Tamir Khason – Just code

“Zone of Pain vs. Zone of Uselessness” or code analysis with NDepend

As for me, there are only two kinds of projects – hobbyist’s nifty tools and systems (scale may wary). The main difference between those is the easiness of making changes and refactoring. Other words, how many other developers I should persuade to do it just because “In the final analysis, it’s their war” – JFK. But what can be the good reason for such fast talk? – “You code sucks or at least it ought to”.

“Every generation needs a new revolution” – Thomas Jefferson

So, in order to win such revolution for “systems” you absolutely need static analysis tools like NDepend. Those tools are not intended for being your advocates, but those intended to help you to understand all risks and approximate the amount of work should be done to fulfill another revolution.

Unfortunately, you cannot use such tools for fair measuring of code quality because of Computer Science rules of thumb. How to decide whether “methods is too big” or “method is too complex”? However you can (and should) use it for dependencies risk detection. For example, in following illustration you can clear understand that any change inside BetterPlace.Core or BetterPlace.Model assemblies (and namespaces) can be painful.

Now the only question is who is responsible of modules, using it and how long will it take to convince them to make a revolution.

From here you can start using CQL (Code Query Language) which is SQL like language invented by Patrick, the author of NDepend, for querying code elements and sections. By using it, you can define what “method is too big” means in terms of your project.

SELECT METHODS WHERE NbLinesOfCode > 300 ORDER BY NbLinesOfCode DESC

Or see where you should replace method overloads by default arguments, introduced in .NET 4.0

SELECT METHODS WHERE NbOverloads > 1 ORDER BY NbOverloads DESC

Then, when you marked all places and human targets for revolution, you can start it. After you done, you can even compare builds and measure the amount of work and quality of results achieved.

To finalize, I just touched the tip of what good static analysis tool can be used for. So get it, learn it and use it not only when you need to make a revolutions, but also during your application design and build process to be aware about how the new monster created will looks like.

Download NDepend >>

Proper disclosure: Apr 15, Patrick, the author of NDepend, asked me to review his tool and offer one license for evaluation. I told him, that do not need to evaluate it because I’m using it for a while (also I had the license of my own) and I’ll be happy to write a review once I’ll have a bit time for it. Now it happened. Thank you, Patrick, for such good work!

July 27th, 2009 · Comments (0)

Book review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming

A couple of weeks ago, Packt publishing asked me to review Gastón C. Hillar book “C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide”. They sent me a copy of this book and today, I’m ready to write a review for it. But before I’ll start reviewing it, I want to apologize to the publisher and author for the impartial review.

First of all, you should understand, that this book is about how it possible (for this book author) to write four programs (with awful user interface) using different classes from System.Threading namespace to perform tasks, rather then what is multithreaded programming and how to achieve best performance by utilizing multiple CPU power. Your own programs will not run faster after reading this book, but you’ll probably know (if you did not know before) how to use BackgroundWorker, Thread, ThreadPool, AutoResetEvent and WaitHandle classes. Also, there is a small chapter about thread context switching for UI thread delegates invocation and parallel extensions.

There are some technical misconceptions and errors in this book. But it is not the major problem of it. The problem is that while reading this book I question myself whom this book aimed at? Language style is somewhere between blog chatting (better then mine) and MSDN style documentation. I admit I don’t know quite how to categorize this, the author writes in a style that is just bizarre (even more bizarre then mine in this blog ) Overall, it sounds like I’m reading a conversation between two beginner-level programmers trying to explain one each other why they are using certain coding convention in C#.

Another half of this 395 pages book is just copy-paste stuff from Visual Studio (including it default tabulations and indentations). Here one of representative examples of such copy/paste

// Disable the Start button
butStart.Enabled = false;
// Enable the Start button
butStart.Enabled = true;

…

// Some very useful property, which used as private member for another public property
private int priVeryUserfulProperty;

public int VeryUserfulProperty
{
   get
   {
      return priVeryUserfulProperty;
   }
   set
   {
      priVeryUserfulProperty = value;
   }
}

Verdict: Not very exemplary introduction to some classes inside System.Threading namespace for fellow students who like to read blogs, rather then books and documentation and do not want to understand how it works under the hoods, but write something and forget it.

3- of 5 on my scale. This book is not all bad, though, but apparently suitable for very specific audience, which definitely excludes me.

March 20th, 2009 · Comments (7)

My favorite gadget arrived…

If you’re smoking, you know how it to flight more, then two hours when you cannot smoke. Also, you know hw it feels when outside is cold or rainy, but you should come outside to smoke. When you’re in pub with friends and a pint of good beer, but you cannot satisfy with your drink, when each 10 minutes you need to go outside to smoke. This why, I ordered electronic cigarette, that so far become my favorite gadget.

It’s absolutely perfect device. It produce odorless warm smoke and filled with real nicotine. It much healthier, then real cigarette, while you have a feeling of real smoke. And the most important thing, that you can smoke it in all places, where smoking prohibited.

The pack  contains of two rechargeable batteries, charger, inhaler and nicotine cartridges. All you have to do it so mount cartridge and start smoking

It feels like regular cigarette, tastes like regular cigarette, smells (for smoker, not for all around) like regular cigarette, but it is not regular cigarette, thus you can smoke whenever you want and where ever you want.

Absolutely incredible and very useful gadget. Happy smoking and thanks to Gamucci for such innovation. Now I can smoke during 12 hours flight to MVP summit.

January 20th, 2009 · Comments (3)