Lacking Anything Worthwhile To Say, The Third Wise Monkey Remained Mostly Mute

Project Euler 100/304 complete (on the permanent leaderboard at last!)

(in which we discover What’s Been Going On lately)

 

Don't talk ... code

 

I’ve been coding like crazy in C# of late, a language I’ve barely touched in the last few years. Put it this way, generics were new and sexy the last time I wrote anything serious in .NET… (There should be some ExcelDNA fun to be had later.)

I’d forgotten how flat-out fast compiled languages, even the bytecode/IL kind could be. It’s not a completely fair comparison, to be sure, but a Ruby script to extract 300,000 accounts from my Oracle database and write them as XML takes a couple of hours, mostly in the output part. A C# program handled the whole thing in 5 minutes. Then processes the accounts in about 30 seconds, of which 10 are spent deserializing the XML into objects, 10 are serializing the results to XML and 10 are performing the moderately heavy-duty mathematical tranformations in between.

 

Click to test is value for money

 

Lacking at present a paid-for version of Visual Studio 2010 (the Express Edition, while brilliantly capable, won’t do plugins, which precludes integration Subversion and NUnit, to name but two essentials), I have been enjoying greatly my experience with SharpDevelop, which spots my installs of TortoiseSVN and NUnit and allows both to be used inside the IDE. It’s not perfect: there are areas, particularly in its Intellisense analogue, where exceptions get thrown, but they’re all caught and I have yet to lose any work. While the polish is, unsurprisingly, at a lower level than Microsoft’s, it’s entirely adequate (and I mean that in a good way) and the price is right. I particularly liked being able to open an IronRuby session in the IDE and use it to interact with the classes in the DLL on which I was working.

While I expect VS2010 to become available as the budgeting process grinds through, I’m not at all sure that it’ll be necessary to switch. An extended set of automated refactoring tools could be attractive, although Rename and Extract Method are probably the two most useful, productivity-wise, and they’re already present. I would rather like to have Extract Class, which isn’t needed often but would be a big time (and error) saver when called for.

On another topic entirely, should you be looking for entertaining reading in the vaguely technical, erudite and borderline insane category, may I recommend To Umm Is Human to you? Any blog that has “orang utan” amongst its tags is worth a look, I’d say. If you like it, you’ll like it a lot. I was once made redundant by a Doubleday, but I don’t think they’re related.

There’s an interesting new programmer-oriented podcast on the block, too: This Developer’s Life has slightly higher production values that may ultimately limit its life – the time to produce an episode must be substantial. I found myself wanting to join in the conversation with stories of my own, a sure sign that I was engaged in the content.