Archive for the ‘Misc. programming’ Category

Code quality, part II: Proper exception handling

One critical part in good-quality code is the way it handles errors. Error handling is very rarely fun to write, but nevertheless, it's one of the things that your code gets judged by. Or, rather: proper error handling rarely gets praise from the end user, but the lack of one causes lots of irritation. The [...]

January 1, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

ASP.NET 2.0 development process

ScottGu of MSDN has resurfaced in the blogging world, giving us two excellent articles on ASP.NET 2.0 development processes. First "Whidbey Update" covering some of the internal metrics and scheduling issues, and then "Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer" about the testing procedure and platform in general. Some of the that stuff is truly [...]

October 30, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Clean up your testing databases

Came across an interesting CodeProject article: a .NET application that takes a database connection string and deletes all information from all tables except those specifically marked with IsStatic attribute. Take a look at Database Resetter. The application is not finished yet, and crash on a table's self-reference is pretty serious… but I like the concept. [...]

October 5, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Web Services experiences surprisingly rare

Last week I spent one afternoon listening to Redmondian propaganda at the Microsoft Challenge event (sorry, the site is in Finnish only). The MSDN track was mostly web services – not particularly surprising when considering .NETs fundamentals and the whole Connected Systems hype. My personal surprise came in when one of the speakers asked the [...]

October 2, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Loose thoughts on code documentation

Anatoly Shalyto, a professor at Saint-Petersburg State University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics recently published an article about Foundation for Open Project Documentation. If you're interested in reading another set of philosophy about the importance of documentation in general, go ahead and read it. I didn't find the article itself very interesting or evolutionary, [...]

September 12, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Money for bugs

Microsoft's Gunnar Kudrjavets mentions the Mozilla Security Bug Bounty (get $500 by finding and reporting a security bug) and ponders the effect of money in the bug reporting process. Naturally, Gunnar's concept of a bug-finding competition with some teams getting money and some not is pretty far from everyday life. In truth, few people search [...]

August 21, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · Comments Closed
Posted in: Misc. programming

Continuous integration

Yet another article (this time by Martin Fowler) preaching on the benefits of continuous integration. For those of you not familiar with it, it's a software development principle that says you must have an automated build process that verifies the functionality of the source code several times a day. So, at all times, code in [...]

August 16, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

The pain of big code reviews

Some ranting on code reviews in general: Bugzilla's bug 185090 is nearing completion, and I certainly hope I've finished my part by finally granting review to the 70 kbyte patch. To the no less than 13th iteration of the patch. For those of you not familiar with the Mozilla family review process, a short recap: [...]

August 4, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Misc. programming

Tight syntax from a readability perspective

When reviewing the code for a massive new feature for Bugzilla, a question on the proper way to write logic stepped up again. Do we use the ternary conditional operator ?: ? Do we use explicit boolean constants true and false instead of relying on expression results? Let me demonstrate the issues encountered with some [...]

July 25, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Posted in: Misc. programming