LEDwall Proto 3
Ahh, Christmas holidays. The perfect time to muck about with electronics and software. I never thought I’d enjoy electronics this much. Admittedly, I didn’t make a lot of changes the […]
Thinking inside the box… four of them to be exact
The past few weeks, I’m observing the appearance of a new ‘discovery’.
The discovery is this: You can describe people’s communication style / personality type with four colors!!!111one
There’s RED, for the strong-willed, fast-paced thinkers.
There’s YELLOW, for the sociable, excitable, “ooh, shiny light”-type persons.
There’s BLUE, for the detail-focused, precise analytics.
And GREEN, for the relationship/feeling-oriented person.
It’s a hype. It’s The New Thing. It’s AMAZING. Aannd… it’s really old :’)
Dear <%=firstname%>
Someone has been using EJS (or similar) and forgot to add an = sign
Extension to Category Posts in Custom Menu
The WordPress plugin I wrote, Category Posts in Custom Menu, supports custom extensions. Recently, I wrote an extension for someone who wanted to show all posts from some category, say […]
What do a warning, a comment, a test and your backlog have in common?
#warning This is going to be a nitpicky post.
There was once a developer who marked his code with TODO’s.
// TODO does not handle case X
public void Handle()
{
...
// TODO clean this up
var ugly = ...
...
// TODO re-enable after Y is implemented
// if (bla)
// {
// ...
// }
Another developer used warnings.
#warning still have to write test for this
switch (something)
{
case a: i = 4; break;
case c: i = 1;
default: throw new InvalidOperationException();
I’m writing this blog post to illustrate subtle but significant differences between four mechanisms that can be used for a shared goal: To mark what still needs to be done.
Are you joking “It compiles, ship it!”? You might actually be doing just that…
A while back, I talked with someone about using the Singleton Design Pattern vs. using an IoC container and registering your class as singleton.
Response:
IoC containers are regularly bootstrapped wrongly, resulting in your product not working as it should. And you don’t discover that until you startup the product. I’d rather use the Singleton Pattern. That way, the compiler will protect against errors.
Painting of a friend during an archery workshop
In January of this year, I invited a couple of friends for an archery workshop and dinner. The goal was to hit the balloons taped to the target and at […]
Just.. wow
Today, in a conversation with someone I met at a training, first the perpetual stereotype of “engineers not having good communication skills” came up. When I countered that, with the […]
A composite validator pattern
Have you ever encountered something like this?
(Note: #r denotes a collapsed region of code)
public class MyBulkyClassThatDoesALot
{
#r Private fields
#r Constructor
#r Another constructor
#r Public properties
#r Public methods
#r Private methods
#region Validation
// meanwhile, somewhere on line 20485
public ValidationResult Validate()
{
ValidationResult result;
CheckThatSomethingHolds(result);
CheckThatSomethingElseHolds(result);
if (this.somesituation)
{
CheckSituationDependentCondition(result);
CheckSituationDependentOtherCondition(result);
}
...
// Somewhere on line 20585
CheckLastThing(result);
return result;
}
private void CheckThatSomethingHolds(ValidationResult result)
{
if (this.somecondition)
{
result.AddError(new ValidationError("Condition X failed"));
}
}
private void CheckThatSomethingElseHolds(ValidationResult result)
{
if (this.somecondition)
{
result.AddError(new ValidationError("Condition Y failed"));
}
}
private void CheckSituationDependentCondition(result)
{
if (this.somecondition)
{
result.AddError(new ValidationError("Condition SituationDependent1 failed"));
}
}
// Are you tired of scrolling yet? Good, because this is how whomever reads this code shall feel in real life ;)
private void CheckSituationDependentOtherCondition(result) { ... snip }
// A sigh of relief when you reach the last one
private void CheckLastThing(ValidationResult result)
{
if (this.somecondition)
{
result.AddError(new ValidationError("Condition Z failed"));
}
}
#endregion Validation
// And then, of course, there is a lot of code after this. If you're unlucky, there wasn't even a #region around all the Validation methods and you have to hunt them down one by one because they are scattered through the code.
}
Don’t worry, you’re not the first one to end up with this. Often, it started as a single validation rule that was just implemented directly in the class to be validated. However, there are some things to look out for.