Category Archives: Software Development

Single instance per session application with argument passing

Posted on June 4, 2008 by Simone

Suppose you want to create an application which you want to limit to a single running instance, like some image viewers do for example. Also, you need different users on a Terminal Server not to conflict with each other. Oh, … Continue reading →

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How much would it cost to rewrite it?

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Simone

I’ve just added LogMiner to Ohloh, a site that offers an interesting feature: it can analyse a project source code and estimate how much it would cost to hire a development team to recreate the project from scratch. I think … Continue reading →

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If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again…

Posted on May 19, 2008 by Simone

Here’s another interesting piece of code I’ve just dug up in a C# application I’m reviewing. If you can come up with a bright idea about what those try/catch blocks are supposed to do, you’ve got more imagination than me… … Continue reading →

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Don’t code like this at home, kids

Posted on May 14, 2008 by Simone

Sometimes when you’re reviewing someone else’s code, you find interesting pieces of “art“. Like the following loop construct in a C# application: 123456789101112    int i = anArray.Length – 1;     while (true)     {       … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Simone

I always assumed the designers of the Objective-C language and Cocoa frameworks trust me to know what I’m doing while I find very elegant ways to shoot myself in the foot. – from a mail sent to Cocoa-dev

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PHP templates

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Simone

When you design a complex application, it’s always useful to separate the presentation layer from the business logic. Usually, when dealing with web apps, this involves handing templates which are “filled” with data by your controller. The common rationale is … Continue reading →

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Attributes, reflection and PHP

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Simone

After a long exposure to .NET, when I get back to PHP I sometimes find myself missing some cool functionality (and a good IDE too… none of those I’ve tried so far can compete with the comfort of VisualStudio + … Continue reading →

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Is MySQL bad for (open source) software quality?

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Simone

I think so. Why? Because it’s basically a toy DBMS with too many non-standard behaviours. A lot of open source projects choose MySQL mainly because it’s widely available among hosting providers, while better RDBMS like PostgreSQL1 are hard to find. … Continue reading →

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The meaning of const in C

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Simone

John Engelhart posted to Cocoa-dev a detailed explanation of what exactly const means in C programs. Keep in mind that he’s talking about C, not C++ (where const has a stronger meaning and even a slightly different semantic when used … Continue reading →

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A little rant about .NET’s ReportViewer

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Simone

The .NET Framework 2.0 contains a component called ReportViewer which can be used to generate reports in different formats (HTML, PDF, etc…). After having used it for a couple of reports in a web application, I came to believe that … Continue reading →

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