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  • Computers don't care whether your resources are directly addressable

    The article Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate (along with many others like it) claims that SOAP web services have a limitation in that resources they work with are not directly addressable via a URI, but that you have to connect to the SOAP endpoint and then call a method on it. The analogy used is as follows: Let me offer an analogy. Suppose you were living temporarily in a hotel. The hotel might not...

  • Ivory tower protocol wars

    There seem to be a lot of blog entries at the moment arguing over the relative merits of XML, JSON, YAML, S-Expressions, etc. as a data interchange format, and Web Services, WS-* Services and REST-style as the application protocol implementation. But while various articles make interesting academic points about which format is more human readable/easier to parse/represents numbers natively/allows cyclic...

  • Not using negatives does not make your code less readable

    Most people find negative statements more difficult to comprehend than positive statements. You probably had to double-check the title of this entry to see if it made sense - I know I did! This isn't surprising if you think about it because a positive statements presents a concept which can be used directly, whereas a negative statement presents a concept and then says "the opposite of that"...
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  • Common namespaces don't contain commonly used code

    One thing that irritates me about software development is peoples apparent obsession with sub-namespaces called "Common" which they use to contain code that is used throughout the rest of the project/solution. Common namespaces are a code smell which often means you don't really understand your problem domain and so have lumped a load of largely unrelated classes together into a generic...
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  • Quick and dirty projects are rarely quick but always messy

    We've all been on them before. A salesman gets a request from a client to implement a "simple process", and the client books ten days work at a fixed cost which means you're obliged to deliver in that time. You go in, do the work to the minimum standard as that's all the ten days allows you to do on a project that should really have been twenty-plus days, and then leave. And that's...
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  • When naming servers, please name them sensibly!

    At my house I have a bit of a north pole theme with my hardware naming conventions. The laptop I'm writing this on is called ICECAP, my media center is called GLACIER, and my desktop is called ICEBERG. Even my wireless network is called AURORA BOREALIS. Now this is a bit of fun in a home environment because there aren't many computers, it's only me who has to remember which is which, and...
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  • You can't solve a problem that doesn't exist

    On the MSDN forums there are usually a few posts each week along the lines of “Please tell me what you think of this…” followed by a fairly long listing of entirely uncommented code. Presumably the poster is looking for feedback on the quality of the code but they are missing the fundamental point of writing code: Why did they write it in the first place? If the code you write solves the problem that...
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