A day in the life of...

I just remembered another technique for calling methods discovered via reflection! It is possible to convert a MethodInfo to a delegate and call it, this is just as fast as calling the method directly. So if you have a method that you call often which was discovered via reflection you should try this.... private delegate bool DoSomethingDelegate(object a, object b); MethodInfo methodInfo = type.GetMethod(.........); DoSomethingDelegate method = (DoSomethingDelegate) Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(DoSomethingDelegate), methodInfo); for (int i = 0; i method(this, this);

I've been trying to think through every type of feature I can that people might want in an application, and then seeing if I can think up a way of implementing it using signals. A couple of days ago I thought up something I couldn't implement using the exact approach I had. I once wrote an app that had a treeview on the left hand side, the user could drill down to a customer of their choice and then when they clicked on that customer the display would update and show their details. This made me realise that a simple "SelectCustomer" signal would not be sufficient, what I actually needed to do was to have multiple SelectCustomer signals and indicate which customer to select. The changes I have decided to make are as follows: I will introduce a struct called SignalCreateParameters. This will hold a string property "Parameters" which may be used to automatically populate some of the properties of the created signal, ie the customer identity. The signal facto...

Women can multitask No matter how many times you might be told "women can multi-task!" it's just not true, humans can only do one thing at a time. I don’t doubt for a second that my wife's brain can keep track of multiple subjects much better than my single task brain, but at any one point her brain is only concentrating on a single task! It's exactly the same for software. People may wish to deviate from their current task in order to fulfil some adhoc requirement, but that task is an interruption, it does not occur in parallel to what they were doing before. Once that interruption is over the user of your software wants to pick up where they left off. This is what a process driven (or "task oriented") approach to writing software is about. Process driven work flow A process in this context is a single task performed within an application in order to achieve a specific goal. The goal may be just about anything such as "Delete customer", ...

Seeing as I haven't had enough free time to write part 3 recently I thought I'd post this little teaser. Would it surprise you to know that this very diagram generated into code and I was able to run it? The signals on the ShowWelcomeMessage had to be hand coded, but hopefully I will be able to get some kind of custom code generation plugin to get the signals auto generated in future.

Here is a list off the top of my head 1 - Ugly code! Why do some people set local variables to null when they have finished with them? This is .NET! The garbage collector will collect "unreferenced" objects when it is ready, an object is unreferenced if you no longer use the variable that holds the reference to it! Why do people name variables so poorly? Firstly I *hate* Hungarian notation. C# is a strongly typed language so I cannot multiply a boolean by a string, so why do people use variable names like "bIsMale" and "iAge"? 2 - Catching all exceptions An exception is something you expect to happen, but shouldn't happen if all goes well. If such an exception occurs you might know how to solve the problem and enable your application to continue, but if the exception type was unexpected how can you possibly know the cause of the error or what state your application is now in? Therefore I hate code like this try { DoSomething(); } catch { } 3 - ...

Going beyond wizard interfaces If someone had said to me "Process oriented application", in the past I would have thought to myself "Wizard-like interface". Whereas I find "Wizards" very useful in certain situations I also find that they are too time intensive for a user who knows what they want to do, how to do it, and just want to get on and do it! The thing is, I think an application layer should be process driven. The business objects layer is there in order to represent the logical business entities of the application, and the application layer should be there to drive the logical flow of the users' interaction with those objects. So, the question is "How do we implement a process oriented framework without enforcing a wizard-like interface?" The answer I think is to use Signals. Signals The process may imply that there is always a specific path through an application. Although the user may influence that path by selection options ...

An onion has layers... ...Shrek In the beginning When I first started writing applications they would typically be a single program editing a single datasource. As time went on this changed because people wanted to share data, so client/server applications appeared. It didn't stop there though, N-Tier applications became much more common. Applications were typically split up like this: RDBMS--DAL--Business classes--UI Due to the fact that I use ECO for my business layer , and that ECO has the DAL built in, the illustration for me would look something like: RDBMS--Business classes (ECO)--UI Thinking of business problems as classes instead of tables really helps to simplify your design, so I have been very happy writing applications this way for some time now. The application layer In December 2005 I was tasked with the job of writing quite a complicated Compact Framework application. Although this application was going to be complicated it needed to be very simple to use, as the ...