This post is primarily a personal reference. I also consider this a tribute to Oleg, who played a big role in improving my understanding of the jqGrid internals – the way it handles source data types, which, if I may say, led him in discovering a bug in jqGrid.

I received quite a lot of criticism for Dealing with Bad Code. The criticism was mostly along these lines – There is no good or bad programmer. The good programmer thing is more of an illusion. When you place a programmer in a domain in which he has little or no experience (like a PHP web programmer writing C++ code), he will soon be seen as a bad programmer. What is branded good or bad is subjective.

Dear Reader,

Do not be overwhelmed by the length of the article. I have tried my best to keep the length of the article NOT directly proportional to the time required to read it.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you - Oscar Wilde

There are times when truth tends to be subjective, such as this article. However, I have definitely added the fun component to keep up earlier promise. Consider the time you spent reading this article as a break from your work or routine. I am sure you will enjoy it; doesn’t matter if you are using a Windows Phone 1. Perhaps you will read it again.

I am programmer¹ gadget savvy, an avid fan of Microsoft products (especially Visual Studio and associated suite of development tools), and an honest critic of any product I use. I have an Android Phone, an iPhone, and for a few months now, a Windows Phone. And this is my experience with the Windows Phone – good, bad and grey.

To begin with, the Windows Phone landscape (app and feature set) is dry and unpromising. There are a few good things here and there to console ourselves for the money we spent on the phone, and for the love of Microsoft!

Read this fine article by Joel Spolsky: Things You Should Never Do

It is a great article, one that invokes mixed feelings. The article talks against rewriting (large scale) software…..from scratch. Joel was kind enough to consider all those who write software as true programmers; people who give enough thought and not just code up something that works. However, it is far different in the real world. That said, I am neither completely in disagreement with Joel nor am I advocating to rewrite large scale software once the code is identified as a mess.

In the previous post, we saw the academic (not general purpose) version of a linked list used to solve the puzzles, and solved the following puzzles on linked list.

Not the same way but we could say better. Visual Studio 2012, another power packed release of Visual Studio, among a lot of other powerful fancy language features, offers the ability to deduce the method caller details at compile time.

A short while back, Sammy quizzed me on linked list based problems; singly linked list.

I gave SMS FireWall a refresh with a couple of features requested by users:- An option ‘Allow and Move’ in the settings screen, which when checked moves the messages from the quarantine vault when opted to be added to the allowed list.

Hugh pointed out a bug in the OrderedThreadPool. I think there is a small window for error in the OrderedThreadPool class.

A short while I was engaged in a little project where I had to interact with a third party service provider who required a (30 length) unique id as part of the transaction.