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  • Code Reuse is (Damn) Hard

    - by James Michael Hare
    Being a development team lead, the task of interviewing new candidates was part of my job.  Like any typical interview, we started with some easy questions to get them warmed up and help calm their nerves before hitting the hard stuff. One of those easier questions was almost always: “Name some benefits of object-oriented development.”  Nearly every time, the candidate would chime in with a plethora of canned answers which typically included: “it helps ease code reuse.”  Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.  Tools only ease reuse, its developers that ultimately can cause code to be reusable or not, regardless of the language or methodology. But it did get me thinking…  we always used to say that as part of our mantra as to why Object-Oriented Programming was so great.  With polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. we in essence set up the concepts to help facilitate reuse as much as possible.  And yes, as a developer now of many years, I unquestionably held that belief for ages before it really struck me how my views on reuse have jaded over the years.  In fact, in many ways Agile rightly eschews reuse as taking a backseat to developing what's needed for the here and now.  It used to be I was in complete opposition to that view, but more and more I've come to see the logic in it.  Too many times I've seen developers (myself included) get lost in design paralysis trying to come up with the perfect abstraction that would stand all time.  Nearly without fail, all of these pieces of code become obsolete in a matter of months or years. It’s not that I don’t like reuse – it’s just that reuse is hard.  In fact, reuse is DAMN hard.  Many times it is just a distraction that eats up architect and developer time, and worse yet can be counter-productive and force wrong decisions.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of reusable code when it makes sense.  These are in the few cases where you are designing something that is inherently reusable.  The problem is, most business-class code is inherently unfit for reuse! Furthermore, the code that is reusable will often fail to be reused if you don’t have the proper framework in place for effective reuse that includes standardized versioning, building, releasing, and documenting the components.  That should always be standard across the board when promoting reusable code.  All of this is hard, and it should only be done when you have code that is truly reusable or you will be exerting a large amount of development effort for very little bang for your buck. But my goal here is not to get into how to reuse (that is a topic unto itself) but what should be reused.  First, let’s look at an extension method.  There’s many times where I want to kick off a thread to handle a task, then when I want to reign that thread in of course I want to do a Join on it.  But what if I only want to wait a limited amount of time and then Abort?  Well, I could of course write that logic out by hand each time, but it seemed like a great extension method: 1: public static class ThreadExtensions 2: { 3: public static bool JoinOrAbort(this Thread thread, TimeSpan timeToWait) 4: { 5: bool isJoined = false; 6:  7: if (thread != null) 8: { 9: isJoined = thread.Join(timeToWait); 10:  11: if (!isJoined) 12: { 13: thread.Abort(); 14: } 15: } 16: return isJoined; 17: } 18: } 19:  When I look at this code, I can immediately see things that jump out at me as reasons why this code is very reusable.  Some of them are standard OO principles, and some are kind-of home grown litmus tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The only reason this extension method need change is if the Thread class itself changes (one responsibility). Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method only depends on classes that are more stable than it is (System.Threading.Thread), and in itself is very stable, hence other classes may safely depend on it. It is also not dependent on any business domain, and thus isn't subject to changes as the business itself changes. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is inherently closed to change. Small and Stable Problem Domain – This method only cares about System.Threading.Thread. All-or-None Usage – A user of a reusable class should want the functionality of that class, not parts of that functionality.  That’s not to say they most use every method, but they shouldn’t be using a method just to get half of its result. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – since this class is highly stable and minimally complex, we can offer it up for reuse very cheaply by promoting it as “ready-to-go” and already unit tested (important!) and available through a standard release cycle (very important!). Okay, all seems good there, now lets look at an entity and DAO.  I don’t know about you all, but there have been times I’ve been in organizations that get the grand idea that all DAOs and entities should be standardized and shared.  While this may work for small or static organizations, it’s near ludicrous for anything large or volatile. 1: namespace Shared.Entities 2: { 3: public class Account 4: { 5: public int Id { get; set; } 6:  7: public string Name { get; set; } 8:  9: public Address HomeAddress { get; set; } 10:  11: public int Age { get; set;} 12:  13: public DateTime LastUsed { get; set; } 14:  15: // etc, etc, etc... 16: } 17: } 18:  19: ... 20:  21: namespace Shared.DataAccess 22: { 23: public class AccountDao 24: { 25: public Account FindAccount(int id) 26: { 27: // dao logic to query and return account 28: } 29:  30: ... 