August 2004
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Reducing what the code could do to just what the code should do
I’ve got one of those ‘please dig us out of this hole before we ship on Friday’ gigs this week. I’m back with the refactoring project for a few days and, well, when the cat’s away… So, we’re 80% … -
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Sick of the R word
I’m getting a bit fed up of hearing the word ‘Refactoring’ when what people really mean is just ‘hacking at code’. Back in May last year I responded to Bob Cringely’s piece on how bad the whole idea of … -
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Caring
There was a good reply by Dr. Real PC on one of Joel’s discussion threads recently; “The most important thing is caring. If you don’t care it doesn’t matter how smart you might be. If you aren’t interested how … -
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Failed
On Tuesday I wrote about the start of this week’s gig. Now that the week is over I guess an update is in order. In summary; I failed to work miracles this week… Monday and Tuesday were spent on the low hanging fruit. Lots of … -
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Most Amusing
Beatallica via Craig. -
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Hmm, so I'm wet, huh?
You are water. You’re not really organic; you’re neither acidic nor basic, yet you’re an acid and a base at the same time. You’re strong willed and opinionated, but relaxed and ready to flow. So while you often seem … -
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The Exponential Nature of Lines of Code
The faster your codebase grows, the less of it people will understand. When people don’t understand all of the code, they don’t see global patterns, and so they will reinvent little wheels all over the place. In theory, the … -
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Excellent piece on exceptions
IanG on Tap: When to Catch Exceptions - the answer is, of course, not as often as you’d expect… Ian’s talking about managed code as can be seen from his final comments about expecting to see many more finally blocks than … -
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Singletons and testing
When you need to jump through hoops to write tests you’ve done it wrong. Jonathan de Halleux writes about testing singletons and how he can subvert the standard C# singleton pattern to create a new singleton for each test he needs to … -
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Brute force marshal by value
This week I integrated the new data provider with the rest of the client’s existing code. The integration was pretty easy as the existing code deals with the data provider via a single method on a COM interface. All that was needed … -
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Just In Time Testing
Once we’d integrated the new data provider we were in a position to do some more testing. We configured the code that used the new component to request the same data from the new component and the old code and to save the data to … -
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Practical Testing: 11 - Moving away from the simplest thing
Previously, on Practical Testing: having decided to rework the code from scratch in TDD style we fixed the tick count bug for the second time - this time the solution was cleaner and simpler. At the end of that episode we were left with a … -
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Thoughts turn to snow
The 2004/05 ski season starts for us in mid September when we’re off to Saas Fee with Warren Smith again. Today we got our boots out and spent some time stomping around and practicing some of the jumping exercises that Warren had us … -
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Repaying the technical debt
The boss is away, we’ve almost done all the things he asked us to do before he went and, well, there’s a bit of spare time so we’re looking closely at the code. The last few weeks have been a bit of a push for the finish … -
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Platform, push off
However, I still prefer that all these technologies should be introduced and made exclusive into Longhorn, because of the enormous benefits a comprehensive base platform provides. By requiring an upgrade, Longhorn would cause a mass shift … -
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Doxygen niggles
I’ve been using Doxygen recently. It can scan a body of code and produce reams of linked documentation and diagrams. I, personally, don’t really use it for its documentation, just for its diagramming. I’ve always believed …
