Wednesday 26 November 2008

CPPing in .NET

I've talked about the trend of developers to use ready made solutions.

The idea is simple enough. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Almost every problem a developer encounters, someone else has already coded a solution.

When taken to the extreme, we end with a development technique which can be termed "Copy Paste Programming" (CPP in short).

Like anything in life there's a risk involved in this. In many cases code produced using this technique is less understood then code developed from scratch. And in most cases (I have seen) the ready made solution solves a slightly different problem then the one it is applied to. Which at the end leaves us with a piece of code that almost works but we don't know why.

Its not that I'm against using other people code. In many cases its the most effective and fastest to get the job done. However when doing so, I take the time to carefully understand the piece of code I'm CPPing into my .NET application.

1 comments:

Putcha V. Narasimham said...

Good advice: Blind CPP is risky. We should have something like Software Lego Bricks. We ASSEMBLE or CONNECT the Bricks BUT DO NOT CREATE THEM. CREATING Briks is PROGRAMMING but ASSEMBLING them is DEVELOPMENT ---you can't go too wrong but put together useful and safe software without specialized knowledge of programming.

putchavn@yahoo.com

 
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