18 Nov
I am going to propose a guideline for the use of C# 3.0 Extension Methods: Don’t Use Them to Rename Existing Functionality in an API Just Because You Don’t Like A Function’s Name.
The idea of extension methods is that you can improve an otherwise non-extensible object’s public API by ‘extending’ its Interface to include additional [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
2 Comments
17 Oct
Its somewhat funny to me how the usual ‘knock’ against Open Source Software is the poor quality of the documentation that often accompanies it. “Why can’t we have professional quality, comprehensive documentation for these OSS projects just like the really solid, professional quality documentation that comes from — oh, I don’t know — Microsoft for [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
13 Comments
04 Oct
In my career I have seen many a developer embark on the journey that eventually leads them to what I would term ‘Object-Relational Mapping as it was originally intended‘. After watching this process over and over again, I have reached the conclusion that the path is always the same. Different people on the journey may [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
6 Comments
22 Sep
Question:
How do you know nowadays that something in developer technology has been perverted completely beyond its initial intent into something horribly disfigured and unrecognizable to its original authors?
Answer:
When people start to feel the need to put the phrase "Plain-Old-" in front of it.
Whether POJO (Plain-Old-Java-Objects), POCO (Plain-Old-C#-Objects or Plain-Old-CLR-Objects for the VB-heads out [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
17 Comments
10 Aug
The prolific writer Arthur C. Clark once (famously) wrote:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
As software developers, we are presented just about daily with such ’sufficiently advanced’ technology — the world of what one could know about software engineering techniques, languages, frameworks, databases, compilers, etc., etc., etc. is just so vast now that no [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
1 Comment
27 Apr
Lately I have been giving some thought to just what exactly the guiding principles are behind the way I both approach and execute my professional software development career. After considering this for some time, I have come up with the following fifteen or so principles that I think sum up pretty nicely my approach to [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
2 Comments
23 Mar
At my current organization, we have been having a number of debates over the past 6-8 months about the relative benefits of writing unit tests for our code. The opponents (ok, I will give the benefit of the doubt and call them ’skeptics’ instead) trot out all the usual suspects here to bolster their skepticism: [...]
Posted in Software Development Process by: sbohlen
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