Derik Whittaker : Humor

Best Error Dialog ever w/ Visual Studio

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:25:00 GMT

Today I received the following error and thought it summed up my day perfectly.

Now the real question is what was I doing to receive this error…… I was trying to copy a single line (w/ 50 characters of text) to the clipboard…DOH

Till next time,

Can anyone spot what is wrong here?

Derik Whittaker — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:40:00 GMT

4 Advil later and my head really hurts. Here is a little story about how a simple little typo can really cause major headaches and pain.

Yesterday I was in the process of setting up one of our new WCF services to use Jimmy Bogard’s solution to use StructureMap to create our services. At one point during my development I had the setup correct because when I would do a ObjectFactory.WhatDoIHave() I could see the output. However, a few minutes later everything was broke. Not knowing what had changed (I had not yet committed anything to svn so I could not do a compare even) I did what most developers do, I tried it again and again just hoping it would magically work. (ok, what I really did was kill the dev web server, restarted IIS, restarted VS, etc). After about 30 minutes of trying to determine what had changed I finally went home for the night, hoping that a new day would magically solve the problems.

Well, when I came in today the problem was still there (looks like my laptop Gremlins took the night off.

Can you spot what is wrong with this code?

ObjectFactory.Configure( 
    scanner =>
        {
            scanner.AddRegistry( new IoCDataStrategyRegistry() );
            scanner.AddRegistry( new IoCLicensingRegistry() );
            
        }
    );

Did you see the error? It is subtle. Ok, give up, take a look at this code

ObjectFactory.Initialize( 
    scanner =>
        {
            scanner.AddRegistry( new IoCDataStrategyRegistry() );
            scanner.AddRegistry( new IoCLicensingRegistry() );
            
        }
    );

Turns out that StructureMap does not puke when you use the DSL syntax in an incorrect manor. What it does do however is simply not wire up correctly, which makes sense.

Anyway, not that my head hurts, but my code is back to normal I guess it is time to move on to the next issue.

Till next time.

Did corporate IT depts not get the memo disk space is cheap?

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:48:51 GMT

Does anyone else have this issue at work. I have 75mb worth of emails within my corporate exchange account and I get emails about 1-2 times a week telling me I am over my limit. WHY.

Has corporate IT departments not got the memo that drive space is DIRT CHEAP. I mean this is not the 90’s. I can go out and by a few TB’s of drive space for the price of a nice steak dinner. I am almost to the point where I am going to buy a damn drive my self and walk it down to our IT dept and ask them to install it (ok, since I am a remote worker i guess i will have to send it to them, but you get the point).

Anyway, I am done with my little mini-rant. besides, i have found that if i do not acknowledge the emails they go away (or at least get deleted).

Till next time,

Unit Tests to the rescue

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:44:27 GMT

Today started off in a bad, bad way. Because of some issues I had earlier in the week with my source control repository (SCR) I was doing a ton of work offline. Today I was able to regain access to my SCR I decided to do a full get. I was fully expecting SourceOffSite (crappy overlay tool on top of VSS -- BTW, VSS is the devil) to prompt me for conflicts or do merges...... NOPE

When I finished doing my SCR pull I re-opened Visual Studio and did a compile. To my dismay I had TONS of build errors. After about 3 seconds of looking into the errors I knew I was screwed. It turns out I lost about 2 days worth of code because the source files were not merged they were overwritten....THIS SUCKS

The good news for me is that much of the code that was overwritten was plumbing work and was fixed in about 1 hour. However, there was a bit of logic code that was overwritten as well. This is where my unit tests came to the rescue.

Because I has pretty good code coverage with my tests I was able to re-create the logic with very little fear that the new implementation changed the intent of the original logic. Also because I had my tests I was able to infer logic based on what the tests were meant to verify.

I am not trying to say that tests made this all ok, but having my tests did make me feel a little better in thinking that I have not broken anything. Sadly, I wasted a large portion of my morning doing this.

Till next time,

[----- Remember to check out DimeCasts.Net -----]

Quote of the day

Derik Whittaker — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:56:17 GMT

I was listening to Episode #8 on DeepfriedBytes today and heard the greatest quote.

In this episode Woody and Keith are speaking with Brad and Jim who both work over at Microsoft. The quote goes a little like this:

'We are a Microsoft shop here so we try to use Microsoft products'

Sorry, I just found it great they they actually referred to them selves as a 'Microsoft shop'

Till next time,

The var war is brewing

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:30:48 GMT

When C# 3.0/.Net 3.5 was released one of the new features that was included was the 'var' keyword. Now I have to admit that when I first read about this new feature I immediately associated this 'var' with the Variant of VB6 or the var of JScript. But that could not be future from the truth.

