Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

UrlHistory and Internet Explorer

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 | Development | No Comments

Back in 1997 I started a humble MFC project to manage my URL history in IE so I could keep track of when I had been to which pages, etc. Like it so frequently happens with spare-time projects, something else came up and it’s been lying in an unsuspecting corner of my harddisk’s sector 27724 collecting dust ever since… well, not literally, I hope.

As I was cleaning out a bit of miscellaneous projects on my disk and trying to work out which projects I wanted to finish sometime, I came across the MFC project and thought… hmm, IE has this stuff in it nowadays, so why not just right write up a wrapper around it for .NET and provide it so tools are a bit easier to write to do custom things. For instance take a snapshot of newly visited pages since yesterday and create a graph of your browsing activity, or what have you of projects one can think of.

• Source code
• Binaries

Tags: programming

Refactoring to patterns

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

So, I got a lot of refactoring books for christmas and I finally ploughed through Joshua Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns. It continues where Martin Fowler left off in his Refactoring book, but Kerievsky paints the broader picture, showing how patterns can be fitted into existing code.

A bonus for Kerievsky is that he is a good deal less patronising than Fowler and Beck, but the thing that really won me over to the book is the verbosity of his examples that accompany each and every refactoring in the book. These are priceless in understanding the motivation for refactoring, and while I may not always entirely agree with his motivations, and while some of the things are non-issues in non-Java languages, it provides a wealth of information.

But like John Brant and Don Roberts write in the afterword: use this book as a primer, not as a reference guide.

Tags: book, book review

Cartoons

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

Normally I don’t really mention anything much else than a few disconnected ramblings about my life and some development stuff I do on here, but I want to mention David Morgan-Mar’s most excellent comic: Irregular Webcomic. His comic gave me more laughs while I’ve been down after my tonsillectomy than anything else did. So a big thank you from here.

Tags: webcomic

Dissecting code

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

Guess this being out cold after the tonsillectomy (or however you spell that) has a few benefits, basically I get to read a lot.

Just finished reading Dissecting a C# Application: Inside Sharpdevelop as I hoped it would provide an ample amount of information on why they chose the design they did, what prompted which things, etc. Now, it does this… to some degree, but it mainly reads as an in-depth guide to the SharpDevelop source code (I suppose I should’ve guessed that from the title, huh?). So while it probably is an extremely interesting book to read if you want to hack the innards of SharpDevelop, it isn’t particularly interesting to read if you want to look at how they designed things. The interesting bits are largely obscured by long and tedious code listings from the IDE.

What little there is to glean from it of design evolution thoughts can largely be picked up in the first few chapters. Otherwise, single chapters might seem interesting if you’re looking at implementing the same thing yourself. For me, the most useful thing in the book was links to a couple of websites with interesting out-of-print books.

So, if you have time to spare, or want to hack around SharpDevelop, then take a look, otherwise pass this book by.

Tags: book, book review

Chipping away on a program

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 | Development | No Comments

… or Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code. With refactoring being the buzzword of the day who can afford not to take a gander at the promised land?

Now that may seem like a rather biased introduction, that was indeed what I was going for, however, I have used refactoring for a while, but I have never looked at any literary works on the matter and I thought it was time to pick up Fowler’s book. While it displays a lot of different methods for refactoring I can’t help having the feeling of being talked down to all the way through the book. It is as if Fowler and Beck (who in parts co-authored chapters) have this condescending notion of yeah, yeah, you might have your fancy design model, but this is how software really survives.

While refactoring may provide the means to extend the longevity of your code, I find the picture they paint is overly pink. They are enamoured by their own techniques, fair enough. I guess I just look for more objectivity in books.

All that said then if you are developing object-oriented programs in this day and age you should read the book, if nothing else to see how the refactoring craze started.

Tags: book, book review