December 2005

Here are the articles that were published in December 2005.

Typing (the programming kind)

published: Mon, 19-Dec-2005

There was a time a couple of years ago when I thought generics were the best thing since sliced bread. They still are and the ability of the Anders and C# team to come up with something so amazing as LINQ and lambda expressions for a C# 3.0 preview built on this foundation is pretty amazing. But, in a sense, all these new experimental features gives us is the ability to fake dynamic typing on a static typing foundation. And that leads me to dynamically-typed languages. Read more...

Cyclomatic Complexity

published: Tue, 13-Dec-2005

Something that came up in a conversation: what is cyclomatic complexity (CC)? If I gave you a method, how would you calculate the CC of the method from scratch? Actually the second question assumes you know what CC is, so I'm cheating a little. But bear this in mind: managing complexity is an important part of being a good software designer and programmer and CC is a measure of complexity. Read more...

What Does Configuresoft Do?

published: Mon, 12-Dec-2005

I've been asked this before: "what does Configuresoft do and where do you fit in?" Usually this goes along with a comment that they've visited the official website, read about Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM), but are still flummoxed. Well, it's all very simple really, once you strip the jargon away. In essence, ECM is a very good (as in pretty awesome) PC monitoring system. But, rather than continue in this vein, let's approach what we do from a different angle. Read more...

Thread pool (part 2)

published: Mon, 12-Dec-2005

Time to start on this little project of mine to design and write a thread pool class. No sooner than I decide this course of action, though, that first, work and my personal life explode (sigh), and that second, Maxx, a fellow architect here shows me Joe Duffy's post on why you shouldn't write a thread pool, or, rather to be fair, why many people's reasons for doing so are not valid. Hah! I shall forge on since Joe's argument is mostly about performance. Nevertheless, I shall bear his posts on multithreading in mind as I TDD myself to a solution. Read more...

Thread Pool (part 1)

published: Thu, 1-Dec-2005

So a reader commented about my WaitableThread class. "Couldn’t you use a custom thread pool for this?" and encouraged me to take a look at a "smart" thread pool on Code Project. As it happened, the one he was recommending was one I'd taken a look at previously. Yes, you see the developer who wanted to launch lots of threads (see my previous post) had discovered this implementation and was all for using it. I took a look at it and decided that I could see enough problems on a cursory examination that I didn't want to use it for real code. Hence, the effort to write a WaitableThread class. Read more...