The 'var' keyword was created to allow for anonymous types, these are types that at design time (code time if you will) do not have a concrete type, but at run time they do (compiler creates the concrete type for you). The var keyword is statically typed, it is not a new version of the Variant. Take a look at the code below:

// Valid
var someVariableName = "Foo"; // this is typed as a string

// Invalid
var someVariableName = new SomeObject();
someVaraiableName = "Foo"; // this is NOT allowed

Enough of the history lesson, on to the point.

The use of the var keyword has had some controversy since it was announced, but as of late this 'var' war has heated up with some recent blog posts. Most notably there have been 2 posts that kinda sum up the general over all feeling on var. One for the general use and one against the general use of it.

In Jeff Atwood's (aka Coding Horror) post he talks about using var to remove redundancy. However, in Richard Dingwall's posts he thinks that Jeff has it all wrong. Well, I am here to tell the world that they are both wrong, yet both right (wow, what a way to pick a side Derik)...

No really, to be honest I was NOT in favor of the var keyword at first, but after giving it some thought and use, I LOVE the var keyword.

In Jeff's post he likes the var because he thinks it removed redundancy from your code (I 100% agree with this). However, Richard counters that saying that the use of var reduces readability. Well, again they are both right, but Jeff is soo much more right than Richard.

So, if I think they are both right, then how do I code an use the var? here are my rules for when the var should be used versus not used.

Var should be used in all cases where the type can be visually inferred from the right side of the statement:

// Use var
var foo = "string";
var anotherFoo = new Object();

Both above we know the static type by looking at the code
Var should NOT be used when rule 1 is not true:

// DO NOT USE var
var person = someObject.GetPerson();

Above I can assume that the GetPerson returns me a person object, but I am not 100% sure. In this case I would rather see something like below.

Person person = someObject.GetPerson();

Ok, now that I have cleaned up the 'var' war and everyone is happy again, it is time to tackle a larger problem like how to get my wife to allow me to have an iPhone. Wish me luck.

Till next time,

[----- Remember to check out DimeCasts.Net -----]

How to Foo-up your RSS feed with a single /

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:06:55 GMT

So today I got an IM from Chris Sutton telling me that my RSS feed for DimeCasts.Net was not working. So being the paranoid guy I am, I immediately started to run in circles like Chicken Little yelling "The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling". It was not till I became horse and ran out of breath did I realize I needed to fix the thing.

The first thing I did of course was to test the thing, and sure enough Chris was NOT lying (you never know about those guys from Iowa), but what was the cause. I knew it had worked the day before, what happened. Oh yea, I actually setup the RSS generation to be a automated process, not manual.

Because I am so new to RSS, and have never created a feed document before I did not want to take the time to learn some third party API (like rss.net) so I hand rolled my own logic to build the XML Document (don't worry, apart from the data access, it is all of 20-25 lines of code). Turns out that I put an extra '/' in the URL in the link node under the channel (below in RED).
<channel>
<title>DimeCasts.Net -- Inform and Educate in ~ 10 minutes or less</title>
<link>http://www.DimeCasts.Net/</link>

For some reason (again, not an RSS guru) when this happens the URL's for each item gets fooed up. After a few simple keystrokes the problem was fixed, and as it turns out the sky was not falling.

So what is the moral of this story? No matter how 'simple' the change, shit can go wrong in a hurry.

Till next time

(P.S., check out DimeCasts.Net)

Re: 3 Geeks in an Elevator -- My take

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:49:21 GMT

Bil Simser has a funny post that I thought I would respond to.

My 2 people. JDN (John) of the Alt.net list and Scott Bellware. This would be great. I am sure for the first 24+ hours it would be a cynical bitchfest and blood would be all over the place. Then, as calmer heads prevailed they would hug and be life long friend.

Till next time,

Wow, 250 posts just flew right by

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:15:48 GMT

I did not even notice that my post from yesterday was my 250th here at Devlicio.us. Who would have thunk that I would that much useless stuff to share with the world.

It has been a blast, and here is to another 250 more posts. That's right, I still have more useless knowledge to share....:)

Till next time,

Great code comments I stumbled across.

Derik Whittaker — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:39:15 GMT

Today I was looking at some .Net 3.5 source code and ran into these great comments.

      //ok, this is a hairy, dirty, and nasty piece of code
      //the alternatives are substantially worse than this though
      //i.e. when you do your own provider, LINQ assumes that
      //you are going to implement your own expression tree visitor and
      //do it all yourself.  Frankly, I still have xmas shopping to do
      //and I really don't want us to be foobared when we get
      //even more extension methods added to LINQ
      //therefore, we are pulling execute based on taking the calling the standard execute on
      //enumerable, but using our own class
      //

This is great because it is truthful and explains the exact intent or thought process of the developer.

