Mostly Client Side

To #Region Or Not To #Region

Admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:22:19 +0000

That truly is the question. A question that has surfaced today when a co-worker started bitching about the 4 layers of embedded regions in the code he was working on. If you’re not familiar with regions here’s a short explanation. In .NET you can surround your code with #Region and #Endregion to make it possible to hide those lines of code. The purpose is to make the code clearer by occupying fewer lines.

Use Fewer Lines Of Code!

As neat as that functionality is I have a better idea. User fewer lines of code. That will not only make it clearer, but it will most likely perform better as well. The long term advantages of minimizing the amount of code you use cannot be exaggerated.

Here’s an example and a quiz.

Your boss hands you a new assignment. Shockingly an end user has found a bug in your software. He needs you fix it. It’s not too hard for you to discern the location of the bug. Now here’s the quiz. Would you like to work on a bug in a file with:

488 lines of code
3627 lines of code

Yeah! That’s what I thought. Quantity is not the same as quality.

As luck would have it the file you’re working on has 3627 lines of code. It happens and as usual you don’t have time to refactor the code. Do you think it will be helpful to have 20+ regions in the code?

Not really, regions may have their purpose, but I’d rather have fewer code lines with useful comments. To be conservative I would say that anymore 4 digits on the line count is too much, personally I’d prefer to keep it below 500, but that’s just me. So do me a favor the next time you have to scroll for several minutes before you reach the bottom of your code, try to see if you can refactor some bits here and there. There’s a lot to gain from doing so.

Organising Your Thoughts With A Mind Map

Admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:40:09 +0000

When starting a new project one of the first things you need to do is to get your thoughts organised. A mind map is a really powerful tool towards that end. The good news is that I’ve found a really excellent free tool called Mindomo. As with most free software there are some limits to the options you have available to you, but in this case it really is pretty good.

This is the mind map for my CMS project which I’ve decided to call MCmS (if you have any ideas for a better name let me know )

MCmS Mind map

Off course, that’s the mind map at its preliminary stages. There is still a lot of thinking that needs to be done, but I’ll get there. The developement process will most likely be pretty agile, but we’ll talk a lot more about that tomorrow.

For today though I highly recommend checking out Mindomo it’s a really great free tool.

Starting On A High Note

Admin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:01:42 +0000

Well, since I don’t expect to be ending anytime soon. As the title of this blog suggests there will be a lot of client side code. Having said that the amount of server side code will be about the same. I don’t like to differentiate the two. However, I can promise you that all code presented on this blog will be web based. This blog has two main purposes.

Keeping track of my coding projects
Entertainment value and possible rants

I really hope you can live with that. If not well, that’s just too bad. I’ll use this first post to give you a short outline of the first major project I’m going to keep record of on this blog.

MC: Presents!!

The first big project is going to be a CMS system. A simple one at first, but with a structure that allows easy expansion. So we’re talking about a very modular structure here.

I’m a .NET developer by trade so choosing that platform would be a no-brainer. However, I’m up for a challenge so I’ll do it in PHP. I actually have a few good reasons for that, but I’m not going to reveal them to you right now

I know enough PHP and have enough literature about it to get started so that’s not the problem.

Planning And Project Management

As any half decent software developer knows planning is vital to the success of your project. However, in reality we don’t always get to plan things as much as we like to. Since this project is mainly for my own amusement I get to do things exactly how I think they should be done. Still, I realise that it’s easy to get caught up in the planning stage so I want to avoid that. What I need are some good tools for planning and analysis.

Preferably free!

So the search continues, however, if you know any such tools feel free to let me know