Today I had an issue where an application that as a mixture of .NET, VB6 and C++ code needed to be debugged. Since the component that I needed to look at was in the VB 6 portion, I attempted to debug from VB6 only to be met with a variety of bizarre errors. I don't have visibility into the rest of the application, so I continued with the .NET 2005 debugging session, which executed correctly, and noticed that I could set a breakpoint in the VB 6 code when the unmanaged debugging support was turned ......
While debugging a COM Interop error I came across the fact that Binding Failures can now be trapped in the IDE using the BindingFailurse MDA (Managed Debugging Assistant). Up until today, I'd still been using the FUSLOGVW utility to track down binding failures.
Experiences today have made me realize how important a solid build process is. I spent 6 hours today trying to get a development environment in a virtual machine to build the source to a component that I needed to help debug. The actual debugging session has taken less than five minutes and will probably take only about another 30 minutes tomorrow.
In the traditional waterfall development process, one of the key pieces of quality assurance is the traditional peer review. In theory, peer reviews allow additional coders to view the code and hopefully discover issues before the make it into the release of the software. Unfortunately, in practice, the reviews do not really add meaningful value to the development process. Typically, the reviews are done near the end of development, and are almost always superficial in nature. The first few files ......
Being a developer for a government contract, I'm pretty much tied to a waterfall process. We can call them 'spirals' or 'iterations' or any name we choose, but at the end of our day, requirements, design, code, test is what the government likes to see. For my debut set of posts, I'd like to start a discussion of how to minimize the negative effects of waterfall development, by borrowing smartly from the agile world. As many have noted before, partly doing agile can cause more difficulties than it ......
It is traditional to open beginning computer programming books with a 'Hello World!' application. I'm sure the practice has continued throughout the world of blogs, and I am merely following the herd in determining what to write at the start of a blogging career. Since I've started following the blogs a few years ago, I've come to realize that I really need to work on my communication skills. I'm the typical hyper-introvert software guy and I feel that I'm in a position where I'm not going to grow ......