Comments on: Common mistakes in software development

By: Common mistakes in software development (part 2): Mixing up the tiers | Ivan Porto Carrero

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:11:01 +0000

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By: ivan

ivan — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:18:08 +0000

@Bob. what I mean with this is exactly that. As the name of the class says Exception it should only be used in exceptional cases and not as a mere error swallowing device. There are some cases in which that is desirable when but in general you don’t want to throw exceptions as your first option.
I am just trying to prompt people to use a their brains a little when writing software.

By: Bob Saggett

Bob Saggett — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:38:17 +0000

I agree apart from the oneabout exceptions. Certainly you should not be eating exceptions. However, your option of returning null on an exception should only be used in specific cases. Throwing exceptions should be the preferred option when an unexpected condition occurs. Returning null is acceptable when the situation is expected. This is probably what you mean but the example does not make this clear.

By: a x b i t . c o m » Blog Archive » Axbit’s Links for 09/24/2008

a x b i t . c o m » Blog Archive » Axbit’s Links for 09/24/2008 — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:19:26 +0000

[...] Common Mistakes in Software Development [...]

By: Arjan`s World » LINKBLOG for September 24, 2008

Arjan`s World » LINKBLOG for September 24, 2008 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:20:16 +0000

[...] Common mistakes in software development – Ivan Porto Carrero ‘ Another thing I keep seeing is very liberal use of try..catch blocks that catch all exceptions.(…) it shouldn’t be used as a safeguard to swallow exceptions you don’t want to fix at this moment ‘ Ivan dives into other’s codebases -don’t we all have that joy from time to time?- discussing some issues, while giving ideas for improvement (btw, see a moving favicon on the site – cute, haven’t seen that before) [...]

By: Nair

Nair — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:11:30 +0000

I agree with you on the ‘returning bool’. I had to admin, I have done my share of the same code as well. Once I moved to C# 3.0, I realized an easier way of doing it (like the ruby way). Create an extension method like the following and it does cover our most of the common null check logic (mostly for my code)

public static class Extensions
{
public static bool IsBlank(this object obj)
{
if ((obj == null) || (obj.Equals(“”)))
return true;
if (obj is ICollection)
{
ICollection collectionObj = obj as ICollection;
if (collectionObj.Count <= 0)
return true;
}
return false;
}
}

keep it coming, after 15 years of programming I am still learning the baby steps

By: Dew Drop - September 24, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Dew Drop - September 24, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:09:50 +0000

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