I never expected the Bluetooth sockets entry to be so popular … From the comments on that entry it seems a lot of people are having trouble with getting devices to work with XP’s bluetooth support. To help out a little here’s my proof of concept test project.
So a refactoring editor doesn’t float my boat; a lint tool that warned me that there were bad smells in the code would…
Right now I use Gimpel Lint as a code review tool. I run it, it tells me nasty things about the code, I listen, fix or ignore. It would be nice if it could tell me that there were bad smells. I think this is where real value could come from refactoring tools.
Ok, it’s that ‘wine’ time of the evening. Miche is working late, I’ve eaten and am close to finishing off a nice bottle of Pinot Noir and my thoughts turn to people being excited by refactoring editors…
Firstly: I’ve never used a program that facilitated automated refactoring, so be gentle…
Right, so we can select a block of code, right click, select ’extract method’ and the editor does all of the cut, paste and argument passing/receiving fixups… Does that really take people more time to do manually than it does to let the editor do it?
Finally got the Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for my iPaq 3970. The upgrade went nice and smoothly and the iPaq feels quite a bit faster and everything seems a little more polished and easy to use. So far it seems that it was worth the money…
I know I’m way behind the curve with this, but… I downloaded Virtual PC from the MDSN subscriber downloads at the weekend. It rocks. I needed to try something out on a Windows 98 box and I didn’t fancy repaving one of my machines so I went virtual. What’s cool is that once you’ve booted the virgin virtual PC and installed your OS of choice you can just copy the drive somewhere and use it again and again.
Barry sent me an interesting link to a piece that points out just how easy it is to bypass wireless network security.
I wonder if you can get a Bart Simpson shirt with him saying “Sniff my packets” rather than “Eat my shorts”…
I’ve enjoyed the hoo har over exceptions this week. It’s made me think and analyse and reassess what I do. I’ll be continuing pretty much as before, but it’s worth spending the time to think about these things once in a while.
It was interesting to see people defending their positions and how some were open to new and different ideas and how some were not. It was useful to be reminded that what I consider an acceptable development trade-off may be completely different to what someone working on embedded stuff thinks is acceptable.
We’re going to run out of amusing titles for these exception related blog entries sooner or later…
Joel wants Ned to rename the functions in his ’exceptions are better’ example. He wants InstallSoftware(), CopyFiles() and MakeRegistryEntries(). Jesse Ezell leapt in with a C# version which includes the rollback functionality that Joel was undoubtedly hinting at. The thing is, although Jesse is defending the use of exceptions, I think his example is making the case for the other side…
Like drumming up traffic to your site, perhaps? ;)
On Monday Joel Spolsky wrote a controversial piece about exceptions; he hates them. Much blog cross linking and local discussion ensued. Today he’s followed that piece up with a piece that basically says ’exceptions can be good and they can be bad, it’s a design tradeoff’. Which, of course, takes all the controversy out of the original posting; strangely I was expecting something like this…
Wheee. I can throw all of my existing MSDN disks in the disk bucket and I don’t need to keep wondering which is the latest version. They’ve changed my subscription ‘for the better’… Hmm, it seems that now the colours will be used to identify the type of disk (I’m sure that’s how it used to be before they changed the subscription ‘for the better’ last time around) and the major numbers will stay the same when a disk replaces another disk, only the minor number will increment… Sounds sensible… I hope it works.
