Eber Irigoyen has a post about what should I hide?, based on advice from Code Complete 2. Eber is making the statement that the question should be reversed. What should I expose?

On the face of it, it looks like a reasonable suggestion, after all, I assume that we all accept that encapsulation is a good thing. The problem is that this completely ignore the notion of extensibility. It only give you the extensibility that you think of ahead of time. For examples of where this approach fail, just look at caching & batching in .Net. In both cases, the approach of show just what you must is used, and this make both completely useless for any scenario that you didn't think when creating the code.

Ten Neward has posted a long post about OR/M - The Vietnam of Computer Science. The first part of this post is a Vietnam war history lesson, and I kind of missed the point, then he goes on to point at various issues with OR/M.

I don't quite get the point of the post, to tell the truth,  and I am tempted to raise Godwin's Law in this matter

He raises some valid points, but each of those issues are already mostly solved issues.

To give some examples:

• Entity identity vs. Row Identity – Identity maps and Unit Of Work handle this issue.
• Concurrency  - Last Write Win, Optimistic Concurrency, Explicit locking.
• Caching across a web farm – Use a distribute cache.

I the last week I was asked multiply times about using Rhino Mocks to mock interfaces with generic methods.

At the moment, this is not working, the code needed to generate generic methods on runtime is not trivial, and I tried fixing it several times, without success. Currently, Dynamic Proxy 2 is being worked on, which will have support for generic methods, so I expect to have this feature soon.

The following hack will get you by for now, it is not ideal, but it is what I have at the moment.

The ISession interface from NHibernate contains a generic Load<T>(object id) method, which measn that Rhino Mocks can't mock it. Here is how we solve the issue:

We basically disable the mocking of this specific method, and now we mock this class, and continue life as usual.

This is not only one of the nicest logos that I have seen, it is also the logo of Rhino Mocks Boo Macros, which is a language extension for Boo that integrate Rhino Mocks directly into the language.

Andrew Davey released it today, and it completely blew me away.

I did some Boo hacking, and I have a fully appreciation of the scale of the task that Andrew had.

Check out how simple it looks:

The above example creates an expectation for a call on foo.Dog(anything, not-null,  between 0 and 10), and then make the call. There is a lot more documentation here.

Very nice and simple to work with.

Congratulations, Andrew, and very good work.

Mike has an excellent rant on "No Code, just a bit of XML here and there" approach. Check it out. I wholeheartedly agree.

What we need is a lightwieght script for configuration.

Download: XmlDataType2003.zip

I am trying to play Black & White 2, and I'm running into a lot of issues with my graphic card (ABIT R9600XT) the default drivers crash often when playing the game, and trying to update the drivers resulted in crashing the computer itself when playing. This is a fairly old card, and it is only capable of displaying B&W in the lowest level of detials, but I am still blown away by the game.

My requirements are:

• Stable Drivers - I'm not a top notch gamer. I want stable drivers.
• Dual head support - not something that I'm willing to give up ever.
• Support the things that B&W 2 needs.
• Not a big, noisy monsster.

Any recommendations?

For the past week I have been doing quite a bit of work in unmanaged C++. It is mainly a set of small utilities that we need, and they can't have a dependency on anything.

I used to be a big bigot for C++. I understood RAII and shared_ptr, I could read templated code without a hitch and I occationaly even managed to write a program where pointer chasing was optional :-)

Now that I am working in C++ again, I am amazed to find out just how much I forgot, and just how much stuff is just not there.It was so bad that I actually had to do a search for "Hello World C++" just to find the correct syntax to get the application to compile.

I spent a several minutes searching for std::string.split() method. I knew that it had one, but I could find it (never mind the intelli sense story for C++). I slowly dawned on me that I was actually thinking about System::String, and that C++ really does have more than a single string type.

I still remember the high level concepts, but I lost a lot of the instincts that I had for C++.

For instnace, should a method have a return value of std::string, or std::string* ? What is the meaning of each? I had to actually consider the implications of those decisions before I could go on. And don't get me started about having to worry about releasing memory. I need to write some mutli threaded safe code in C++, and just making sure that all the threads are releasing memory appropriately is going to be a huge headache.

But even beyond that, there is the not small issue of needing to remember all the API that I need. It is not just shared_ptr vs auto_ptr, it is simple things like reading a file or consuming XML.

I feel so lonely without the BCL...