Inner Drive Software

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture, our extensible framework, got some needed maintenance recently as we started integrating it into a new product we're developing for January release. I'll come back to the product from time to time, but for now I've updated the partial SDK we've had online for a while. Any comments, criticisms, or even kudos, are appreciated.

The Base Class Library (BCL) team at Microsoft has published a really good overview of floating-point types in .NET. Check it out.

A member of the Windows Vista team explains (via Joel Spolsky):

I worked on the "Windows Mobile PC User Experience" team. This team was part of Longhorn from a feature standpoint but was organizationally part of the Tablet PC group. To find a common manager to other people I needed to work with required walking 6 or 7 steps up the org chart from me.

So after 12 years, you still have to go to the Start menu to stop the computer.

We're still thrashing through the abandoned application, in which we found this gem.

I spent more than 8½ hours yesterday reconfiguring the Inner Drive network. I think other guys might have taken no more than an hour to do this. I do software; routers and DNS and DHCP and DSL are all hardware problems. I really don't enjoy doing hardware stuff but I'm glad I did it. Because now I know how.

The changes vastly improve our network topology, and will help when we install our new web/app server later this week. In the past, we used a Windows Server 2003 machine to bridge between our public interface and our private network. The server ran BlackIce Defender as a firewall, which means, as astute readers will notice right away, evil packets got all the way to the server before the firewall could have at them. The same server also ran our Websites, Exchange, and was the Active Directory catalog master.

Having all of these services (did I mention DNS as well?) on the public box is asking for trouble, as I found out.

I am not happy today.

Our Exchange server crashed in a maddening fashion. The Exchange Information Store can't log in, nor can our admins get to the Active Directory snap-ins on the affected server. Apparently the security database got damaged when the server rebooted after a critical update. It's going to take us probably three days to fix the problem, partially because we've got client work to deliver before we can really care about the email outage.

In related news, I'm reading a new book:

I've been helping a client get a custom database application working for a while. The previous vendor never quite completed it, then got testy when the client brought me in.

There are two unbelievably bad things about the vendor's data design that I want to share.

One of my daily digests contained a link to "How to choose the best database for your business." By Oracle.

Golly. Which database do you suppose they recommend? Think it's MySql?

Very funny: How To Write Unmaintainable Code: Ensure a job for life, by Roedy Green.

Very helpful, even in C#: Tips for maintainable Java code, by Rolf Howarth.

Spend an hour reading them, then send them to your teams.

My project manager sent around this link to Joel Spolsky's rules for software management:

I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point.

I totally agree with Spolsky's list. I have never been on a project that scored better than 7 until now (which scores 9, IMO, but we're moving toward 11), and only one, ever, has answered "yes" to #8 (quiet working conditions).

I mentioned Friday that I've completely refactored the section of the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™—the Idea™—that handles quantitative functions. (I've also decided to make some SDK documentation available.) The actual design of the IMeasurable classes—Length, Speed and the like—bears more discussion.

Just this morning I wrote about choosing a class over a struct to take advantage of inheritance and abstractness. It turns out, I was wrong.

I've encountered a problem familiar to veteran C# developers: whether to use a class or a struct for a particular design. So I'm going to follow my own advice and develop first for elegance and second for execution speed.

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ contains a very useful namespace called Quantitative that contains classes and interfaces to use in measuring things. Essentially, there is a trio of interfaces, IQuantity, IUnit, and IPhenomenon, that allow you to create and convert any kind of measurements. The principal implementation of IQuantity is the Numeric structure.