The familiar data structure Linked List is patented. The United States Patent is 7028023.The inventor is one Mr Ming Jen Wang from Colarado USA of LSI Logic Corporation. Now whats not very clear to me is the implications of this to the broader developer community.
I was spending most of my time during the last two months, trying to figure out how things should come into place in the next couple of months up until next year. I was even visiting these Personal Development web sites, and downloading and reading stuff on ‘Positive Thinking’. But life is such that you never know what is going to hit you, when and where!
You can do any amount of preparation but only to find that it’s little or no use! Actually I’m going through the mill now, and learning things in the difficult way. It suddenly stuck me, how brittle a life we all are leading. Its a moment of pleasure, excitement, sorrow, betrayal,tears, laughter and so on. Life is all these. All these are there. Its only that I dont know just which one is next!
So I think I’m right "Cross Roads of Life Bear No Road Signs"
Maybe its destiny, or maybe just instincts………but surely there is no perfect way.
Unit Testing Windows Compact Framework Applications
This weekend I was all busy spending some quality time digging into NUnit Unit Test framework. My requirement was to write some Unit tests for a Windows CF version 1.0 application. After getting a fair bit of an understanding about the Assertions, and Attributes, I wrote some simple Test Cases and compiled. I got some disturbing compile time errors regarding mscorlib.dll. The VS Compilor was indicating some dll version issue. I tried in vain, and yesterday morning decided to remove the reference NUnit.Framework which I have added to my Project reference.
Hey…………Suddenly the application compiled successfully. I took a step back and saw this in the NUnit documentation.
So there it is. NUnit currently does not support Unit Testing on Windows Compact Framework. Also As Jamie Cansdale has replied to an inquiry which I made, neither TestDriven.NET support this. My Applications are on CF Version 1.0. So cannot take advantage of Orcas I guess.
Most recently I had to ‘plan’ a code review. Since our client will be actually reviwing our codes its always better for us engineers to review our own work. Ideally a code review is not something which you would do after doing everything, but it has to be a part and parcel of our daily builds, so that the released codes are always complying to inhouse and other Industry best practices. In XP (Extreme Programming) ‘Pair Programming’ is introduced to to take advantage of code review, although its one such advantage of Pair Programming.
First thing I wanted to do before starting a code review was to know ‘Why am I doing this ?’ ‘What are my goals ?’ ‘How do we plan a code review ?’
Since we are doing the review after a long elapsed time period, we also needed a plan.
One of the Main reasons behind this code review is to look for windows of opportunity to improve overall application performance. To identify potential bottlenecks. Refactoring opportunities will also arriese as and when we go about doing this. I wanted a starting point and Ideally it’s a Checklist.
Also there are numerous tools to help you identify gray areas in your code. Sourcemonitor is one such tool which is also a free download.
