It is all about handling values that are not Integers, Overflow values and Nulls. There are subtle differences, in the handling of the methods, and the exceptions they could throw: ArgumentNullException, FormatException and OverflowException.
During a recent code review, I bumped into a couple of C# constructors having boolean parameters, leading to the dreaded magic booleans code smell.
This reminded me of the infamous Avoiding Booleans post on Coding Horror, which now is almost 10 years old.
To celebrate, I will coin the Dutch phrase when marking these in a review:
Boolean parameters en literals zijn vrijwel altijd een zwaktebod. Een teken dat beter nagedacht moet worden over het doel van de code.
The Dutch word zwaktebod is used when bidding Bridge using the Acol system. It is the equivalent of a “weak takeout” response to a bid of 1 NT (notrump or no trump, in other languages sometimes sans atout).
The English translation is just about this:
Boolean parameters and literals virtually always are a sign of weakness. It indicates you need to give more thought to the goal of the code.
AOP allows you to perform separate of concerns (SoC) in your application, especially in the area of cross-cutting concerns like for instance logging, authorization, monitoring, etc.
It took a while in Delphi to allow for AOP, but the TVirtualMethodInterceptor (that introduced in Delphi 2010) can be used to do AOP (only for Virtual Methods, which is still way better than having no AOP at all).
The code requires a lot of manual labor. so I was glad that DSharp (a great library by Stefan Glienke – one of the leading Spring4D contributors) contains a nice wrapper around TVirtualMethodInterceptor so you can use AOP in an attribute based fashion.
Nick Hodges recorded a good introductory video on AOP in Delphi with slides and demo code:
But that is nowhere on the default path, nor in the registry.
What happens during installation of Visual Studio and/or the Microsoft SDK, is that the vsvars32.bat file of Visual Studio is updated so it can add the location of many tools (including xsd.exe) to the PATH.
So the trick is to find the youngest Visual Studio first, then run the according vsvars32.bat, and then xsd.exe is on the path.
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Here are some Coding Kata videos of the Bowling Game Kata in various languages and environments. Some of them are dumb (no audio) just like good practice usually is. Note: it helps to know a bit about 10 Pin Bowling Scoring rules.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 