Saturday, October 07, 2006

VSMDI Files - Continued buginess

One things really bugs me with VSTS is the VSMDI file, it causes all sorts of issues which I've now started reporting to Microsoft.

One of the most annoying issues is that you sometimes get multiple VSMDI files.

Now I'll admit that I was worried about reporting some of the bugs because they're intermittent and I haven't got reliable steps but in the case of this one I found lots of posts on the Web relating to similiar problems so I was sure it was worth reporting.

Microsofts response was to mark it as non-reproducible. Well yes, fair enough, but if quite a few of your customers are reporting it then why not leave it open and just wait till someone gets repro steps?

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Thursday, October 05, 2006

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns - Boring Rant

If you haven't read Jimmy Nilssons book on DDD in .NET this will be boring, in fact its probably boring even if you have read it.

I should first say that I like the book but have issues with it as I explained in my Amazon review for it. However there's one part of the book thats annoyed me quite a bit, and I think it displays a problem that seems to happen when the authors in books don't think enough about the readers.

Its the section on "Test-Driving A Web Form" in chapter 11.

First off I won't be rushing out to unit test GUI's left right and center, especially not when it adds to the complexity so much. However its an interesting topic that could have been quite enjoyable to read about...

...except for the fact that the author of that section seemed to be more interested in force feeding the reader his views on unrelated topics.

In particular the author doesn't like prefixing I on interfaces. Fine. However it annoys me that his examples don't use the prefix despite the fact that the majority of his readers and (nearly) the entire FCL uses it. He even goes as far as to stick an entire page in the middle of his discussion describing why he doesn't use the I prefix. Its ridiculous, all he's done is confuse and sidetrack the reader with information that would have been better in an appendix (or at the end of the section, or in the bin).

Anyway I think his argument is questionable, even if every developer now stopped using the I prefix we'd still be stuck with it on all the existing interfaces. Do you really want people reading your code to have to deal with a prefix that is only used on some interfaces? I think not. Anyway interfaces are treated differently in languages that don't support multiple inheritance so I find the seperation useful.

Even if the argument wasn't weak though, and even if I felt the I prefix was the cause of global warming AND the darkness in the hearts of men, I wouldn't want it to be shoved down my throat in the middle of a discussion about something completely different!

On the flipside if you want examples of books that give you lots and lots of information in a relatively concise manner, that are enjoyable to read and that have good code examples then I'd recommend looking at Robert C Martins agile development book and Eric Evans DDD book.

Both are superb. Heck I'd rather read the Java samples carefully chosen by people like Robert Martin or Eric Evans than the C# examples in some C# books. Put it this way would they put code like this in an example:

// using A=NUnit.Framework.Assert
A.AreEqual(SrcPanel, "a> b> c ");

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