Monday, July 15, 2002

Microsoft's Next .Net [ActiveWin] I've seen reports of this all day. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] 11:12:41 PM

VB.NET Folder Browsing sample. 10:54:17 PM

ANNOYING STUFF: Fly The Copter! 10:26:45 PM

I've updated all of my sample code to be color-coded via the TripleASP.NET ShowCode utility. It missed a few key words here and there, but I think it makes the code look better. 10:24:01 PM

Measurement Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in such an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win. [Joel on Software] I've known a few developers who think the above situation is actually a fun place to be in. Not me. I say solid designs and few bugs make a much bigger statement of performance than churning out bug fixes... 10:01:51 PM

Solving the Enterprise Services config dilemma. Here's a little variation of System.EnterpriseServices.ServicedComponent that activates classes derived from ServicedComponentEx in a freely configurable, non-default app-domain and roots them in the directory of the assembly containing the component and not system32. TODO: Add support for custom config files based on COM+ package name, proper security setup, etc; Still, I am tired, so I am posting anyways ;) G'night. [Clemens Vasters] 9:57:11 PM

From tomorrow, the ISS is visible from my balcony again! [Clemens Vasters] Lucky! The last time I had a good opportunity was right in between the 2nd and 3rd periods of one of the Red Wings playoff games. Unfortunately, it was cloudy... :( 9:47:22 PM

It would often be useful to be able to sort by more than one column in a DataGrid. .Net has no built-in way to sort by multiple columns, but this article shows one way that some extra code can make this "multi-sorting" possible. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] 9:10:29 PM

XML Messaging. There's this tension between the object and XML schools of thought that runs pretty deep. The group that I work with is pretty firmly in the XML camp, but this is a difficult point to communicate, even within the company. There's still a strong belief that everything must be serialized into an object, so when we tell people that we're just passing XML Elements, and they should leave the result in a DOM, we get quite a bit of resistance. [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog] Here is the problem in my mind (thinking from an object point of view) - that XML still has a structure.  I have to access the third child's attribute named "foo".  That rule is derived from a grammar.  What happens when you change that attribute name to "bar"?  Since I would have to change my DOM code to handle this, I might as well just map that structured XML onto an object so that I know what I'm working with.  Properties and Fields and Methods Oh My! Of course if you have a system where the XML can change or is loosely structured, you have to use native XML facilities.  You would build into your system a series of XPathes that are stored in a lookup table.  These queries are looked up based on some criteria (maybe you have an XPath query that you run on the document that tells you what other XPath queries you will need to use).  If the structure changes, you change only the XPath query to return the nodeset or value that the original code was expecting (if possible). So in summary - use the best tool for the job.  Sometimes you have very strict grammar for your XML, so mapping to objects isn't a big deal.  Sometimes you have a looser grammer, so you need to use native XML tools like XPath, XQuery, DOM, etc. to be more fluid in your business logic. [Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog] 9:08:58 PM

© Copyright 2002 Patrick Steele. Last update: 8/2/2002; 9:15:12 AM.