Archive for January, 2009

One down

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

It has been 4 weeks since I put the last thing in the mail for my applications, but I only finished the first one yesterday. I had another set back. This time, it was with recommendations. Thankfully, there are a few people who were willing to help me out. I rushed them through writing the letters and got them in the mail last week. One school is showed my status as complete yesterday. There is still more to do. I need letters for a final school.

Class started last week. It is the first one I have taken at the graduate level. There are only 4 of us enrolled. I’m already behind on the reading. Oh well…

Functionality Expectations

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

On a regular basis I get requests like “Can it do this? I think we used to be able to…” I hate hearing that. Do people think developers work to remove functionality? The upside to this is that it shows the value of our work. People get comfortable with some functionality on a web site and assume all web apps must have it and honestly don’t remember what life was like before it.

With plenty of help from the people around me, I just rebuilt a website for our internal use. The most used applications are up to date but the core/framework was a disaster in classic asp. Over time, users subconsciously ignore links to broken or bad apps. Rebuilt it, throw on a fresh set of colors and all those forgotten apps/links are new again. Then, users start coming back asking why it doesn’t do all the great things it used to.

Our work is never judged against what came before it. We need to develop to compete with the biggest and best of now: Google, Amazon, Basecamp, and whatever else is coming out.

 

 

AndAlso vs. null

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

I am constantly writing conditional statement where I have to worry about null values.

If objFoo = “match” Then
‘do something
End If

If objFoo is null then an error stops the program. A normal if statement like:

If Not IsNothing(objFoo) And objFoo = “match” Then
‘do something
End If

also fails because both expressions will be evaluated and the second return the same error. As an alternative to nested if statements, I can replace “And” with “AndAlso” which will evaluate the fist statement and only move to the second if necessary.

If Not IsNothing(objFoo) AndAlso objFoo = “match” Then
‘do something
End If