Towards Authoritative Technical Software Design

Abstract

In this paper we examine the long-standing need within the Software Engineering Discipline for technical design documents that are authoritative. A design document is authoritative if there exist technical means of materializing it as a running software system, thus guaranteeing that the end result is indeed precisely as described by the design. We notice the scarcity and inadequacy of existing solutions, we look into the difficulties involved in the creation of such documents, and we conclude with some realizations on what it would take to come up with a solution that works.

Converting MSBuild project files from legacy-style to SDK-style

I recently did this at work, and I decided to document the process here in the form of a how-to guide. Please note that I am not an expert, I am learning as I go along, so there may be mistakes.

Sdk-style project files have existed since net5, but when they were introduced they were made compatible with earlier versions of dotnet, such as dotnet framework 4.7.2. The kind of project files we were using before can now be called legacy-style project files.

• Legacy-style project files begin with <Project ToolsVersion="...
• Sdk-style project files begin with <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">.

Sdk-style project files are necessary if you want to:

• Start using the `dotnet` command-line utility and all the functionality that it provides.
• Eventually migrate to a modern version of dotnet.

On the "Dotfuscator" tool by PreEmptive Solutions

I am giving this tool a try at work, and I am encountering a great many problems with it. I decided to publicly document my findings.

Migrating a project from DotNet Framework 4.7.2 to DotNet 7

I recently did this at work, and I decided to document the process here in the form of a how-to guide. Please note that I am not an expert, I am learning as I go along, so there may be mistakes.

[SOLVED] Maven deploy fails with status 422 unprocessable entity

It has been more than a year since I created this question on GitHub Community; a couple of days after that I found the solution by myself, so I answered my own question, and to this date comments keep being added by people who were helped by my post.  

When I look at it today, I notice that my answer has this particular style, this grumpy indignation which has become so characteristic of me, after a lifetime of battling with lame software, and even worse, with lame error messages. 

I thought I should share this on my blog for posterity.

Here is the link:

The Trouble with XAML Hot Reload in WPF

The XAML Hot Reload feature of WPF is extremely useful because GUI work often involves tweaking visual aspects of an application, so being able to modify XAML, save it, and immediately see the changes on the screen saves a huge amount of time as opposed to having to terminate the application, modify the code, re-compile, re-run, and go clickety-clickety-click to navigate to the same page and finally see your changes.

Unfortunately, as a WPF project grows, the XAML Hot Reload feature inevitably one day stops working: You modify your XAML, you save the XAML file, and yet nothing changes on the screen. The message "No changes were found" appears in the Hot Reload tab of the Visual Studio Output Window, but it is a damned lie, because you just made changes. This can really be a problem.

When you find yourself in this extremely unpleasant situation, here is a list of things to try:

Program Code is Uncountable

There are some words in English that are uncountable. For example: cheese, furniture, music, evidence, research, knowledge, information, etc. When we speak of those things in plural, we still use the singular form: "I would like to order a four-cheese pizza", "Let me give you some of my furniture", "We need to consider all the evidence", etc.

Hyrum's Law

With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.

Hyrum's Law

(From https://www.hyrumslaw.com/)

Notable severely down-voted answers of mine on Stack Exchange

Among the answers that I have given to thousands of different questions on stackoverflow.com and softwareengineering.stackexchange.com, some have been vehemently down-voted.

Sometimes I make mistakes; when that is the case, I delete my answer; however, in other cases, the down-votes represent opinon which is in disagreement with my opinion, and in those cases I let my down-voted answers be, since I stand by my own convictions.

I suppose that this is the price you has to pay for: a) having your own opinions; and b) daring to voice them: there will always be some folks who will take offense.

Here is a list of my severely down-voted answers, so that you too can take offense and down-vote them even further:

Stack Overflow: api design - Which HTTP code is most suitable for when an endpoint is "full"?

Software Engineering: api design - Should a REST API return a 500 Internal Server Error to indicate that a query references an object that does not exist?

Software Engineering: grammar - Does it make sense to use "ys" instead of "ies" in identifiers to ease find-and-replace functionality?

Software Engineering: java - Is it okay to have objects that cast themselves, even if it pollutes the API of their subclasses?

Trees of Eternity

This band has been haunting me for the past days. I feel compelled to write about it. This post will be completely different from the kind of posts you normally see on this blog.

While going through some random playlist on YouTube I stumbled upon this band that I immediately took a liking to, which is something that does not happen often. When I tried to find out a bit more information about them, what I discovered wrecked me.