Geek Speak

Could someone please write a Java based estimating package? I really want to be able to able to turn to a manager and say, with a straight face, that all of my estimates were done in JEst… Sorry, it’s been a long day.

Being a consultant, I find that the start up and shut down of projects are usually the most stressful times. Start up is all about “hitting the ground running”, learning lots of stuff really fast and making a good impression. Shut down is all about hand over. Shut down is the hardest because you need the cooperation of the people you’re handing over to. Whilst you can pretty much deal with any issues during the start up phase just by digging deeper or working harder a hand over with no cooperation just becomes a hand off.

It makes you think. I find that when I’ve done a brain dump post like last night’s “loader lock” posting, all of the issues are fresh in my mind. Posting just before bed means that by the time I wake up I’ve usually come up with lots of new ideas about the thing I just posted about… So this morning I find myself adjusting my Dll hooking code so that I call back into DllMain() just before unloading the Dll and realising that since I’ve told the loader that this Dll doesn’t have an entry point it’s not going to bother making any calls into the Dll when I create new threads…

I’ve been splunking around Dll loading recently for a pet project. It’s been an interesting journey and this evening I solved the final piece of the puzzle and, when I did, I suddenly wondered, not for the first time, why Windows holds the loader lock when calling DllMain()… Chris Brumme explains this much better than me, but; the loader lock is a system wide lock that’s held by the OS when it does stuff to its internal process tables; things like loading and unloading Dlls.

Ah, a place to keep all that bad code… The Daily WTF From Barry

I need to dynamically load a dll, grab some function pointers and do stuff; simple stuff, done it 100s of times before. I decide that this time I’ll wrap the HMODULE that I’ll need in a class to make sure I can never forget to call FreeLibrary() on it - RAII is your friend. It’s Sunday, I’m feeling righteous so I’m doing it in a TDD style. I write some tests, load a dll, load a bad dll to check error handling, load a dll that doesn’t exist…

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 that if I can’t draw a neat and tidy picture of the relationships between pieces of code then the design needs fixing. I used to drop in and out of drawing my own cut down version of UML diagrams as I designed code.

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 to a new platform and offer developers a new minimum level of operating system functionality, a la Windows 95. From .Net Undocumented Riiiiight… I’ll remember to tell all of my clients who are only just finishing moving from NT 4 that they’ll need to move everyone again real soon now because it’ll be more convenient for developers…

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 was to adjust the calling code to use the COM object rather than the local implementation and everything just worked. The good news was that the call to get the data was now 100 times faster than it was with the old code; the bad news was that processing that data took almost three times as long.

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 catch blocks, of course, in a proper language ;) like C++ you don’t need any try blocks at all as RAII will deal with all your resource management for you…