Code Complete is all about Software Construction.  What? You probably never faced a course on software construction in school … or did you.  Some key points from this chapter:

• Software Construction includes detailed design, coding, debugging, integration, unit, and integration testing. 
• Construction is also known as implementation and programming.

These topics are likely a cross-section of the courses you’ve taken or the tasks you’ve completed while on the job.  Construction is a core piece of software engineering.  If you’ve worked on a project that started out as “just a small app to do foo” then it’s likely you started with this phase of development.  If you’ve worked on a more mature product, concept, or idea, then you might have worked your way to construction through specifications and business requirements.  In class, this might be a set of information provided to you before you begin a lab or homework.  Steve discuss many great points for why construction is an important topic including:

• Construction is the only activity that’s guaranteed to be done.
• Construction’s product, the source code, is often the only accurate description of the software. 

I love the articulation of this first point.  Whether it’s a project or a product that’s running late, many corners can be cut but this isn’t one of them.

Questions for discussion:

• In projects you’ve worked on how much time has been spent in the construction phase?
• Steve’s motivation for this book was to provide a quicker dissemination of best practices among practitioners and between academia and industry.  How do you learn about or share best practices to improve your skills?

I find the way I learn best is to chat with other developers, although I also like books and newsletters.  I find that when I try to explain my code to someone else, I see a lot of nuances that I missed when I was looking at it on my own.  When I was at IBM, I developed libraries in C.  Memory debugging was quickly one of my frequent tasks and I learned how to use Valgrind and Electric Fence from my colleague Folu.  This lead me use to use linux.die.net as a resource more generally.  I read a lot of MSDN and DeveloperWorks articles.

Since working at Microsoft, I’ve learned about Channel9 which has a lot of great developer content.  Microsoft has a number of great resources for students such as the MSDN Flash Newsletter “News for Students” column and our Facebook discussion at Microphone.

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Help!!  I permanently deleted an email I need, I need to find an email I deleted, how to restore a deleted email.  If you’re in trouble, here’s a quick solution for retrieving email from the dumpster in Outlook 2007.

When you delete an email from one of your folders it first goes into the Deleted Items folder.  To permanently delete an item, it has to be deleted from the Deleted Items folder and is sent to the dumpster.  If you’ve sent an important item to the dumpster, hope is not lost.  You can restore the items using the following procedure:

1. Highlight the folder that originally contained the item.  (If you’re not sure which folder, than you have to repeat these steps for each possible folder).  In this example, we’ll restore something to the Inbox.

2. From the menu bar choose Tools –> Recover Deleted Items.  Keyboard shortcut (hold down ALT and press ‘t’ and then ‘t’ again)

3. A window will pop up with the most recently deleted items:

4. Highlight the message you want to restore and select the icon with a message with an arrow on top, ‘Recover Selected Items’

5. To restore multiple messages, hold down ‘CTRL’ and select the items you want to restore

This came in handy for me when one of my rules got corrupted.  Hope this helps, Happy mail finding!