Archive for February, 2008

C# 3.0, Parallel LINQ, And The Betfair API – An Introduction

My pal Jan has a habit of waxing lyrical about the wonders of Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) as soon as you make the mistake of mentioning multithreading within earshot. I’ve been playing around with .Net 3.5 recently, and I write a lot of async code day-to-day when struggling to keep desktop webservice clients responsive when making [ READ MORE ]

Code CAN Be Beautiful

In his review of Code Is Beautiful, Jeff Atwood decides that no, actually it isn’t. He’s fairly adamant about it too: Ideas are beautiful. Algorithms are beautiful. Well executed ideas and algorithms are even more beautiful. But the code itself is not beautiful. The beauty of code lies in the architecture, the ideas, the grander algorithms [ READ MORE ]

Extending the Technical Debt Metaphor

A few months ago, the inestimable Steve McConnell (he of Code Complete fame) wrote about technical debt. McConnell looks to extend the metaphor beyond the simple idea of ‘code that is going to be a liability in the future’, identifying two main types of technical debt (deliberate and accidental), and identifying further correlations between the [ READ MORE ]

Reporting on NCover Exclusions

On a recent project, my team was set the task of achieving 100% unit test pass-rate and code coverage. If you’ve ever been in this position, you’ll know it’s a double-edged sword – whilst it’s great when the Powers That Be embrace quality instead of fixating, limpet-like, on the next deadline, it can be a [ READ MORE ]

Descent Into Incompetence

I am fairly heavily involved with recruitment where I work, being the author of the technical test and phone screen questions we use for evaluating candidates, and conducting face-to-face interviews with many of the hopefuls that get over these early hurdles. Naturally, in order to gain these responsibilities I have gone through a number of required [ READ MORE ]