Using an ADE: Ancient Development Environment

by in Feature Articles on

One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.

For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.


In the Zone

by in Representative Line on

Robert R picked up a bug in his company's event scheduling app. Sometimes, events were getting reported a day off from when they actually were.

It didn't take too long to find the culprit, and as is so often the case, the culprit was handling dates with strings.


Will You Still Need Me?

by in Error'd on

... when I'm eight thousand and three? Doesn't quite scan.

Old soul jeffphi hummed "It's comforting to know that I'll have health insurance coverage through my 8,030th birthday!"


Lucky Thirteen

by in CodeSOD on

Wolferitza sends us a large chunk of a C# class. We'll take it in chunks because there's a lot here, but let's start with the obvious problem:

    private int iID0;
    private int iID1;
    private int iID2;
    private int iID3;
    private int iID4;
    private int iID5;
    private int iID6;
    private int iID7;
    private int iID8;
    private int iID9;
    private int iID10;
    private int iID11;
    private int iID12;
    private int iID13;

Historical Dates

by in CodeSOD on

Handling non-existent values always presents special challenges. We've (mostly) agreed that NULL is, in some fashion, the right way to do it, though it's still common to see some sort of sentinel value that exists outside of the expected range- like a function returning a negative value when an error occurred, and a zero (or positive) value when the operation completes.

Javier found this function, which has a… very French(?) way of handling invalid dates.


Losing a Digit

by in CodeSOD on

Alicia recently moved to a new country and took a job with a small company willing to pay well and help with relocation costs. Overall, the code base was pretty solid. Despite the overall strong code base, one recurring complaint was that running the test suite was painfully long.

While Alicia doesn't specify what the core business is, but says: "in this company's core business, random numbers were the base of everything."


High Temperature

by in CodeSOD on

Brian (previously)found himself contracting for an IoT company, shipping thermostats and other home automation tools, along with mobile apps to control them.

Brian was hired because the previous contractor had hung around long enough for the product to launch, cashed the check, and vanished, never to be heard from again.


What Goes Up

by in Error'd on

As I was traveling this week (just home today), conveyances of all sorts were on my mind.

Llarry A. warned "This intersection is right near my house. Looks like it's going to be inconvenient for a while..." Keeping this in mind, I chose to take the train rather than drive.


Archives