I was listening to the ArCast recorded with Scott Hanselman earlier today, and he was talking about the idea that Non-Software artifacts should approach zero.  If you've seen some of his posts, or listened to some Hanselminutes podcasts, you have no doubt come across this idea before.  I like this particular phrasing mostly because it gets to the heart of what I think one of the most often overlooked aspect of the programming process is; Namely, the intent of the programmer.

I think this is one of the most important things to take into consideration when looking at someone else's code (or even your code, more that about a week after you wrote it).  There are a lot of subtleties about a design which go away after the code is written and starts to gather dust.  If the developer had a particular design pattern in mind when they built a class structure, this information exists only in the mind of the developer, and maybe some technical spec doc which is lost in source control, or share point somewhere.  Someone else comming along may look at that class structure, and not see the scaffolding the original developer put there to support that pattern, and will most likely simplify the design, removing the pattern in the process.

One proposed solution to this, which I saw in a posting from a java developer was to use marker interfaces to communicate this sort of intent.  That is, an interface which actually has no method declarations, but exists only to mark a specific class as being part of a pattern.  One additional advantage that the Java-Doc system allowed was the addition of the documentation around that interface into the docs generated for the implementing class.  This is not a bad idea, though it is terribly hard to enforce.

I think Windows Workflow will be a major contributor in this arena, allowing very explicit declarative syntax for creating code.  There may even be some potential to building WF activities around design patterns (hmmm...maybe I have a project).  This idea ties into all sorts of other areas of development, though. When designing web services the contract is what is used to communicate the developer intent, and therefore creating super methods that take DataSets or XML Blobs makes the contract basically useless.  .Net attribute-oriented programming also allows for this sort of thing, though I can't see it being flexible enough to serve as a declarative language extension (yet). 

Once again I think we have no choice but to look at Unit Tests as the single most effective way to communicate developer intent.  If the tests are named properly, and test coverage is high enough, we should be able to see all of the requirements, how the various components interact, and generally what the developer was thinking.  I've even written tests which assert a particular class implements an interface simply because I though that was a critical part of the design.

What is my point?  Well, I guess its really just the beginning of a though process around how to better capture programmer intent.  What tools should there be?  We all know documentation doesn't work.  Unless your doing Model Driven Development, UML is usually as out of whack with the software as the documentation (or worse).  And I think everyone agrees that putting this information in a word document is the best way to ensure it does not end up in the final product.

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Here are my results of the Superhero Personality Test...Does it surprise anyone, really?

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 80% Green Lantern 65% Iron Man 55% Catwoman 55% The Flash 50% Hulk 50% Superman 45% Supergirl 40% Robin 35% Batman 35% Wonder Woman 30%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

On a similar note...here are my supervillan results...I personally think I tend more towards the joker, personally:



Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom 60% The Joker 60% Lex Luthor 58% Mr. Freeze 57% Magneto 53% Apocalypse 48% Poison Ivy 44% Green Goblin 44% Riddler 40% Dark Phoenix 39% Juggernaut 36% Kingpin 36% Catwoman 34% Venom 33% Two-Face 28% Mystique 24%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

Okay, I admit it, this is a rant....But I promised myself I would post more, so you have to take what you can...

So here's the deal, I've been peripherally involved in a project at my current client, to the point that I know generally where things are going, but I haven't done any code review or anything like that.  The good news is that the developer working on it is fairly sharp, so I had no major worries....The fun comes when this developer (who is a contractor like myself), decides to take a offer for another gig (for way more $$, so who can really blame him).  Left in his wake is a new developer, who is trying to figure out the business as well as the code, which is not a fun thing to do, a stack of code, and deadlines which are not moving.  What is not left is any sort of design artifact on the code side.  There were some data changes, which have detailed ERDs, but nothing on the code side.  In looking at the code, it seems reasonably well put-together, though there is way more tight-coupling than I generally like to see, and a much deeper object hierarchy than I generally like to work with.

Now allow me to wonder into dream-land for a bit...This is a situation where TDD would pay off big-time.  For starters, it would be more likely that the code that was left would be leaner than it currently is had this project been a TDD project.  Also there would be the wealth of code artifacts that the tests provide.  At a glance I could see which components are supposed to do what, and (assuming the test writer thought this way) why certain components where there.  Then there is the safety net for the massive refactoring that every developer does when they inherit new code (you know, the guy who wrote it originally was an idiot...I never would have done it this way...that doesn't make any sense...).

