Erno de Weerd - All Comments

re: Setting up Windows Live Writer with Movable Type

Doxey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:00:02 GMT

You rock! Thanks for the tip on the password.

Dox

re: The X-Factor Syndrome

Arnaud Weil — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:06:45 GMT

Man, you exactly wrote what I would have love to wrote if I had your brains! ;-) So if I get it right your job is about playing games that have to do with computers, right? :-)

re: Getting more out of VS2010 Beta 2

Mark A Wilson-Thomas — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:21:49 GMT

Thanks Erno.

I look forward to hearing your findings.

Sorry about the lack of Silverlight 4 support in the RC - Tim Heuer does a good job of explaining the ins and outs of the situation here timheuer.com/.../faq-silverlight-and-visual-studio-2010-release-candidate.aspx .

Mark

re: Static Noise

Erno de Weerd — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:35:17 GMT

Static is not the solution for creating a constant. It's like insisting that you need a nuclear bomb to scare the enemy and although a nuke can do that for you, it might not be the best or appropriate way to do that.

As for globals: how global is global? Most globals are scoped to the running process. What if the user starts multiple instances of the same program? What if multiple users start the same program? Have you ever noticed that when the day comes that they find out (as they inevitably will) that Pi equals 4 we have a serious problem updating all software that defines Pi? How global is that definition? (and how constant is Pi any way?)

;)

re: Static Noise

Wouter — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:17:43 GMT

But...

where do I leave my constants then? Or my globals? :)

re: Static Noise

Erno de Weerd — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:29:21 GMT

Hi Martin! Good to 'see' you again.

Yes, I know the debate on singletons quite well. that is why I made a concealed reference to it. I dislike singletons perhaps even more than I do statics. I wanted to keep the discussion on topic and perhaps write another post about singletons but don't hold your breath for that; there a lot on the web about them already.

re: Static Noise

Martin Wolf — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:50:06 GMT

Very good points!

I am not 100% opposed to the use of statics in all contexts -- their use can be defensible in certain low-level technical situations, such as when a class wants to maintain a cache of data across its object instances, for performance reasons, but that caching is an implementation detail which should be transparent to the calling code.

Mind you, I'm not saying that statics are *necessary*, even for that. And I agree that they get abused a lot more often than they get used legitimately, and that their very existence can encourage bad habits. Any code which uses statics tends to make unittesting a lot more painful, too. So I wouldn't mind too much living in your world where modern programming languages simply did not have this feature.

Agree on the static main, too. Although I don't really like the alternative of kicking off the whole program from the constructor of the startup class. A constructor should do the minimum amount of work necessary to get the object into a well-defined state, and nothing more. Teaching novice OO programmers to run their entire program from within an object's constructor, might give them an entire *other* set of bad habits. So I would perhaps use an overloaded operator() in C++, or make the startup class implement the Runnable interface in Java and then have the VM call its run() method.

By the way, you may find this interesting also:

steve.yegge.googlepages.com/singleton-considered-stupid

I guess it's fitting that the most obvious legitimate (even if not absolutely required) use for the 'static' keyword, is a design pattern which is already somewhat dubious in itself..

re: Getting more out of VS2010 Beta 2

Erno de Weerd — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:49:04 GMT

Thanks Mark! I got it running already; I'll let you know.

I am sad to see SL 4 not being supported but I think I understand why:

1. No Go-Live licence for SL beta versions

2. What would be left to present on the MIX... ;-)

re: Getting more out of VS2010 Beta 2

Mark A Wilson-Thomas — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:53:56 GMT

Hi Erno

We would love to hear how you get on with the new RC build which is available to the public NOW, here:

msdn.microsoft.com/.../dd582936.aspx

Only one caveat: if you are an SL4 developer, please note that this RC does not currently support Silverlight 4 development as Beta 2 did.

Thanks

Mark Wilson-Thomas

Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio

re: WPF: Hardware support

Erno de Weerd — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:02:51 GMT

Read this: beta.blogs.microsoft.co.il/.../hardware-acceleration-in-wpf.aspx

When you are running Windows 7 you already have hardware acceleration due to the minimal hardware requirements for W7. Is this what you are looking for?

Check the RenderCapability.Tier property on your machine to find out at what level hardware acceleration is running.

re: WPF: Hardware support

Don Reed — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:03:19 GMT

How do I turn on hardware accleration. I am using windows 7

re: TO!

maartens — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:03:27 GMT

An interesting book (in my opinion) that adresses the topic of matching your class model with the domain model is:

[url]www.amazon.co.uk/.../277-5523371-0584439[/url]

re: TO!

Erno de Weerd — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:25:05 GMT

Awesome! I didn't know that... too bad it was published in 2004... ah well... I honestly never heard of it before.

As for your first remark: yes, that is one of the very interesting side effects of getting the classes at an abstraction level that is too high; in the end you'll endup with object with very generic attributes and operations. The problem is that you'll miss out on specific attributes and operations.

re: TO!

HarryN — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:29:57 GMT

Erno: your word was spread and a first book is already available: Thing-Oriented Programming!

www.springerlink.com/.../12e68nxt7elf4edw

re: TO!

HarryN — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:28:12 GMT

I frequently encounter messages saying "How to sell things online and make money", so I think you have to look for an other (even geekier?) solution.

By the way, I think all the attributes and operations of Product you named in your example apply to Car too ...