Inner Drive Software

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?

Here's some code I discovered while tracking a bug this morning.

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).

We spent two hours yesterday debugging some code that kept firing early. It wasn't clear to anyone, including the people who wrote it, why this happened. We patched it with the C# equivalent of duck tape, but really, it still doesn't work right.

This incident shows how important it is to know what your code is supposed to do, and not to accept the code if it doesn't. Many tools exist to help—most notably, unit-testing tools like NUnit—but they have trouble with the specific problem that we encountered: events fired from black-box controls.

I will have more to say about this later.

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.

My colleague Cameron Beatley sent me this handy comparison guide for programming languages.

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.

Genius Boy here just spent ten minutes debugging a class because I used the private field directly inside the class, instead of the property accessor method.

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.

I've finally added an explanation of Evolutionary Delivery to my corporate site. I wrote this as part of a proposal to a client in September, and for reasons that passeth understanding, I neglected to publish it online.

By the way, I write software for a living, so if you're reading this and realize you need a small, agile development team for a .NET project, send us a message.

An example of a piece of code that desperately needs refactoring.

Read Microsoft's Framework Design Guidelines, written by the guys who wrote the .NET Framework.

Compiler warnings tell you stuff you need to know. Read them.