Author: Scott

Last week revealed an interesting difference between C# and VB.NET. C# operators like “and” (&&) and “or” (||) do it automatically. The VB.NET operators “And” and “Or” don’t do this by default. So if you use these, all the conditions are evaluated, regardless of whether or not that’s necessary.

In the .NET 2.0 Framework, instead of making these operators work like the C# ones, VB.NET added two new keywords: AndAlso and OrElse.

It’s good that VB.NET has the facility, I just don’t like the implementation.  It’s another reason to prefer C# at the very least.

It seems clear enough to me which approach is the best way to develop software, but not everyone in my office seems to agree. So I thought I’d do a bit of research on the two approaches and summarize my findings here. I really wanted to find some impartial statistics that compared the productivity of the two approaches. In addition to the usual Google searches, I included information I could find from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The first comparison of the methodologies I reviewed was on pages 23-24 of a PDF I found at SEI. The comparison mapped waterfall activities to agile activities and highlighted the key difference–the waterfall methodology lacks an opportunity to demonstrate the output of an iteration and make improvements based on feedback.

The first statistics I could find came from this wiki entry. While they’re specific to a single company, they make a very compelling case for the use of agile methods. Agile methods (specifically SCRUM) delivers more lines of codes, with fewer defects, in less time than waterfall methods.

Another free e-book, this time on C# and VB.NET development standards.  Fair warning, you do have to provide an e-mail address to download it.

We’ve needed something like this at my current employer for a long time.  Come to think of it, my previous employer could have used this too.  I worked with some colleagues to put together a small SQL standards guide to direct our database development.  I wanted to write a companion document for our .NET development efforts but have had far too much other work to do.

Charles Petzold has written a book titled .NET Book Zero.  It’s a guide to implementing application in C# targeted at C and C++ programmers.  I haven’t read it myself yet, but I plan to.  I hope it’s a resource I can use to help build the skills of developers that report to me who aren’t familiar with C#.

The author has made it available in PDF and XPS formats.  There’s source code too.