September 2009 Entries
To be honest, while I was writing the original Adventures in System Diagnostics post, I had no intentions of turning it into a series. Since then, however, I have given consideration to implementing in a production environment (already written, the sequel) and also to developing custom listeners (not yet written, soon to be the threequel?). With these last two titles, I had thought that would be the end of this topic. It turns out, I was wrong. Just this past week, we started seeing issues with an...
This post marks the beginning of a series on architecting software solutions/designs. Understand, this is not an attempt to explain, compare or endorse any of the many patterns and methodologies that already exist. Nor am I proposing a new pattern or methodology. I am attempting, however, to shed light on some items I have found over the course of my career to be significant stumbling blocks to the successful implementation and utilization of any software application. These are items that need to...
On 09/09/09, I blogged on the System.Diagnostics namespace and specifically the TraceSource class. I wanted to follow up that discussion with just a little more information about using TraceSource in production applications. One of the things mentioned in my original post is that in order for Trace to function within an application, that application has to be compiled with the TRACE constant. This will add some overhead to execution as the compiler will not be able to fully optimize the code. It...
For those of us who waded through VB5/6, tracing the execution of our applications and apis was time consuming and somewhat frustrating. Writing to the event log was different than writing to a log file. Writing to the console had its own challenges and many of us developed a vast array of methods to accomplish this very important task. The introduction of the System.Diagnostics namespace, and, in particular, the Trace and Debug classes in .Net v1.0/1.1 was a vast improvement. Now, developers had...
Surprisingly (or maybe not), I have heard this question and its many variations several times over my career, even more so the past couple of years. It really is a very simple question without a very simple answer, especially since it is highly subjective. From personal opinion (like I said, subjective), what constitutes a good developer is that they exhibit few (if any) bad developer traits, AND, they bring more to the table than just code. Writing code is just one component of the job. A bad developer:...
Recently, I had the opportunity to present this topic at the St. Louis Day of Dot Net Conference. The session turnout was a little disappointing. But, it was one of the last sessions on the last day of the conference, so I guess it could be expected. Still, it gave me the chance to speak in front a group of my peers and, quite honestly, see how I would fare. I had some difficulty with my laptop and the display, but the presentation went pretty well. The slide deck of the presentation can be downloaded...
It is a known fact that IE attempts to sniff out the mime type of files as they are downloaded. That is, IE checks the extension of the file, the content type, etc to try to determine if there is an application on the client PC that has been configured as the default for that type of file. So, when downloading a file with a .txt extension, it would offer to open the file with Notepad, or Excel if the file had a .csv extension. This is fine most of the time. But, occasionally, developers may want...
And that mind is ... well ... mine. My name is Ralph L Wheaton Jr. and I am a senior developer with 18+ years of professional experience in software architecture/development/de... working in manufacturing, IVR, banking and, most recently, healthcare. Currently, I am focused on Microsoft technologies, specializing in Biztalk and .Net development, though I have worked on various other technologies including Unix scripting, Informix, Fortran and C/C++. My software development career started when my...