The Pragmatic Bookshelf | PragPub May 2012 | What Makes an Awesome Command-line Application?

I thought this was a great article. It hit a chord with me as I have had to tackle some foolish command line apps recently where the devs have just dreamt up new commands and ways of working for themselves instead of just using the normal heuristics. Very annoying.

Something that I have just found and annoys me is setting up command line programs for schedules tasks. If you don't do this right, you end up with a complete mess! Like a list of emailers for different programs and clients:

- Emailer_01
- Emailer
- Emailer_New
- emailer_March2012

This is just annoying. I know you can still tell what the programs are if you look into them or work it out from the other columns but it's still a pain.

- The arguments the scheduled tasks take should be documented.
- The scheduled task itself should log to the event log.
- The error messages logged to the event log should be sensible (for example - give a list of the possible params if an incorrect one was given, if there are too many, wtf?).
- When you create a scheduled task, name the task nicely with something like - "company.program.program instanceName" so it's apparent what the scheduled task is for, this type of naming should apply to the source of the event log as well so they're easily filtered when trying to find information out about the program.

Comments

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

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

My home office upgrade wish list.

My home office is almost due an upgrade. I have been holding off until my youngest daughter is out of her cot as then we can finally dispatch the enormous monstrosity of a cot out from the kids bedroom and the drawers that are in my office can be banished giving me better access to my wonderful whiteboard. My other improvements will be purchasing a new, larger monitor. I currently work from a single 22ich Samsung which just doesn't cut it anymore, I did have two at some point but I can't recall what I did with it. I really enjoy using a touch screen so I think I will go for one of these 27inch Hannspree models that I have used before. I put a lot of hours in at home and whilst I have a reasonable chair I still tend to suffer with some back problems, so my next port of call will be to get a Varidesk for home. It works an absolute treat at work and just lets me switch stuff up when I feel like it. they take a reasonable amount of desk space up but I tend to leave my desk fairly

Dominic Finn

Search This Blog