There was yet another huge flamewar over whether or not debuggers are useful or the tools of lazy slobs. Count me in the former: I like using a debugger. Tests are great for shaking out issues with code and for maintaining confidence. However, when things get rough (and they will), it’s nice to look at exactly what’s going on inside the code.
My New PC Build
August 15, 2007My AGP-based, first generation Athlon 64 was getting long in the tooth, and didn’t have a lot of upgrade room. With an eye towards doing more .NET development, and…uh…Bioshock’s impending release I built a new machine.
- Athlon64×2 4000+ with stock heatsink/fan
- ASUS M2N-SLI mainboard
- 2GB of RAM (Crucial, of course)
- ATI x1950Pro video card
- PC Power & Cooling 610 power supply
I reused a SATA drive and Antec case I had already. The power supply seems like overkill but that video card (crucial for productivity), eats a lot of amps. The build went easily, and even with considerably more horsepower this PC is quieter than the old model.
I’m also trying running as a limited user under XP on this machine. I’ll fast-switch to an admin account when I need to install something. Now to get Visual Studio and…uh Bioshock installed.
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Posted by Rich
C# and Yield
July 31, 2007I just discovered yield. Wow. After using some of the new tools languages like Ruby provided (blocks, process control), it’s been hard to go back to Java. Nice to C# is up to more than just adding syntactic sugar (cough, Java5, cough).
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Posted by Rich
Diving Into .NET
July 10, 2007I’ve been coding Java for a good seven years now, ever since I walked away frustrated from writing business applications in lower level COM+, ATL, and C++. Tonight I dug into a .NET training book for the first time, as I plan on getting certified mainly as a goal for learning. It’s really hard to look at C# as a Java programmer and not see the overwhelming similarities. System.Console.Writeln isn’t fooling anyone. That said, I’m already seeing some niceties. Tonight’s example:
bool? flag = null;
The ‘?’ allows you to indicate the variable is nullable. Java is going to make you think about ints and Integers, even in the Java 5+ world.
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Posted by Rich
I Have the Unit Test Religion
June 22, 2007…And I must testify. I’ve been making a conscious effort to make as much of the new logic I’m writing unit-testable, and it really makes the development process smoother. I can’t stress enough how important and comforting it is to be able to make changes to complicated logic and be able to immediately test for regressions. There are some pretty big pieces of logic in my current project just crying for unit tests. Now I just have to convince the customer it’s worth it.
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Posted by Rich
