Previously, we gave a send-off to the New York Times “Digits” game with a custom solver app. Unfortunately, the solver took quite some time (several hundred milliseconds) and even more space (several hundred megabytes) to analyze the solutions for one…
Goodbye Digits
As of August 8, the New York Times game Digits is no more. Digits was a game where you were given a target number and six smaller numbers. Combining the smaller numbers with the four basic arithmetic operators, you would…
Stay COM: finishing up the tests
In the last post, we began focusing on testability with COM interface stubs. It was a lot of work, and a good reminder of why backfilling test coverage via a test-last approach is not ideal. Still, it shows that through…
Stay COM: stubs and testing
Previously, we built a Windows Task Scheduler sample application using the COM API via WIL. As far as the client code was concerned, COM was a detail encapsulated by the C++ facade we created: Not a COM pointer to be…
Stay COM: C++ and encapsulation
In the previous post, we discussed using WIL to tame COM APIs. At the end, we had translated a Time Trigger sample from the Task Scheduler API from a very C-like structure into something approaching modern C++. Still, that example…
Stay COM: WIL
(For this series, I’ll assume that you know the basics of COM. If you need a refresher, I highly recommend Kenny Kerr‘s excellent Pluralsight course, The Essentials of COM.) Sooner or later, every Windows programmer has to deal with COM,…
No time, no problem
Unit tests are supposed to be deterministic. If a test is called out as being nondeterministic, you can bet that it depends on time in some way. Any app big enough and with sufficient unit tests likely has something akin…
New day, new style
I have used StyleCop for years. The project started back in the mid-2000s as an internal Microsoft tool, was released to the world in 2008, and became open source on CodePlex in 2010. As you can imagine, coding style can…
Redecorating with C++
The decorator pattern is one of the classics in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. Let’s explore this pattern first with a C# example. This is just your average decorator, which as the code comments say, employs inheritance and…
UberQueue challenge
David Fowler tweeted: Coding challenge for you in any language. I want to see different ways of expressing this computation: The challenge was, of course, expressed in C# and what luck — that was my chosen implementation language! Before I…