Posts

A-Team Library

A short while ago, I had to write a compelling document for a client about a library that I had developed during my tenure, call it A-Team Library or ATL. Having to learn the “eyes-wide-shut” culture to maintain the couples-of-decades old code and simultaneously develop on the top of it was very disheartening. It was time a lot of things were given fresh thoughts. Not the least of all duplication of code and functionality. But not just that. Like in a programming language, when there is more than one way of doing something, when those ways are opposing, it causes nothing but confusion. So was the case. The business seemed to be far from realizing it. More ...

The Secret behind Bjarne and Herb’s Papers on Unified Syntax

A long time back, in one of my posts here¹, I had discussed about Extension Methods² … in C++; sorta! It seems that the grand daddy, Bjarne Stroustoup³, had read my post, and was impressed. So he has published a paper – Call syntax⁴: x.f(y) vs. f(x,y). Good thing except I don’t like the idea of assuming x.f(y) for f(x, y) while the reverse is the actual idea of extension methods. You will know when you read his paper. It seems the commander, Herb Sutter⁵, also was impressed with my post. Not only that he too doesn’t seem to like the x.f(y) for f(x, y) idea. Great men think alike. LOL! So he published his paper – Unified Syntax⁶. How is that? More ...

A Simple Tree List View

Digging up stash is one of the best pass times. You know you never know what you will find. I had an article written quite some time back but had not posted it anywhere. Not sure why. I posted it at CodeProject – A Simple Tree List View.

PHP Savers – PropertyBag

The ubiquitous and the universal data structure in PHP is the [array][1]. It is an amalgamation of commonly used data structures – list, map etc. In the recent times, PHP has also adopted object orientation and introduced classes. The syntactic difference in the way a property of an array and object poses an inconvenience in the user code¹ specifically when there is a need to interact with code that is not open for change; legacy or not. More ...

Cool Regex Testers

Anytime I have to play with regular expressions, I use one of the online regex testing web sites to come up with the regex I need. Last couple of times I had to come up with a regex for most common everyday stuff like dates and such. Oh yeah, last time it was date actually. I had a server response that had a date in the format yyyy-mm-dd, ISO format. I was working with JavaScript, and initially I was naive to use the Date class to parse the date in the response. Turned that there is difference in the way the date is interpreted by Firefox and other browsers. More ...

Overloading vs Variable Arguments !!!

In a statically typed (object oriented?) language, function overloading offers the facility of organizing your code into two or more functions with different types and/or number of arguments. This is highly useful when the functionality offered by the function can be invoked in different scenarios. For instance, let us consider the function(s) below: More ...

Getting reminded of the reminder !!!

I have been using Android for quite some time now, and only recently I noticed that Android pops up a notification reminding you of a reminder. It says “Upcoming alarm – Buy Milk”, where Buy Milk is the reminder I had set.

Is it smart enough to help a lazy volatile minded guy like me or is it trying to be my wife who would not rest until I buy milk? Don’t know.

jqGrid: Handling array data !!!

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. More ...

Clean Code

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. More ...

The Windows Phone Epic !!!

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!