.Net blog of Sijin Joseph

Here are some of the tools that I currently have installed on my dev machine. Most of them are freeware or have free versions available.

I’ve been working on this bug for the past one week, basically a call to the GDI+ APIs MeasureString and DrawString was failing with a very useful exception “A generic GDI+ error has occured” , my initial hypotehesis was that the problem was coming because of the length of the string that we were trying to measure, at that time around 100000+ characters. In retrospect this now seems like such a foolish thing to hypotheize.

I was reading this article today A Few Secrets You Need to Know about Client-Side Scripting which I picked up from joel.reddit.com

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now and wanted to jot down my thoughts, but this post Hackers and Fighters by Mark Traver captures beautifully my feelings on this subject.

I got back to application development using Java after spending the last 4 years developing applications using .Net and C++ and things have really changed!!! I have spent the last one month trying to catch up on all the new stuff in the Java world. Updating myself with the latest changes to the syntax only took one day though and I was surprised to see that in the latest incarnation Java 5 and .Net are like twins. If you don’t believe me then read this.

The build process is more than just a compilation of the code that is done on a developer's workstation, a good build process is able to generate the final set of artifacts that is sent to the user in one step. For e.g. a build process for a desktop application would build the installer, documentation, licenses etc. for the entire product, in case of a web application the build will compile the code files, supporting assets and deploy to a test or staging server. A good build system should be configurable and able to build multiple editions of the product.

A few years back when I first started reading about design patterns, refactoring, OO principles etc. I got it into my head that I should "Always program to an interface not an implementation". So whenever I needed to create a new class/abstraction I used to start of with an interface IThis, IThat etc. over a period of time I saw that most of my interfaces were only ever implemented by one class. This started becoming a pain to maintain as adding a new method meant that the method needed to be added to both the interface and the implementation class, further since there was only one implementation of the interface some developers started substituting one for the other and freely casting between the interface and the implementation. This became a source of constant code review changes and eyesores in code, with some methods expecting interfaces and others expecting the implementation class. Of course with strict code reviews we would never have got into this situation, but I've been working in startup companies all this time where getting something out there to earn $$$ has much higher priority than clean code.

An uber cool use of web services, Amazon has released the "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)" web service, it's in limited beta right now.