January 2008 Archives

Windows Vista is, in retrospect after trying it out for a couple of months, simply a skip me version of Windows. I can just note my own folly in buying it.

I'm a big fan of continuous integration, small checkins and very quick checkins. It's easier to debug afterwards and trying to puzzle together from perforce history afterwards is much easier when the changes are small and atomic. Now, that's what I like to do. Sometimes things don't really work out in the real world like you want it to so the other day I found myself with the fun situation of having two weeks worth of changes to try to integrate back into the main line. Of course nothing was backed up, nor did I feel particularly worried about it at the time. I had however done a lot of work, some of the changes involved the fruits of heavy thinking and other changes were the result of an hour or two of menial changes to the code that was a result of some other change.

Have you seen the default crash dialog in windows? It's a dialog that's pretty much useless for the normal user (I always just click go away when it happens for other applications) but it's very useful for your own applications. For example, you are debugging some arcane crash that only happens deep inside the content pipeline. It can be tedious to make a reproduction case, that's small enough so that you can run it standalone in the debugger.

Windows.h must be the worst engineered header of all times. It's a meta header, designed to include several others and these are usually so bad that I'm wondering if anyone at Microsoft ever learned to program in a larger environment (ironic is it not?).