31:  32: } 33: } Now to be fair, I’m not saying there doesn’t exist an organization where some entites may be extremely static and unchanging.  But at best such entities and DAOs will be problematic cases of reuse.  Let’s examine those same tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The reasons to change for these classes will be strongly dependent on what the definition of the account is which can change over time and may have multiple influences depending on the number of systems an account can cover. Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method depends on the data model beneath itself which also is largely dependent on the business definition of an account which can be very inherently unstable. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is not really closed for modification.  Every time the account definition may change, you’d need to modify this class. Small and Stable Problem Domain – The definition of an account is inherently unstable and in fact may be very large.  What if you are designing a system that aggregates account information from several sources? All-or-None Usage – What if your view of the account encompasses data from 3 different sources but you only care about one of those sources or one piece of data?  Should you have to take the hit of looking up all the other data?  On the other hand, should you have ten different methods returning portions of data in chunks people tend to ask for?  Neither is really a great solution. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – DAOs are really trivial to rewrite, and unless your definition of an account is EXTREMELY stable, the cost to promote, support, and release a reusable account entity and DAO are usually far higher than the cost to recreate as needed. It’s no accident that my case for reuse was a utility class and my case for non-reuse was an entity/DAO.  In general, the smaller and more stable an abstraction is, the higher its level of reuse.  When I became the lead of the Shared Components Committee at my workplace, one of the original goals we looked at satisfying was to find (or create), version, release, and promote a shared library of common utility classes, frameworks, and data access objects.  Now, of course, many of you will point to nHibernate and Entity for the latter, but we were looking at larger, macro collections of data that span multiple data sources of varying types (databases, web services, etc). As we got deeper and deeper in the details of how to manage and release these items, it quickly became apparent that while the case for reuse was typically a slam dunk for utilities and frameworks, the data access objects just didn’t “smell” right.  We ended up having session after session of design meetings to try and find the right way to share these data access components. When someone asked me why it was taking so long to iron out the shared entities, my response was quite simple, “Reuse is hard...”  And that’s when I realized, that while reuse is an awesome goal and we should strive to make code maintainable, often times you end up creating far more work for yourself than necessary by trying to force code to be reusable that inherently isn’t. Think about classes the times you’ve worked in a company where in the design session people fight over the best way to implement a class to make it maximally reusable, extensible, and any other buzzwordable.  Then think about how quickly that design became obsolete.  Many times I set out to do a project and think, “yes, this is the best design, I can extend it easily!” only to find out the business requirements change COMPLETELY in such a way that the design is rendered invalid.  Code, in general, tends to rust and age over time.  As such, writing reusable code can often be difficult and many times ends up being a futile exercise and worse yet, sometimes makes the code harder to maintain because it obfuscates the design in the name of extensibility or reusability. So what do I think are reusable components? Generic Utility classes – these tend to be small classes that assist in a task and have no business context whatsoever. Implementation Abstraction Frameworks – home-grown frameworks that try to isolate changes to third party products you may be depending on (like writing a messaging abstraction layer for publishing/subscribing that is independent of whether you use JMS, MSMQ, etc). Simplification and Uniformity Frameworks – To some extent this is similar to an abstraction framework, but there may be one chosen provider but a development shop mandate to perform certain complex items in a certain way.  Or, perhaps to simplify and dumb-down a complex task for the average developer (such as implementing a particular development-shop’s method of encryption). And what are less reusable? Application and Business Layers – tend to fluctuate a lot as requirements change and new features are added, so tend to be an unstable dependency.  May be reused across applications but also very volatile. Entities and Data Access Layers – these tend to be tuned to the scope of the application, so reusing them can be hard unless the abstract is very stable. So what’s the big lesson?  Reuse is hard.  In fact it’s damn hard.  And much of the time I’m not convinced we should focus too hard on it. If you’re designing a utility or framework, then by all means design it for reuse.  But you most also really set down a good versioning, release, and documentation process to maximize your chances.  For anything else, design it to be maintainable and extendable, but don’t waste the effort on reusability for something that most likely will be obsolete in a year or two anyway.

