load of tosh : Development

Writing Solid Code

Tosh Meston — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 07:21:00 GMT

I've just finished reading Writing Solid Code, which it seems everybody at Microsoft has and recommends. I think one of my past dev leads bought each of us on the team a copy. The odd thing is that it's having immediate effect. Maybe that's not odd, but good. I'd finish a chapter and start immediately adding recommended practice to my home projects. Many of the practices are old having been ingrained by dev leads and peers stating them time and again in code reviews. It's clearly a part of the culture at MS. What I found interesting in the book was real world stories of the "old" days -- bugs that were found in Mac Excel due to poor coding practices. The other key takeaway of the book which I'd recommend to new hires or interns is the attitude that the author promotes of the developer being a tester first.

Terrible rewrite compulsion

Tosh Meston — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:22:00 GMT

I just opened a project that I hadn't touched in quite some time and noticed that I was building up my SQL statements by concatenation, which as we all know is a bad idea. I then felt that old compulsion to start rewriting -- this time to use OleDbParameters. I really don't need to update the code. It's a personal tool, and it serves its purpose, but the urge to rewrite is there. Next time I open it, I may have learned another new trick and feel that urge to implement that. Anybody else have this kind of compulsion? I'm sick.

Prototyping: Do it right or get it done?

Tosh Meston — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 00:42:00 GMT

Given that prototype code has a way of becoming ship code and that one usually doesn't have a whole lot of time to play with a prototype, should one take the time to "do it right" or just mock up as many features as you can in your timeframe?

Hard-coding resource strings: yes or no?

Globalization: yes or no?

Performance investigation: yes or no?

What is the priority list of things to do right in a prototype?

Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2003-2005

Tosh Meston — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 04:45:00 GMT

Seems like many of you guys are already up to date on future Visual Studio releases. In case you are interested in reading more on Whidbey and Orcas, you can visit this article on MSDN.

"Edit and Continue" and programmers who work for a living.

Tosh Meston — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 19:16:00 GMT

Rory Blyth pointed me to DonXML's recent post on edit and continue functionality encouraging poor programming practices. It's an interesting post for discussion, but I don't agree. For many VB guys, edit and continue is a feature on par in usefulness with something like Intellisense. It's a time-saver more than anything else. Many solution programmers don't have time to debate the various algorithm efficiencies or write test harnesses for each component they create. Many times, these guys are the ones writing test harnesses for your own code. They want something that works yesterday. If they're stepping through some new code to get it working, they don't want to rebuild for stupid mistakes that are not caught by the compiler. IMO, they should bring edit and continue in for C# as well.

ActiveSetup and MSI

Tosh Meston — Sat, 28 Jun 2003 07:52:00 GMT

Hmmm... trying to find information on using ActiveSetup to install an MSI is not easy.