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…
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…
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…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 4 (complete solver)
After some incremental progress in our Letter Boxed solver, we’re now ready to complete the app. Our hard-won “expertise” in Rust now makes the last several steps largely mechanical. The first set of changes produces LetterBox and Vertices structs, so…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 3 (modules, trie, I/O)
Our Rust-based Letter Boxed code so far has just the core character-based data types. Today we’ll add the trie. Before we move on, we need to keep our house in order. Rather than have one massive lib.rs file, we should…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 2 (panicking, hashing, parsing)
Previously we began our Rust exploration of Letter Boxed with the core St and Ch structs. Now we’ll complete their functionality. The next test on our TODO list looks like this in the C# version: We’ve already encountered our first…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 1 (basics)
We’ve already set up the development environment, so let’s write some Rust code! A good place to start is with the bottom layer data structures, known as Str and Ch in the C# version. To review, Ch is an enumeration…