Comments for The Inquisitive Coder - Davy Brion's Blog

Comment on It’s Not About The Number Of Hours You Put In by Michael

Michael — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:57:00 +0000

Well said. I was working a job where I wasn’t being challenged on a daily basis, and wasn’t growing much as a result. I got involved in open source and some personal projects on the side which both helped me learn and become a better developer. Now I am working a position that challenges me every day and am around people that know a lot and share their knowledge with me. Because of that, I haven’t been contributing time outside of work to software development but am still continuing to grow and improve, while having more time to spend with my family.

Comment on Native ID generation with NHibernate by Răzvan Panda

Răzvan Panda — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:03:00 +0000

Thanks! They really should add that to the documentation

Comment on There’s Only One Valid Metric For Developer Productivity And Quality by João Bica Osório

João Bica Osório — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:31:00 +0000

You also have this one though:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+only+valid+measure+of+code+quality+is+WTFs+per+minute

Comment on There’s Only One Valid Metric For Developer Productivity And Quality by João Bica Osório

João Bica Osório — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:41:00 +0000

I strongly disagreee. I think it is a useless or even dangerous conclusion… Just because your absolute “Eventual Efficiency” would be great for all projects it doesn’t mean that specific quality metrics can’t be resonable within a project context. For example if you have a large open-source project with many contributers you want to track the density of comments on the code. I mean, I hope you’r not one to argue that you could live without good src code comments under those circunstances. Similarly If you’r writing software for the ABS system or to send a rocket to the moon, there are plenty of metrics that you must use and are correlated to the quality of your testing. Just grab a good book on software testing. In fact you can’t legally install software on a plane that doesn’t meet specific testing criteria. Just search for MD/MC and DO178-B. So here is what you should be saying: 1. Start from your requirements 2. identify the most important quality needs of your project 3. Phrase a question for how to assess this quality. 4 Establish or reuse a metric that measures or correlates with that. I’ve given two real-world examples that show that “great code” is very relative to your individual project. No harm indended. Kudos

Comment on Event Subscribtion And Memory Leaks (Yet Again) by What function ist delegate{} from “public event EventHandler MyEvent = delegate { } ” mean in vb.net? | Jisku.com - Developers Network

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 09:45:47 +0000

[...] i have a question about this article. http://davybrion.com/blog/2009/09/event-subscribtion-and-memory-leaks-yet-again/ [...]

Comment on Node.js For Dummies by Guest

Guest — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:07:00 +0000

so true

Comment on Why Do We Recycle Our Application Pools? by alan

alan — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:21:00 +0000

We have been dealing with this issue for quite some time and are beginning to lean toward not recycling also. We have some ancillary problems with the recycle issue that other folks may not have encountered: after the recycle happens, the first request will cause the application to JIT and, for a sufficiently complex application like ours, this process can take quite some time and result in problems. We run several app servers behind a load balancer and despite this configuration, we still have customer problems that are clearly traceable to the recycle. Opened a ticket with MS and their response to our issue was to precompile the app. Precompiling introduces a different set of issues however and doesn’t solve the problem.
The solution has to be in not recycling. We have written many windows service apps in .Net that run continuously until the server has to be patched. If we don’t have any patches to apply for a given month, they can run uninterrupted for months…no “recycling”. This phenomenon seems specific to IIS.
We are going to try it. It seems like everyone recycles just because it’s the way IIS comes configured out of the box. I would have a hard time defending the rationale behind continuing this process.

Comment on The MVVM Pattern Is Highly Overrated by Simon Massey

Simon Massey — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:30:00 +0000

I wrote an article which compares a java implementation of Martin Fowler’s “Presentation Model” (aka MVVM) with “Passive View” (aka MVP) and “Supervising Controller” (aka MVC/MVVMP) using the ZK Java framework. Okay its java not DotNet but I think that it helps to discuss the pattern in different frameworks to draw out the concepts as opposed to a single implementation or the support from a single framework.

As I say in the article it is “horses for courses”; if your backed is some procedural/remote service then your logic may well fall into a ‘supervisor’ which mediates the external services and remote pumbing then pushes to a “passive bindmodel”. As it is with that ZK framework it is easy to databind straight onto the entities drawn from an ORM layer so doing things as straight “presentation model” (aka mvvm with an active bindmodel) is not seem like hard work.

