New Location

I have moved my blog to a self-hosted instance of Wordpress, so I will no longer be posting any new entries here. You can find the new blog at http://maxschmeling.me/.

See you there!

My problem with Foo foo;

No, I don't have a problem with Little Bunny Foo Foo. What I'm referring to is a type of coding style where the developer makes a declaration like the following:

Foo foo = new Foo();

Now, I'm not saying this is always bad, but I think we tend to shut our brains off when we write code like this. We don't take time to come up with a meaningful name that will make sense to the next guy to see it. It's kind of the same thing as using i in a for loop. Why not name the variable "customerIndex" or something like that.

I'm guilty of writing code like this too. You can probably find it scattered all throughout my code. But when I slow down and ask myself "is there another name that makes more sense?" I usually end up with a better variable name, which leads to more natual and readable code.

Something to think about.

Who are you comparing yourself to?

I just read Seth Godin's latest blog entry, and I thought it was very good.

Regardless, it’s better than we have been taught we should deserve. Jerry the general manager explained why in the simple quote that leads this post off. He’s busy comparing the place to other restaurants, not to other airports. Seth Godin

It's a short post. You should really read it. I'm primarily relating this to the software development world, but really it applies to everyone. Who do you compare yourself too? If you own or manage a business, what other business do you compare yours with?

If you own a 5 star restaurant and start comparing yourself to the corner diner that's 3 blocks away, you're not going to be a 5-star restaurant for long. The same applies to software developers. If we're constantly comparing ourselves to the guy who can tell you what every acronym means, but couldn't write a functional application to save his life, then we not only won't become any better, but we will probably start to head in that direction as well.

I think we should all make a conscious effort to compare ourselves to someone at the top of our field. If we all did that, I think we'd have a lot more superstar developers out there.

Finite State Machine Research Paper

I'm putting this here more as a bookmark for myself because I've been reading a lot about Finite State Machine implementation lately for a project I'm beginning to start on (a rewrite of an existing application).

This PDF is a pretty good source of information, and it is well written: On The Implementation of Finite State Machines.

Enjoy.

Sandcastle and Visual Studio 2005 SDK

I just ran into an annoying little problem with Sandcastle Help File Builder. I was getting a build error that said the version of Sandcastle that I had is out of date.

After a little research I determined that Visual Studio 2005 SDK was causing the problem. I've installed it since the last time I built a help file, so it makes sense. The fix is to set the SandcastlePath property on your Sandcastle project to the correct path: C:\Program Files\Sandcastle.

Apparently the Visual Studio 2005 SDK includes v1.0.0.0 of Sandcastle, and somehow SHFB uses that version instead of the one installed manually.

This is where I found the answer: http://shfb.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=10817&ANCHOR

Hope this helps.