because of stuff (see next post). Apologies. Today's topic is querying, which .NET makes relatively easy through the magic of LINQ. Last week I showed how LINQ works when dealing with in-memory collections of things. In combination with Entity Framework, or another object-relational mapper (ORM), LINQ makes getting data out of your database a ton easier. When querying a database in a .NET application, you will generally need a database...

We're now past the half-way point, 16 days into the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Time to go back to object-oriented design fundamentals. OO design has four basic concepts: Inheritance Encapsulation Abstraction Polymorphism All four have specific meanings. Today we'll just look at polymorphism (from Greek: "poly" meaning many and "morph" meaning shape). Essentially, polymorphism means using the same identifiers in different ways. Let's take a contrived but common example: animals. Imagine you have a class...

For day 15 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I want to talk about something that computer scientists use but application developers typically don't. Longtime readers of the Daily Parker know that I put a lot of stock in having a liberal arts education in general, and having one in my profession in specific. I have a disclosed bias against hiring people with computer science (CS) degrees unless they come from universities with rigorous liberal arts core requirements. Distilled down to the essence, I...

Day 14 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to namespaces. Simply put, a namespace puts logical scope around a group of types. In .NET and in other languages, types typically belong to namespaces two or three levels down. Look at the sample code for this series. You'll notice that all of the types have a scope around them something like this: namespace InnerDrive.Application.Module { } (In some languages it's customary to use the complete domain name of the organization creating the code as part...

Two weeks ago I started writing my A-to-Z posts and got all the way to today's before my life became nuts—as I knew it would—with 4 chorus-related events and a huge increase in my work responsibilities. And with the Apollo After Hours benefit this coming Friday, this weekend will be pretty full as well. I use my email inbox as a to-do list, and right now it has 35 messages, 30 of which relate to the benefit. I'm very glad the A-to-Z Challenge gives us Sundays off, because I don't know how I'm going to...

Alphabetical order doesn't actually put topics in the best sequence for learning, so we've had to wait until Day 13 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge to talk about one of the most basic parts of an object-oriented program: methods. A method takes a message from an object and does something with it. It's the behavior part of the behavior-plus-data pairing that orients your objects in the OO universe. In .NET, even though you define fields, events, properties, and methods on your classes, under the hood...

Day 12 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge will introduce you to LINQ, another way .NET makes your life easier. LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query, which Microsoft describes as follows: Traditionally, queries against data are expressed as simple strings without type checking at compile time or IntelliSense support. Furthermore, you have to learn a different query language for each type of data source: SQL databases, XML documents, various Web services, and so on. With LINQ, a query is a first-class...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge continues on Day 11 with key-value pairs and simple tuples. A tuple is a finite ordered list of elements. In mathematics, you usually see them surrounded by parentheses and delineated with commas, like so: (2, 3, 5, 8, 13). .NET has several generic Tuple classes with 2 through 7 items in the sequence, plus a KeyValuePair structure that is the equivalent of Tuple. I'm actually not a fan of the Tuple class, though I get why it exists. I prefer naming...

For day 10 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'd like to give a shout out to a Czech company that has made my life so much easier over the past five years: JetBrains. Specifically, their flagship .NET accelerator tool ReSharper makes .NET development so much easier I can't even remember life without it. (If you've downloaded the code samples for this challenge, you may have seen either in the code or in the Git log references to ReSharper, usually when I turned off an inspection for a line or two.) I'm...

Day 9 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings up one of the key concepts in object-oriented design: the interface. In object-oriented design, rule #1 is "program to interfaces, not to implementation." In other words, when interacting with an object in your system, you should care about what behaviors and data you need to use, not what the object actually does with them. Going back to last week's room-and-window example: the original problem was that I want to close all the windows in the house with one...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge enters its second week with a note about you, the human. Last week I discussed several topics that you probably thought were about computers. They weren't. They were about how you interact with computers. Computers don't need programming languages. This is a perfectly runnable program for the 6502 microprocessor: 0600: a9 01 8d 00 02 a9 05 8d 01 02 a9 08 8d 02 02 The human-readable version looks like this: $0600 a9 01 LDA #$01 $0602 8d 00 02 STA $0200 $0605 a9 05 LDA #$05...