Here is the link to it on the ibm.com website:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/portal/proddoc/zkjavaajax/

Comment on Why On Earth Would A Developer Do This? by 一个程序员怎么能这样处理问题？ – WHO1753

一个程序员怎么能这样处理问题？ – WHO1753 — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:41:17 +0000

[...] 【英文原文链接：Why On Earth Would A Developer Do This? 译文：外刊IT】 [...]

Comment on Unit Tests And Silverlight by Gary

Gary — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Any examples on how to use it???

Comment on The Circuit Breaker by El Patrón Disyuntor (Circuit Breaker)

El Patrón Disyuntor (Circuit Breaker) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 05:10:20 +0000

[...] implementación de esto no es complicada y hay algunos ejemplos online de cómo implementar un disyuntor en C#. A la hora de implementarlo hay que tener en cuenta que normalmente el recurso externo que se está [...]

Comment on Why I Prefer JavaScript Over CoffeeScript by Nicolas Gryman ᙅ•℧•ᙂ

Nicolas Gryman ᙅ•℧•ᙂ — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:24:00 +0000

I agree with you for the reasons you have enumerated, and particularly for starters. You must know how JavaScript works to understand what are the advantages of CoffeeScript. Also JavaScript developers should know about C++ and how the VM works.

For some projects, if you develop a library for example, CoffeeScript can be usefull in organizing your code, write less, ans focus on your task, without fighting against some JavaScript pitfalls.Even if JavaScript developers are note familiar with the syntax, it’s easy to read and understand. So when your library is missing some docs, reading a CoffeScript code is pretty obvious I think.

Comment on First Steps With MongoDB, Mongoose and Jasmine-Node On Node.JS by Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Mocha is developed and maintained more actively on node than jasmine. I also prefer its way of asynchronous testing (by passing the done callback) to that of jasmine

Comment on First Steps With MongoDB, Mongoose and Jasmine-Node On Node.JS by Larry

Larry — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:37:00 +0000

I’m looking at your git project and notice that you switched to mocha. I am reviewing mocha and jasmine. Any comments as to why you switched?

Comment on Node.js For Dummies by gbjbaanb

gbjbaanb — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:29:00 +0000

try this one: http://www.nodebeginner.org/

Comment on Node.js For Dummies by Guest

Guest — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:52:00 +0000

you are funcking assholes

Comment on Advantages Of Being A Polyglot Programmer by Pdezenzio

Pdezenzio — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:12:00 +0000

It depends. Learning a multitude of languages makes you a “Jack-of-all-Trades” but “Master-Of-None”. The reason why is languages change and to keep track of 3 languages becomes a daunting task especially of you are prone to using 3rd party open source frameworks. What you end up doing is knowing enough to be dangerous, but never enough to be an expert.

Comment on Why You Shouldn’t Expose Your Entities Through Your Services by Alex C.

Alex C. — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:28:00 +0000

I basically came to this same conclusion myself a little while ago. I’m going to look into that AutoMapper project which might just save me a bit of time. Basically, I have a project which is currently just a WPF application not broken into a Client/Server model. But I was thinking about potential for spinning of new clients down the road which obviously meant changing the model by moving the bulk my business logic and data access into a server side component.

The original project was done using Fluent Nhibernate and I really just wanted to map everything straight through as to someone who hasn’t yet reached this conclusion it seems like the best idea in the world. But I hit many of the issues you mentioned above as well as some others. I didn’t WANT to take all of this code which I had written and rewrite it to use DTO’s but the reality is A) There are many cases which after tons of wasted time still don’t work properly, B) Even when I didn’t have a server side component I was loading data I didn’t need which didn’t really matter at the time despite being poor design, but definitely now with data flowing over the network the waste has a more meaningful impact.

I came to the conclusion long ago that if I had simply committed to doing it right the first time I would have been done long ago. Trying to pass my domain objects across the wire got me going quicker… but in the end definitely cost me far more time in the long run.

So, the moral of the story… even if you think your situation is special, you’ll probably discover eventually that one these or other reasons apply to your project and will bite you in the long run.

Comment on Why You Shouldn’t Expose Your Entities Through Your Services by Prince

Prince — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Hats man! Wonderful post. You are right! I know the pain of exposing entities over WCF, please don’t do it. Resolvers, known types, nothing is not a perfect solution.
I could save a lot of time if I could read this article a couple of days before..

Comment on Why I Prefer JavaScript Over CoffeeScript by sl

sl — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Excellent point. This is not a C over javascript debate. More of a “a compiler that allows you to write programs in VB/Ruby Syntax and then converts it to C syntax vs C Syntax” debate.