//pray.  If something is going to break, it will do so here
return genericMethodInfo.Invoke(null, paramList.ToArray());

We have all put comments in here

I know this post was kinda pointless, but thought it would cause some to smile

Till next time,

Wonder no longer

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:17:22 GMT

Well, I think that's about as long as I want to go keeping this under wraps. And what better day to make the announcement than the one day where you can't be sure if I'm actually kidding (especially now that I've called attention to it).

I've been pretty silent on the alt.net movement. Not for any political reasons, mind you, hillbillies are what you might call "controversially agnostic", at least if you wanted to be polite. No, the real reason is that I haven't had much to say on the subject. At least since moving to CodeBetter. I did do my civic duty at the previous home though.

I've still been following it. And one of the more entertaining aspects of alt.net has been the alt.net pursefight blog. But the method of entertainment for me isn't quite what you might be thinking. For me, the fun part hasn't been *reading* the pursefight....it's been WRITING it.

Oh, don't act all surprised. According to the poll numbers, you already knew it was one of the nobody developers out there. I threw the "disenfranchised" bit in there because who'd suspect a humble Appalachian American of knowing how to spell it, let alone use it correctly in a sentence?

I suppose you'll want some semblance of motivation. That's easy: for the unfettered fame it would bring me.

And why come out of the clo--errr.... why reveal my intentions now? Because the mailing list has become less a source of entertainment and more a source of information. Gone are the marathon threads that eventually end "hey, I'm just trying to be devil's advocate here" by someone hoping to hit the reset button.

Now it's all "How do I manage multiple builds?" and "What's your take on Windows 2008?" The closest I got to any disbelieving head shakes was the presentation from Microsoft with some seriously misguided advice on how often to check-in code. But other than that little trip down DailyWTF territory, it's been pretty clean.

And I see no signs of that changing. Now that the identity crisis has passed and that "what is alt.net" thing has been resolv---errr....swept under the carpet, it's back to business as usual.

So consider this an attempt at the fifteen minutes of fame promised to me by Andy Warhol.

And I'll be timing you.

Kyle the Gloryhound

Is var the new Dim?

Derik Whittaker — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:19:00 GMT

In C# .Net 3.5 they added the var keyword. The intent the var keyword is to allow the object type to be implicitly inferred from the expression used to initialize the variable. However, more often then not I hear people using it because it saves them time typing.

So, if the main reason SOME people are using var i have to ask the one simple qusetion

Is var any different then Dim? I mean they both have 3 letters. They both are used to declare variables........ Hum

*****
I know that var is NOT the same as dim in the 'CLR' sense, so please do NOT try to explain to me how they are different
*****

Till next time,

I have been Google Mapped

Derik Whittaker — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:35:26 GMT

Last fall I was driving home from work and in the distance I saw a car with something on top. As I got closer I noticed it was a 'Google map' car. At the time I was kinda excited as I thought I MAY have been mapped.

Well, today I had a few minutes to kill and I decided to see if they had updated the map with my area on it. Sure enough, they have. If you check out this link you will see a dark gray TrailBlazer, that is ME.

Anyway, thought it was kinda cool. So does this make me famous.... Yea, did not think so.

Till next time,

Being OCD and Merging don't mix

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:34:21 GMT

Let me start of by publicly admitting this, I am have OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) when it comes to code. My code must be clean and it must be uniform. And because I am a ReSharper lover my disorder is even more drawn out.

Over the past month or so while I have been fixing bugs in our application I have been making 'harmless' changes to the various class files that I have been editing. These changes involve removing dead using blocks, removing dead code, removing unneeded 'this' usages, making various improvements to the code, so on and so forth. None of these were major and none should (wish we had tests to prove this) affect the quality of the application. But since ReSharper has highlighted these various issues I thought I would change them.

Boy was that a bad idea. Last week the team I am on had a directive to merge 3 different branches into our trunk and this needed to happen ASAP. What I found out real early in our merge was we had TONS of conflicts or merge warnings because of all my 'changes' (VS Team's merge tool is not the best). Almost all of issues were easy to merge, but the fact that we had to spend a ton of extra time on them was waste (should read these [book 1, book 2] for more information on removing waste). We were able to get through the merge just fine, but it took longer then anticipated.

The moral of the post is this. If you have OCD in respect to code and you are going to be doing merges, try to control your OCD. If not your merges are going to be much more painful and take much longer then needed.

Till next time,

That's right, I am Old School!

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Just to prove that some of us don't need new technology we had these shirts made up at work.

How needs all that new technology, give me VB6 or .Net 1.1 any day.

WPF, WCF, WFF, .Net 3.5, Ruby, F#, Mocking, Testing it is all just a fad.

If you like the shirts, let me know, I can tell you where we had them made.

BTW, these were made up as a joke at work based on a few conversations with a fellow developer :)

Till next time,