October 2007
Miss Diplomatic Manners
Mon, 10/08/2007 - 05:00 — AnonymousAfter what was surely an etiquette-sanctioned interlude, Nancy G. Brinker will be ceremonially sworn in Wednesday as chief of protocol of the United States, a few weeks after her Sept. 14 formal swearing-in.
...'How you dress says a lot about you'
Sun, 10/14/2007 - 12:00 — AnonymousBeverly Taylor / The Birmingham NewsCrystal DawsonWhat are you wearing? A powder blue Liz Claiborne shirt from Parisian; a powder blue, white, pink and black striped Jones New York tie from Parisian; black J. Ferrar pants from J.C. Penney; a...
...Chevela Green at the Minority Gala
Sun, 10/21/2007 - 14:03 — AnonymousSusan Strickland / For The Birmingham NewsChevela GreenWho: Chevela Green, 37, of Liberty Park. The stay-at-home mom moved to the Birmingham area from Chicago in 2006. She and her husband, Ron, have three children: Kaelyn, 11; Emanuel, 8; and Camille,...
...Just because it's in a patterns book...
Mon, 10/15/2007 - 14:16 — AnonymousI'm picking on a commenter here a little bit, and he probably didn't mean it this way, but it provided the impetus.
Don't ever assume a solution is correct for your problem just because it's a pattern in a book on your shelf. Heck, the GoF book has a full chapter on the Singleton pattern, one of the leading sources of painfully tight coupling in enterprise systems. Patterns are just things that reoccur in code. Not good, not bad, just patterns. Any given pattern is probably useful in certain situations and harmful in others. Just because Fowler or the Gang of Four or the POSA guys wrote about a pattern doesn't magically make that pattern a good solution anywhere you feel like sprinkling it into your design.
When you learn about design patterns you absolutely have to pay attention to the discussion on when and why to use a pattern. It also helps to understand the trade offs when there are competing patterns.
Build your own CAB #15 - MicroControllers
Mon, 10/22/2007 - 02:13 — AnonymousAfter a bit of a hiatus and a fair amount of pestering, I'm back and ready to continue the "Build you own CAB" series. The point isn't really to go build a drop in replacement for the Composite Application Block (CAB), but rather to understand the design patterns you can use to build maintainable WinForms applications. I'm hopeful that the material in this series will be useful for both users of the CAB and those who are rolling application specific architectures sans CAB. The previous posts have been mostly written at the perspective of a single screen. For this post I want to go down to the granular control level before coming back up to finish the series with content on coordinating multiple screens and composite applications. My longer term goal is use the BYO CAB series as the kernel of a book on design patterns for fat clients and composite applications, so I'd love any kind of feedback no matter how negative.
MicroControllers
I i...
Be not afraid of the Visitor, the big, bad Composite, or their little friend Double Dispatch
Wed, 10/31/2007 - 14:13 — AnonymousLast week or so there was a thread on the altnetconf message board that about a usage of the Visitor pattern for validating a hierarchy of objects. At work I'm using the Visitor pattern with some frequency in my financial projects to deal with heterogeneous collections of financial elements. Over and over again I'm seeing the Composite and Visitor patterns come up as good solutions to a certain range of problems, but these patterns are often a source of almost superstitious fear to those developers who aren't familiar with them. From past experience I know that developers don't necessarily grok these patterns at the first exposure. I avoided the Visitor for a long time because it's just plain weird looking. I changed my mind only after having some positive experiences with the pattern.
I've had a post on these patterns backlogged forever, so now seems like as good of time as any to try to help introduce these important patterns. All of the example code from this post is part of my StoryTeller OSS project and can be perused to your heart's content from the Subversion repository on Tigris.
Specifically, I...
DESIGNSPONGEONLINE.COM
Mon, 10/01/2007 - 16:00 — Anonymouswe've moved! please visit DESIGNSPONGEONLINE.COM for all new content from design*sponge. this site will remain for the time being to prevent any broken links. see you at the new site!
...sorry for the slow loading
Tue, 10/02/2007 - 16:33 — Anonymoussorry for the slow loading guys- we're switching to a dedicated server to handle the traffic on a new site. we're working on it. so sorry!
grace
...Unfortunately, Britney's look is tragic trailer tr...
Wed, 10/03/2007 - 05:27 — AnonymousUnfortunately, Britney's look is tragic trailer trash - do you think she's ever employed a stylist? Let's hope her li'l sis continues to learn from Brit's mistakes and avoids them like the plague.Also love the Burberry range, esp the top left pic.PS Hope you had fun in Sydney ;o)
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