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  • Five C# Code Snippets

    A snippet is a small section of text or source code that can be inserted into the code of a program. Snippets provide an easy way to implement commonly used code or functions into a larger section of code. Instead of rewriting the same code over and over again, a programmer can save the code [...] Related posts:How To Obtain Environment Details With .NET 3.5 How-to: Easily Send Emails With .NET Understanding SMTP Status Codes ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • How long does it take Google to update all links from R 301 ?

    - by romant
    I just changed the location of my blog, and have done the appropriate redirects. Does anyone have knowledge or experience for the delay in updating all the links across Google? Reason I ask, I wish to change the A record. So this will eliminate the .htaccess file, and thus null and void the redirect. How long must I wait prior to the undertaking? Thank you.

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  • How long does it take Google to update all links from R 301 ?

    - by romant
    I just changed the location of my blog, and have done the appropriate redirects. Does anyone have knowledge or experience for the delay in updating all the links across Google? Reason I ask, I wish to change the A record. So this will eliminate the .htaccess file, and thus null and void the redirect. How long must I wait prior to the undertaking? Thank you.

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  • Des hackers exploiteraient le référencement de Google sur le faux-positif de McAfee pour diffuser le

    Mise à jour du 26/04/10 Les requêtes sur le faux-positif de McAfee utilisées pour diffuser des malwares D'après un concurrent de McAfee, des hackers insèreraient des liens malicieux dans le référencement de Google Le faux-positif de McAfee - qui a bloqué des milliers de PC suite à une mauvaise mise à jour (lire ci-avant) - aurait donné des idées aux hackers. Un des concurrents de McAfee, Sophos, affirme que des cybercriminels utiliseraient leurs connaissances des techniques de référencement de Google pour exploiter cette affaire et propager leurs propres malwares. Le principe est simple. Un utilisateur a...

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  • Des hackers exploiteraient le référencement de Google sur le faux-positif de McAfee pour diffuser le

    Mise à jour du 26/04/10 Les requêtes sur le faux-positif de McAfee utilisées pour diffuser des malwares D'après un concurrent de McAfee, des hackers insèreraient des liens malicieux dans le référencement de Google Le faux-positif de McAfee - qui a bloqué des milliers de PC suite à une mauvaise mise à jour (lire ci-avant) - aurait donné des idées aux hackers. Un des concurrents de McAfee, Sophos, affirme que des cybercriminels utiliseraient leurs connaissances des techniques de référencement de Google pour exploiter cette affaire et propager leurs propres malwares. Le principe est simple. Un utilisateur a...

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  • Does a prose to code compiler exist?

    - by Raynos
    I have seen some horrible code in my time including people virtually duplicating the code in comments // add 4 to x x+=4; // for each i in 0 to 9 for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { // multiply x by i x *= i; } Taking this concept further, I'm curious whether prose to code compilers exist. Is there a valid use case for English prose to code? Do compilers exist that do this? The distinction between this and auto generated code, is that auto generated code is generally always a subset of a project. Can we have complete projects auto generated from english prose? I realise that this might overlap with the concept of declarative languages.

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  • Aw, Snap! in Google Chrome [on hold]

    - by D. S. Schneider
    Just wondering if anyone else's experiencing the "Aw, Snap!" bug in Google Chrome. I'm developing a brand new engine which occasionaly triggers this bug and as far as I know, there's nothing one can do to find out what actually triggered the issue. I've also tested my engine with Firefox, which runs just fine. Anyway, just wanted to know if someone else is facing this while developing games for Google Chrome and has a clue about what can be done to avoid it. I'm using plain JavaScript and the audio and canvas elements from HTML5. Thanks!

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  • why not use unmanaged safe code in c#

    - by user613326
    There is an option in c# to execute code unchecked. It's generally not advised to do so, as managed code is much safer and it overcomes a lot of problems. However I am wondering, if you're sure your code won't cause errors, and you know how to handle memory then why (if you like fast code) follow the general advice? I am wondering this since I wrote a program for a video camera, which required some extremely fast bitmap manipulation. I made some fast graphical algorithms myself, and they work excellent on the bitmaps using unmanaged code. Now I wonder in general, if you're sure you don't have memory leaks, or risks of crashes, why not use unmanaged code more often ? PS my background: I kinda rolled into this programming world and I work alone (I do so for a few years) and so I hope this software design question isn't that strange. I don't really have other people out there like a teacher to ask such things.

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  • Java serait un "Roi légèrement enrhumé", un cadre de Google appelle Oracle à le remettre d'aplomb

    Java serait un "Roi légèrement enrhumé" Pour un cadre de Google qui appelle Oracle à le remettre d'aplomb Josh Blosh, "Chief Java Architect" chez Google, vient de participer au Red Hat Middleware 2020. Lors d'une intervention particulièrement remarquée, il a regretté que la plate-forme Java soit « restée sans maître à bord (rudderless) depuis plusieurs années ». D'après lui, un malaise durable se serait même emparé de la communauté. La principale explication tiendrait au fait que « les disputes techniques et liées aux licences », particulièrement préjudiciables, ont « sapé l'énergie de la communauté et provoqué beaucoup de mauvaise presse »

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