This is making me start thinking about mandating a TDD approach, or at least if not mandating, fostering.  What is the best way to do that, though?  Everybody knows that developers don't take kindly to being forced to do anything, particularly when they see it as making their jobs more difficult.  And lets face it, the sorts of tests that you get from someone who doesn't "get" TDD are things like "Test1", "Test2"..."Test132".  What use is that?  So my challenge is to try to figure out how to introduce a concept like TDD into an organization which really has no other standards (there hasn't even been a decision regarding C# vs VB.Net), and where developers have not used TDD before.  The biggest problem with TDD initially, is that developers feel stifled.  Everyone is taught to think ahead, and try to create something that is resilient to change.  TDD throws that idea out the window, and it is damn hard to break that sort of thinking.  Particularly when your trying to baby-step your way through functionality like properties, that have to be put together in a particular way, and should have tests associated with them.  Why would any rational developer spend the extra 10 minutes to write CanSetCustomerName CanGetCustomerName tests when they can implement the properties and move on?  I think the only way to do it is to figure out some way of showing first-hand where the benefits lie.  Yes, I find writing tests for my accessors a bit redundant, but I take a great deal of satisfaction at the end in the information that I have managed to communicate about the code once it is done.  If I have a get test and a set test for a property, then it is pretty obvious I wanted both.  If I only have a get test, but a I defined a setter, then I know I can get rid of it.  There is also the knowledge that those small things are what the larger body of the tests are built on, and I think they provide a good way to ease into creating a new class in a TDD style.  While your writing those get and set tests you have time to think about the classes public API, and you can start to alter it a lot easier.

But back to the thoughts around introducing TDD....It is hard to show the added agility, unless you are actively changing an existing project.  The Code Artifacts are apparent, but a bit muddled and confusing.  The confidence that a full test suite provides is also a bit hard to communicate, particularly to a skeptical audience.  This is not an easy problem.  I think on one level it is easy to talk to developers and tell them why this is a good thing (Scott Hanselman did an excellent job on his TDD podcast), but experience shows that when the pressure to deliver starts cranking up, most developers return to their old habits to "deliver the project on time", regardless of the amount of time that may be lost down the road because it was not possible to do ruthless refactoring.  It is also dangerous to try to introduce TDD on a critical project....if for some reason it fails, or is delayed, there is likely to be some serious push-back from management to TDD adoption.

It's not an easy problem....but I think I need to figure it out.  I think there would be serious benefits to adopting TDD, especially in my current situation with developers coming and going.  I'll just need to figure out how to share the enthusiasm, and convince others that there really is no other way to develop software.

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   It looks like, to help avoid confusion, and questions from developers, Microsoft is renaming WinFx to the .Net Framework 3.0.  Evedently people were under the impression that WinFX was a seperate entity.

Here's the post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx

I just learned that Microsoft changed the way unhandled exceptions in Threads are propogated in .Net 2.0 vs the way they worked in 1.1.  With 2.0 any unhandled exceptions in a thread will not only cause that thread to exit, but will also be bubbled up to the thread that started the offending thread.  Overall, I think this is a good thing, since not only will it force people to handle exceptions within their thread code, but it will also eliminate the problem of processes mysteriously stopping if there is an unhandled exception on a thread.  It will, however, cause some serious grief for any developers not expecting that sort of behavior.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen less than steller multi-threaded programming tactics in applications which should be better behaived (heck, I've done my share of shoddy thread handling in the past).

The one exception to this, of course, is the ThreadAbortException, which understandably, only effects the thread it is raised on.  Granted using Thread.Abort, or raising a ThreadAbortException is considered a brute-force approach, so it shouldn't be happening anyway....

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It just goes to show that there are always little surprises waiting around the corner.  I've been looking at least casually at .Net 2.0 since Beta 2, and I even read through the "What's New" for C# 2.0 to see if I missed anything.  Somehow I managed not to notice Implicit Delegate Assignment (or at least that's what I'm calling it).

It is now possible to assign a delegate using just the Class and Method name...you no longer have to create a new instance of the delegate type.  Not a huge thing, I know, but for those of us who are easily impressed it's, well, impressive.

Here's the skinny in code language:

public class SomeClass
{
    public event EventHandler MyEvent;
}

public class SomeOtherClass
{
    SomeClass _class; 
    public SomeOtherClass()
    {
        _class = new SomeClass();   
        // Old Way
        _class.MyEvent += new EventHandler(this.MyHandler);
        
       // New Way
       _class.MyEvent += this.MyHandler;
    }

    public void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs args)
    {
        // Handler Code
    }
}

The Dr. is back....after a few years away, I've now decided to make DrRandom.org a blog...come back for more.