// ThomasWeller

It's the maintenance, stupid! (or: Something is rotten in developerland.)

Most people - even the overwhelming majority of programmers - would say that the main activity of a software developer is "writing source code". But this is a fatal misconception - about 75% of all time and money (sometimes even more) is spent on some sort of maintenance activity. Far too little effort goes in the future maintainability of a software product during actual development, which in turn leads to software systems that cause substantial technical and financial problems..

posted @ Wednesday, January 27, 2010 2:03 PM | Feedback (5) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]

Solving 'KataPotter', or: What kind of developer are you ?

From time to time (and when there's room for it, of course), I'm doing a Code Kata to keep my programming fingers flexible and to see myself programming outside the usual business context. Lately, I did the KataPotter , and doing it gave me some valuable insights into my coding process...

posted @ Sunday, November 08, 2009 7:13 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]

TDD is not about testing, it's about how we develop software

I am practicing Test Driven Development (TDD) for some time now, and I hardly can imagine writing software another way nowadays, or could even imagine a reason why I should do so. Time to reflect upon my personal reasons for practicing and being so convinced about this technique...

posted @ Tuesday, November 03, 2009 10:02 AM | Feedback (5) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]

Duct Tape Programming? - Certainly not THAT way...

Lately, there was a blog post by Joel Spolsky called "The Duct Tape Programmer", which is very opinionated and caused quite a lot of responses and discussions in the blogosphere. Basically, this post contrasted the duct tape worldview of developing software to the astronaut architect's, forcing programmers to decide between quick-and-dirty solutions on the one side and analysis paralysis on the other. While all objective arguments against that are already made, here are some additional thoughts.

posted @ Wednesday, September 30, 2009 8:25 AM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]

'dynamic' ? - Be afraid, be very afraid...

One of the new language features, that come with C# 4.0, is the new 'dynamic' keyword. I was totally horrified when I first read about it, because it makes it much too easy to introduce (undetectable) errors into a codebase, can foster bad coding style, and certainly will cause serious maintenance problems. A rant...

posted @ Wednesday, September 23, 2009 6:37 AM | Feedback (5) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]

AOP can save you tons of repetitive code

Lately I played around a bit with Aspect Oriented Programming, especially with PostSharp and the ValidationAspects library that sits on top of it. I wanted to see how I could reduce the amount of infrastructural code like e.g. value-checking, which is highly repetitive and error-prone. I must say, I was impressed of what can be achieved...

posted @ Tuesday, September 15, 2009 6:41 AM | Feedback (3) | Filed Under [ General programming/C# ]