A short filler article this week, to show off a photo I took last summer of the train departure screens at Canning Town station in London.
Continue reading “Showing the Commuter Your Errors”
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Category: Programming
The Two Types of Collection
When I was at university our very forward thinking lecturer (Dr Bacon as I remember) introduced us to the most amazing up-to-date programming environment: C on UNIX. Storing an item in a collection meant declaring an array, or if you are really being adventurous, using malloc to dynamically allocate memory. That was it. Back then it was practically state of the art. As well as making for the kind of excellent training that you curse at the time but realize 10 years later you should be eternally thankful for having been made to do it.
What a difference from today when the .NET Framework comes with so many collection classes out of the box that Continue reading “The Two Types of Collection”
Single Responsibility Apps
If you wrote a class that had more than one responsibility, chances are that your colleagues would be pouncing on it in your next code review, eagerly pointing out what a terrible programmer you are because you’ve broken the single responsibility principle. So if single responsibility is great for classes, why do we so happily accept apps and services that have more than one responsibility? Continue reading “Single Responsibility Apps”
Visual Studio Monochrome – Part 2
Last time we had a look at how Microsoft reinvented the wheel the Visual Studio UI into a colourless ‘metro’ version. This time I’m going to look at some lessons we can learn from the story.
The first lesson is: Know the limits of a good idea. Continue reading “Visual Studio Monochrome – Part 2”
Visual Studio Monochrome – Part 1
To a developer, bugs are things like, returning the wrong value, or a textbox being disabled where it should be enabled. Or when you’re given the honour of a 20 minute audience with the CEO to show him the brilliant new settings dialog you just spent 2 months writing and after 3 seconds it crashes. Continue reading “Visual Studio Monochrome – Part 1”
Office Programming in .NET: The Easy Way
Imagine you’re a .NET developer working for WeLikeReports inc. Suddenly you get taken over by BigCompany Ltd, and the new managers want to review all your documentation. Yes, I know, you never got round to writing the documentation. Just pretend you have some. All your documentation is stored as Word documents which happen to be headed with your old company name WeLikeReports, and your line manager thinks it’d really impress his new boss if that was replaced by the text BigCompany Ltd in every document. Of course you’re the one that gets asked to do the work. And being a developer, the idea of manually making the same edits to dozens of documents fills you with horror so you look for an automated solution.
Welcome to the world of Office programming.
