Author: Scott

The Obsolete Attribute

Posted on by Scott

One of the consultants I work with told me about an alternative use of the Obsolete attribute last week.  Its original intent was to identify methods and classes that shouldn’t be used anymore.  But using this:

[Obsolete(“”,true)]

turns out to be a rather nice refactoring tool as well.  Passing “true” as the second parameter instructs the compiler to flag all uses of a method or class so decorated as errors.  So far, this practice has helped me hunt down the one instance in code where a particular method was used.  Today, I should be able to eliminate an unnecessary custom exception class with it.

Don’t Derive from ApplicationException

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According to this blog entry (or rather, the annotations), deriving from Exception is the correct course to take. ApplicationException apparently doesn’t provide any discernible value. Coming from the folks who actually built the .NET Framework, that’s quite a surprise to me. I can’t think of any example I’ve seen from Microsoft (or anyone else) on exceptions that doesn’t derive from ApplicationException.

A quick look at my office bookshelf confirms that this guidance is even older than the blog post. In Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming, Jeffrey Richter writes the following on pages 410-411:

“… I don’t think there is any value in having the SystemException and ApplicationException base types in the exception hierarchy.  In fact, I think having them is just confusing.”

Hackers and Fighters

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I found this post on “street programmers” and computer scientists quite interesting because I manage a staff where the former outnumbers the latter significantly. In this environment, his conclusion that the street programmer is better than the CS graduate is wrong. The staff that have formal training consistently deliver higher-quality results when compared to the street programmers. The code they produce is easier to maintain and better-tested.

Mark Tarver’s definition of street programmer is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to people who write software for a living. It doesn’t include the people who got into this line of work because of Internet bubble; people who did it because they saw dollar signs rather than out of a genuine interest. I believe the person who self-teaches well is quite rare indeed.

I can’t dispute Tarver’s points about the state of computer science education. Far too many of them have been confirmed by friends of mine who are in Ph.D programs now. He’s certainly right about the conservatism of CS courses too. I still remember learning Pascal in the early 90s as part of my CS curriculum.

Even with the shortcomings of today’s computer science departments, the degree still serves as a useful filter when trying to decide if an interview with someone is likely to be time well spent.  I’ve also encountered enough good programmers in my time with degrees in math or physics that I’d certainly hire them if they interview well enough.

Microsoft vs. Open Source–Don’t Worry

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That’s the gist of this rather comforting post at groklaw.net about Microsoft’s claims of Linux patent infringement. It baffles me that a company which made over $12 billion in profits last fiscal year would stoop to the sort of patent trolling last seen from SCO Group.  It seems desperate.  It’s the kind of move I would expect from a company who had clearly lost the battle in the marketplace and didn’t have any other cards to play.

Another MacBook Pro Owner

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I picked up my Intel Mac last week.  It will soon replace the Mac mini I bought in February 2005, and the Dell PC I bought a couple of years before that.  It’s the first laptop I’ve had that wasn’t issued to me by an employer.  So far, I think I’m going to be very happy with it.

The first impromptu performance test was this: can the MacBook Pro handle simultaneous installations of Windows XP Pro (in Parallels for Mac) and World of Warcraft (direct to the Mac)?  The answer turned out to be yes, even with over a gigabyte worth of WoW upgrades (and nearly 80 patches to Windows XP Pro, not including SP2).

The next items on the the to-do list for setting it up are these:

  • Install most of the stuff described here
  • Transfer data from the Mac mini
  • Install Microsoft Office 2003 on the Windows XP virtual machine

Sometime after this, I’ll attempt to install Visual Studio 2005 in the virtual machine and see how it works.

Resetting passwords with .NET membership provider

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Say you have a user with no password question and answer. It turns out that calling ResetPassword() on that user will throw an exception. There’s an overload that takes password answer as a parameter, which also throws an exception if the wrong answer is provided.

The way to get around this issue for me turned out to be changing “requiresQuestionAndAnswer” to “false” in the membership provider configuration.

GUID vs. Identity Column for Primary Keys

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From the time I started using databases (Sybase 10, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5), I’d always used identity columns for primary keys in tables.  So when I came to my current employer and saw GUIDs all over the place, I wondered if that wasn’t overkill.

I did a bit of searching on the issues, and came up with these links:

The authors of these pieces can reasonably be described as pro-GUID.  They are up-front about the drawbacks of their preferred option (performance is a big one).  I tried the tip on using NewSequentialId() instead of NewId() (from Jeff Atwood) , but SQL Server Management Studio kept giving me errors when I attempted to update the default value of a table column to use it.