For day 7 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going totally generic. A generic in C# allows your code to "defer the specification of one or more types until the class or method is declared and instantiated by client code." In other words, you can declare a class that takes a type to be named later. Imagine you have a program that represents a house. Your house has rooms, and the rooms have windows, doors, and in some cases, fireplaces. They also have furniture. And sometimes headless corpses. (Don't...

We're up to day 6 of Blogging A-to-Z challenge, FFS. The last few days I've written about the two main object-oriented languages that come with Visual Studio and .NET: C# and VB.NET. Today I want to diverge just a little into Microsoft's functional language, F#. At first glance, F# looks a lot like C#. It is, in fact, a flavor of C#; and as it runs on the .NET CLR, it uses .NET constructs. But as Microsoft says, "F# is a programming language that provides support for functional programming in addition...

Welcome to day 5 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. In object-oriented design, we talk about a number of basic concepts that make code easier for humans to read and maintain. Encapsulation is fundamental, by hiding the internal data of a class so that only the class can use it. To access data within the class, you can't just reach in and grab it; you need to use the public properties and methods of the class. Here's a stupid class: #region Copyright ©2018 Inner Drive Technology using System; using...

Welcome to day 4 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. After yesterday's more theoretical post on the CLR, today will have a practical example of how to connect to data sources from C# applications. Almost every application ever written needs to store data somewhere. If you're deploying a .NET website into Microsoft Azure (like this blog), you will probably connect it to an Azure SQL Database. Naturally, Visual Studio and C# make this pretty easy. Here's the code that opens up a database connection and...

Day 3 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to the heart of .NET: the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Microsoft defines the CLR as the run-time environment which "runs the code and provides services that make the development process easier." That isn't the most helpful definition, so let me try to elaborate. As I described Sunday and yesterday, the .NET compiler takes your source code from C# or whatever other language you use and compiles it down to one or more managed modules containing...

For day 2 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going to talk about the first computer language I learned, which is still alive and kicking in the .NET universe decades after it first appeared on a MS-DOS 1.0 system disk: BASIC. BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." The original specification came from John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. Today it's one of the core .NET languages included with Visual Studio as "VB.NET" (for "Visual BASIC," Microsoft's...

Welcome to the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge! We're starting today with a fundamental concept in Microsoft .NET software development: the Assembly. Microsoft defines the assembly as "a .dll or .exe file that can contain a collection of APIs that can be called by apps or other assemblies." In other words, an assembly is the basic unit of delivering .NET software to the rest of the world. An assembly "fully describe[s] and contain[s] .NET programs." When you compile .NET source code, the...

The A-to-Z Challenge starts tomorrow, and I'm all set to go with a list of 26 topics on programming with Microsoft .NET. Now I just need to write the actual posts. It's interesting to me how vacations don't actually lend themselves to much productivity, even when that's the explicit purpose of the vacation. Anyway, if I do my job today, the first post will hit at noon UTC tomorrow. If I don't do my job today, it'll hit sometime later than that.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Daily Parker will participate in this year's Blogging A-to-Z Challenge. Today's the official Theme Reveal day. My topic will be: Programming Concepts using Microsoft C# .NET. My topics will include: Compilers vs Interpreters Generics Human factors (and errors) LINQ Polymorphism ...and will finish with a real-world practical example on April 30th. I will also keep up my annoying political and Parker posts through April. And, full disclosure, many of the 26 A-to-Z...

I've narrowed my list down to four potential topics for the Blogging A-to-Z challenge: U.S. Civics Programming (with .NET) Music Places I've visited I've got 26 topics lined up for each. I think they'll all be fun and relatively easy to do (though I'll have to start writing them at least a week ahead). But like a true INTP, I can't decide which to start with. Sign-up is at 00:01 GMT tonight, or 6:01 pm Chicago time.

This year, The Daily Parker will participate in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Since I've posted an average 1.31 times per day since the modern era* of this blog began in November 2005, and an average of 39.6 times every April, posting at least 26 entries this coming April isn't the challenge. (Also, given trends, it's possible my 6,000th modern-era post will be one of them.) No, the challenge will be coming up with 26 entries on one specific topic, and making them worth reading. Keep reading to see (a)...