Filed under: Best Practices

Coding (vs) Logic 1

Yes sir!! it is a battle of clans! Today all thoughts all ideas are going to come down here. And i am holding nothing back. It is a great war this. In the world of software development there are those believe that it is the Coding that matters more than the logic! startling claims indeed. And maybe that is the reason why they have been loosing as well. Logic undeniably is ultra important when it comes to developing software. Those who somehow claim that coding skills can outshine logical abilities, obviously have issues with their logic. But then i sat down thinking all these years and more so in the past few months, thinking if there was/is any logic in what they said. Can coding truly be as important as the logic, where it is built upon that very logic?

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Pages, Views and Popups - Data Flows

I think i have written a few posts on popups and the issues with layer development before. Today, I was encountered with another classical situation involving Pages, views and pop-ups. And for a change i was invited to be a part of the debate. The scenario was as follows: We had a page, which was in all essence a master page dealing with the background service. This page fundamentally had a tab control with every tab's container having its own control. Now each of these controls led out to one or more popups (again effectively more controls). The issue was to treat the controls as controls and try to relinquish them of all Svc calls. Mind you at this stage no calls were being made from any of the controls but we just wanted to come up with a solution where in we could once and for all decide a standard protocol by which we could completely avert situations involving svc calls being made from the controls.

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Code Integration

It has been a week of thorough introspection and rough hours at work. With ever changing requirements and demands of the software world and its clients, i guess any developer goes through this phase early in his career. The phase where he not only has to produce good code but also keep changing it as per those requirements, and fast!! And all the while, you have to produce bug free code. So what is the secret? How do you keep writing good error free code, with the fast paced changes? Well, let me break the bad news to you: No one can write bug free code in its entirety with significant changes in the software model/requirements being made every other day. But here is the good news: You can reduce the number of bugs by being careful about the changes that you incorporate in your software/code. And this whole process of being careful is called Integration testing.

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SRS: Software Requirement Specifications

I was finally able to clean up my comp today off all the trash i had accumulated over the years in college. Saved up a lot of space!! :D That is when i found this rather interesting document worth having a look at. It was a simple straight forward guideline to writing an SRS. I used it while documenting my analysis and design aspects of my final year project. It is to the point and comprehensive to say the least. I guess one such document should always be by your side while working on any project. :) I could never quite locate the true source of this document. It was a life saver for me. So here is the link to it: SRS.pdf Hope this helps you in your documentation and analysis of your projects. Cheers!!!

A Coder's Handwriting

This is a phrase coined by i-don't-know-who. But this is a phrase used my a colleague of mine at office. When ever there is any issue in the code on the TFS, instead of doing a history check and the past check-ins, this guys identifies the author of that code based on its "handwriting". Interestingly enough more often than not, he is correct. And surprisingly enough, when you think about it for a minute, there seems to be some sense in his method.

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Overlaying UI Controls/Elements

The overlaying of UI Elements or controls is something all UI Developers and Designers do. While it may be pretty useful, it can bring a lot of questions on efficiency, ease of code and logic. So, lets get down to basics: Why have overlaying or overlapping controls? Well, for one, i have been using it a lot for variable functionality. It basically means making your UI possess a different set of UI elements or controls altogether, offering radically different functionalities in varying scenarios. One in specific is having a ComboBox (drop down menu) on top of a Read-only Textbox. This can be used in a form to great effects. While the user is entering a new Form, there might be a predefined selected set of values which he might have to select from for a given field in the form. But, after saving it once, the selection should no longer be accessible and the value of the field should be permanent for the entire lifetime of the form.

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A Pop-Up Story

This is a tale of what i did at work today. It was lousy in a few ways but educating in many others (its all about perspective). Well, i was doing a lot of code refactoring today and it was truly, and no jokes here, truly a good leaning experience. The theme of today's lesson was simple, Encapsulation. In more elaborate terms, i learnt that service calls should not be made from pop ups. Why? Well, no one has given me any clear reason so far. But somehow it makes sense. A pop up is something very intermediate, right? Its primarily used for peripheral functions. All the actions of uploading data, giving out warning and status messages figures in pop ups. So why should you be making service calls from it? Apart from that, there is another reason why you should not be doing something like that: a pop up is essentially a control as well. Any control you ever make has to be under all circumstances independent of anything else.

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Defensive Coding

I will keep this short and simple. Today a senior of mine uttered this phrase, when i was talking ab0ut spanning out null checks all over the code. He said that it will be defensive coding and i soon realized why. The moment you have null check for everything in your code it becomes a little difficult to track down the root of the issue. While your code will be all running and may never break down, there will be issues which will look so mysterious to you that you will end up wasting an entire day just trying to debug one of them.

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