May 2008 Entries

System.Type.GetType performance

Recently, I saw some code that used System.Type.GetType("System... to get a type. My gut feel was that this was bad practice -- even without knowing that this was using reflection, it seemed like an error-prone was to do things. After all, I don't type as well as I'd like, and am apt to mis-type string literals... which the compiler doesn't catch. However, convincing developers to change because "I think that's ugly" can be a tough sell. So I benchmarked it for grins and giggles. Here's the ...
Posted On Monday, May 26, 2008 1:52 PM | Comments (3)

Agile -- a 30-year-old software methodology?

Several months ago, I read Dreaming in Code, the story of a well-funded software project with top-notch people that failed miserably. (Well worth a read in it's own right, that's all I'm going to say about it for now.) One of the assertions made by Scott Rosenberg in the book is that one of the short-comings of software engineering as a whole is that we never learn our own history. That is to say, we're so focused on the latest technologies, the new technologies, the future technologies, that we ...
Posted On Monday, May 26, 2008 12:14 PM | Comments (0)