Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
Athur C. Clarke

While reviewing some code, I stumbled upon a class that receives an ObservableCollection in the constructor. I discovered that this collection is never explicitly initialized. Instead, it is ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

Recently I’ve got another reminder why constructors should be simple. The situation in a nutshell: class BaseHandler subscribes to an observable in its constructor. The handler is virtual, class DerviedHandler adds incoming items ino a list initialized in its constructor. So, ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

Remoting is about distributed objects, while WCF is about services. Remoting is capable of passing object instances between the client and the server, WCF is not. This distinction is much more fundamental than the technicalities like which technology is more efficient, more dead ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

After upgrading to a newer version of Unity, we found that our process began to fail with StackOverflowException. Investigation showed that it happened because the following registration behaves differently depending on the version of Unity:

container.RegisterType(new ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

One large company that shall remain nameless runs a 4-year old version of Git, TortoiseGit, and a lot of other tools, and can’t upgrade.

Being a large company,  it can’t just let every developer install the newest version of whatever they please. That would be just wrong, wouldn ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

Big corporations love uniformity: things are much easier to manage if they are all alike. But then they may also fail all at the same time, with catastrophic consequences. Remember the Great Famine in Ireland? The whole country was uniformly growing only potatoes, because they ( Read more... )

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TL;DR Dynamic “semver” versioning is evil, because it makes it too easy to break things on a global scale. With semver versioning the builds are not-repeatable: you may get one version of a module now and another version 5 seconds later. Combined with deep dependency hierarchies ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

Just found this in production code:

var fa = new FileAsset ( Read more... )

Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.

If anyone tells you unit tests are a waste of time, send them to this post.

I am in the middle of some major refactoring of our bills generator. Billing, you know, is full of lots of not-so-obvious details. E.g. I have just caught a bug where I kept only internal users instead ( Read more... )

In a piece of code I inherited from some smart, well meaning, but a little disorganized East European consultants, I found the following class hierarchy:

RestClient (abstract) JsonClient (abstract) XyzClient* SessionClient ApiClient

* XYZ is our proprietary service. The name was changed to protect the innocent.

It’s been ( Read more... )