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‘I’ is for…Interface

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Roy Osherove has posted an excellent blog entry Interface Naming – Anything But Java’s Standard, Please, on his thoughts on the use of ‘I’ for interfaces. I agree with Roy that using ‘I’ to prefix interfaces is a good idea because it makes code clearer. This is in line with the .Net Framework Design Guidelines by Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina. You should name interfaces to describe the behaviours they bestow on the implementing class, for example, IPersistable.

I personally believe that the ultimate aim of a programmer is to write code that reads like prose and should be clearly understandable by the reader. Any naming convention or coding standard that leads directly to more understandable code has to be a good thing.

As a young, naïve programmer writing C code over 20 years ago, I, like many others, took delight in writing convoluted, hard to understand code! Writing code with others in mind is not only more productive, but also a sign of maturity:

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand. – Martin Fowler

Another interesting point that Roy mentions, is the reliance on an IDE to understand code through the use of ‘hover’ tooltips. Do you think it is inevitable that we should require tools to understand code, or should language syntax and the printed page be sufficient?

Reporting Best Practices: 10 Things Every Report Should Have

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Every report should have a footer containing the following:

  1. The name of the report. Give each report a unique identifier in addition to its name e.g. “Cost Summary By Month, By Area” could be “CS-MA1” This is especially useful in applications with a large number of similar reports.
  2. The date and time the data in the report was generated (or the time period represented by the data) and where appropriate, the execution time taken to generate it.
  3. The date and time the report was printed.
  4. Who printed it.
  5. “Page x of N” Just using “Page x” is not sufficient.
  6. If the report is filtered in any way (date range etc), it should include details of the filter parameters in the footer. If there are a large number of filters, it should include a report header page that describes the parameters and the values filtered on.
  7. Alternating shaded lines for the data detail sections (like the old computer printer paper)
  8. Don’t print empty reports. Alert the user that the report is empty (perhaps offer to filter with a different set of parameters).
  9. If printed as paper copy, a URL to the ‘live’ report (reporting services, or aspx page) and a contact email in case problems are found with the report.
  10. Where similar reports exist in different applications, the system name.

Intellisense for SQL Server – Free!

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I meant to post this a few weeks ago: Red-Gate have made their intellisense for SQL server editors, SQL Prompt, available for free download until September 1st 2006

“SQL Prompt works with Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager, UltraEdit32”

No time-bombs, no restrictions!

Go get it!

Bits and er, Bans

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As most people are aware, the term bit is short for ‘binary digit’. The coining of this word is credited to the mathematician John Tukey, sometime in the late nineteen thirties or early forties.

Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, was a colleague of John Tukey at Bell Labs, and his way of defining the bit was the amount of information required to distinguish between two equally probable outcomes. Around the same time, the British cryptographer, Alan Turing, had also come up with an idea which represented the amount of evidence that made a guess ten times more likely to be true. He called this unit the ban. (Although I suppose that had this been the ‘winning’ formulation, the dit or ‘decimal digit’ might have been coined!)

These historical insights into the information age and many more can be found in “Fortune’s Formula” by William Poundstone. This is a great read featuring gamblers, mathematicians and gangsters with some classic one liners: “In 1974…A computer was something you saw in a movie (often it went berserk and killed people).”

SQL Server 2005 Database Snapshots

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I recently had one of those “ahha!” moments with the new SQL Server 2005 Database Snapshot feature (not to be confused with the new transaction Snapshot Isolation mode). Dr Greg Low gave an overview of this great feature at the Perth .Net User Group last year, and I was going over some notes and e-learning material.

When you create a snapshot of a database, SQL Server 2005 efficiently creates a NTFS sparse file that initially contains effectively no data.

When you read data from the snapshot, SQL Server checks to see if the page the data resides upon exists in the snapshot. If it does, it serves the page from the snapshot; otherwise it serves the page from the original database.

How do pages appear in the snapshot? Each time a write is made to the original database, SQL Server checks if the page is already in the snapshot, if not it copies the page into the snapshot BEFORE the write is made to the original, thus preserving the point in time snapshot of the data. For some reason, I had wrongly assumed the page was copied after the write, but that just did not make much sense.

Database snapshots can be applied wherever you want to preserve a point in time state of a database. An excellent example of using a snapshot is point in time reporting. This is just one of many reasons why you should consider upgrading to SQL Server 2005.

Vault NAnt task

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If you are using NAnt for your build scripts and using SourceGear vault as your SCC repository, please be aware that the default behaviour of the Vault NAnt task in versions 3.1.8 (and below) will overwrite any checked out and modified source files.

I have a single generic build script which I run on the build server and use on developer machines, so that a developer can simply type ‘nant’ at the command prompt in a solution folder to perform a complete build. (This is much quicker than opening the Visual Studio IDE to perform a build)

See the SourceGear Vault support site for details:

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=6188
http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=5876&highlight=nant
http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?p=25162#25162

This will be addressed in the next release 3.5 (ETA approx. July 2006)

More on NAnt soon…

User Interface Design Books

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A while ago on the Stanski ausdotnet list, someone posted a question asking for book recommendations on User Interface design. Here’s my recommended list in no particular order:

The Design of Everyday Things : excellent common sense reference, great for getting into the mindset of good design, especially the ideas of visual clues (like push door with plate, pull door with handle – reminds me of that Farside cartoon of the “school for the gifted”!)

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability : Great for web, equally applicable to windows. Short, easy read, but valuable. A little gem of a book. If you design web sites, this is required reading.

About Face 2.0 and The Inmates are running the Asylum both by Alan Cooper: I would highly recommended “Inmates”, which discusses some real world examples of usability, and is a highly enjoyable read. You probably won’t agree with everything (I didn’t), but it gets you thinking…

Joels Spolsky’s book User Interface Design for Programmers (most of which (if not all) is available free on his web site Joel on Software)

Good News Everyone!

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OK I admit it. I’m a recently converted futurama nut!

Last week I sat and passed 70-443, which completes my MCITP (Database Admin SQL Server 2005). Thanks to everyone who gave me encouragement. As exams go it wasn’t the easiest or hardest exam I’ve ever sat, but it did require some serious concentration for a couple of hours.

Considering I’m a developer, there is a slight irony that I should complete the DB Admin side first; just 70-441 remaining for developer certification.

If you’re in two minds about certification, my advice would be if you know your stuff, try to get your employer to pay for an exam or two and just sit them. What have you got to lose?

Recommended book

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One of concepts I firmly believe in is continuous improvement. If you’re a software developer, you need to constantly improve and keep up with the software industry’s direction. One of the things I strive to do is read one book a month; they are not always software books and I don’t always manage one a month, but the point is the principle. I’m currently reading Bob Walsh’s “Micro ISV: From Vision To Reality”. I heard about this book from Joel Spolsky’s site and Eric Sink’s blog, both of which are worth reading if you’re serious about software development.

Whilst this book is primarily aimed at someone about to take the plunge and go it alone in the software industy, it has excellent advice for developers in general, and it is well written. It covers a range of topics from branding and selling to development infrastucture.

In the past I’ve applied the idea of branding even to in-house software applications and I think people take in-house applications more seriously when they can identify them easily.

Name Change

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A colleague told me he thought my blog title of “Get the Bad News Early!” was too negative, and he got me thinking. Hence the name change. Whilst it’s not particularly important, I’ve changed it.

Both are important concepts in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC):

Early Detection means cheaper to fix.
Fixing the symptoms of a problem is unproductive (though common).

Much of the evolution of the SDLC over the last 30 years has been focused on detecting problems as soon as possible.