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.
In a funny way, he explains why the simplest fundamentals of computer software text, dates and numbers can cause some real headache for the programmer…
A long while ago, someone (it was too long ago, so I sincerely forgot who, it probably was in the JBuilder era) told me that I should try out Ruby and Scala.
I did take a short look at Ruby back then, but since Ruby was so focussed on Web Development, and my heart really wasn’t there, postponed it to the times that the Web would be hot for me.
Then I should have taken a look at Scala (which compiles to Java bytecode), but since I abandoned Java (JBuilder wasn’t nice, Java programming was slow and modern IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse weren’t there yet).
Now that I’ve done truckloads of work in the .NET and Delphi world (including domain specific languages and Pascal based products), I bumped into these Scala videos by Venkat Subramaniam:
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:
Shared Projects are a new feature of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. It was initially created to support universal apps apps for both Windows Phone RT and Windows RT, and that’s what most people know about it.
However there is also this genius Visual Studio extension that allows Shared Projects on any .NET project. It means that you can create a project shproj that contains a list of C# files. This file can be referenced by any project and will be included at compile time.
With Shared Projects you are always able to debug through any references code. This makes it very easy to find and fix issues or test new features.
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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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 