ESMITHY.NET

Packing and Alignment

By Eric — Fri 24 June 2005 — 1 minute read

I've made some effort to understand the differences between the Struct Member Alignment compiler option /Zp, #pragma pack and __declspec(align()) with Microsoft Visual C++ in light of an odd bug that ultimately was caused by inconsistent packing options between compilation units.

/Zp and #pragma pack are equivalent, but /Zp …

DeskMinder Release

By Eric — Sun 05 June 2005 — 1 minute read

I wrote DeskMinder as a Christmas gift for my family and friends. It originated as just a bit of HTML and JavaScript as an Active Desktop component for reminding me when special occasions were drawing near, like family members' birthdays and anniversaries. To make it easier to customize the events …

InspectionPrinter Initial Release

By Eric — Tue 26 April 2005 — 1 minute read

I've released the first version of my InspectionPrinter utility. We have been renewing our efforts to do more formal code inspections at NextPage recently, which finally motivated me to finish this thing off, having originally started it nearly two years ago. It can be downloaded from the software section.

The …

.NET Context Menu Handler

By Eric — Thu 07 April 2005 — 3 minute read

I've been working on a context menu handler shell extension in C# lately. There are a few samples that people have produced on the web (for example, The Code Project, pek.com, and TheServerSide.net). I've found a better way of implementing IShellExtInit.Initialize than in the examples I've seen …

Microsoft's CD Replacement Policy

By Eric — Thu 03 March 2005 — 3 minute read

I noticed a while back that my Rise of Nations game CD had a big crack through it. This was likely owing to it being on the floor in close proximity to the wheels of the chair at the boys' computer. Any hopes that it might still be readable were …

Techniques for Effective Logging

By Eric — Tue 09 November 2004 — 6 minute read

Updated September 8, 2005

Logging is a testing and diagnostic technique that lies somewhere between automated testing and debugging. It can help you understand what your application is doing, especially in cases where there is some non-determinism because of threading, or when running in an environment where debuggers are not …

Mock Object Strategies

By Eric — Tue 09 December 2003 — 12 minute read

How do you get your production code to use real objects and your test code to use mock objects?

Here's the class we want to test (adapted from Object-Oriented Design Heuristics, Arthur J. Riel):

public class HeatFlowRegulator 
{ 
    private Furnace furnace; 
    private Set house;    

    public HeatFlowRegulator(Set house) 
    { 
        this.house = house …

Testing Styles: Favor Unit Testing

By Eric — Wed 03 December 2003 — 8 minute read

Ideally, human efforts in testing should focus on building tests -- figuring out the strategies, test cases, and test data. From there, we'd rather let the computer run the tests and verify the results. If you had to test everything manually every day, you would either not do it, or really …

Why Exceptions Are Better Than Returned Error Codes

By Eric — Thu 12 June 2003 — 3 minute read

I'm occasionally surprised that some programmers prefer an error handling system of returned error codes over exceptions. After spending several years with both approaches, I've become convinced that exceptions are a superior model. If you agree, great! If not, read on and let me try to persuade you. I'm always …