Visual introduction to (managed) C++ 2005

I’m sick but I can still watch videos from Channel 9 :). If you need a general overview of C++ 2005 and its relation to CLR then I recommend this video with Brandon Bray. It looks like C++ 2005 is big improvement in terms of usability since C++ 2003. I was using managed C++ 2003 about two years ago and it was nightmare. In one solution I had C, C++, managed C++ and C# code. Even if it compiled it very often threw strange exceptions during runtime because of mixed nature of almost all my assemblies. A few things Brandon mentioned:

• for each statement in C++(for .NET and STL collections)
• difference between generics and templates
• why C++ managed compiler can produce best MSIL ever

Of course I’ve added his blog to my list.

Microsoft's certificates - any real value?

Scott Hanselman represents quite similar to main point of view. But I think that Microsoft’s certificate can have real value if we satisfy a few conditions. If we learn in order to prepare to them then it makes sense otherwise it’s bullshit. And one more remark, many job offers say that the certificates are either required or at least more then welcome. Does it make any senses? Not much to me because every single person that can handle mouse and keyboard can pass them without any problem. How? Just download brain dumps from the Internet. Then how having them or not having them can be any criterion? Anyway you have to check a given person out in order to confirm its certificates are true. You can ask why I’ve passed 2 of them. I think the answer is just a few lines above :).

I need more syntactic sugar

I am really excited about extension methods and once C# 3.0 is released I’m going to extend every collection class with IsEmpty, IsNotEmpty functions. They should look like that:

public static bool IsEmpty(this ArrayList list)
{
   return list.Count == 0;
}

public static bool IsNotEmpty(this ArrayList list)
{
   return list.Count > 0;
}

I know that it’s not big deal but I would rather write: if (list.IsEmpty()) then if (list.Count == 0). The first one is just much more readable.

INDC - you should regret if you missed it

I was there. Here is the proof. But where is my pint of Guinness? :)

NDepend tells you about your design quality.

Quite useful free tool. It can analyze your assemblies and suggest what is potentially dangerous. I am not big fun of all included visualisations but I really appreciate generated html report. It’s worth giving a try: NDepend.

Developer is an asset

More verbose and therefore really valuable version of my short post ;-). I completely agree with Joel . No doubts.

The freedom of experimentation is crucial

If a software engineer has to struggle against lots of tedious work incorporating every single change then very often he simply abandons it and doesn’t change anything. In other words he would rather leave some poor solution that more or less works then replace it with something really valuable. His creativity is simply limited by the amount of additional effort that every change requires. Above problems can be caused by lack of proper tools, messy and unmaintainable code or even so trivial thing as slow workstation. There are people that don’t perceive it as a real problem but in my humble opinion they are wrong :).