Follow on from home automation post

Just a quick follow on from the home automation stuff. I just saw this person put an iPad in their kitchen cupboard door. Looks pretty cool. Although I wonder whether just a case and a stand somewhere in the kitchen would be more useful...

Anyway they have done it now and it's still a pretty cool idea (especially if there was some kind of easy release mechanism at the back of the door). If you coupled this with the x10 app I saw for the iPhone on one of the commercials then you could have yourself a pretty cool control system.

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Making your domain less mutable

This happens regularly to me (and from my anecdotal investigation everyone involved in large / old projects). We need a new piece of functionality. I write it, it's beautiful and I win the internet. I have estimated 8 days (or 22.23 lol-points depending on how you live) and it's only taken 4 days. Ah, but then a very small; mostly ignored and very unimportant detail rears it's cruel head. You need to make it work with the code that exists already. This is normally in the form of saving to some pre-existing entities. Oh dear. You save everything through the various management / service classes that exist already and nothing works. So begins the next couple of days of horror. You find that you didn't set the work = true . Most of my woes in this area are caused by modifications at layer further down (or the stored procedure it finally ends up in) changing the object that I was trying to save or not saving part of the object because of some rule. So many errors

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi

IIS Administration using Microsoft.Web.Administration using F#

A friend had mentioned his joy at using Powershell. I guess this is pretty cool and I don't mind Powershell. I sort of missed the boat a little with it because I haven't done any Windows Administration since I used to look after Windows Server 2000 machines (and possibly a couple of 2003). At that time I had a different arsenal to cause untold woe on my fellow colleagues....VBSCRIPT!!!! Boy could I cause trouble with that. With a combination of that, VBA and SQL I used to love creating spider webs of pure madness, once written the apps were tied together so precariously; one false move and the entire thing would explode.... anyway that's a different story. Back to the Powershell. He was using it to automate IIS (or else I heard what I wanted to so I could try and push F# onto him, who knows?). I have heard various stories of extremely large platform automation scripts being written recently (for example .net rocks interview with Steve Evans ) and whilst they seem to be g

Dominic Finn

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