Jeremy Gollehon's Bookmarks tagged Programming →  View Popular

We prioritize on a couple of factors:

• Severity:  meaning impact to users judged by asking is there a workaround, does it leave the project in an unstable state, or in the worst case does something crash.
  
• Priority:  meaning does it impact a core scenario, do customers use this feature often, is it a regression from a previous release.
  
• Cost:  how long will it take to fix it and test the fix.
  
• Dependencies:  if it requires code changes in Office or the .NET Framework, we would need to negotiate with those teams and their Service Pack teams.

Sorry Jeff, but that’s not “perfectly understandable”.  I agree with extracting the square root code into a separate method with an appropriate name, but your second version (the one with the comment) was more informative since it mentioned which algorithm you were using (in your version, the maintainer is going to have to figure that out for themselves).  Also, we’re still left with at least two poorly-named variables.  We can forgive the use of n for the parameter since that’s kind of a convention but what the hell are r and t?

In my opinion, this is better:

/**
 * Approximate the square root of n, to within the specified tolerance,
 * using the Newton-Raphson method.
 */
private double approximateSquareRoot(double n, double tolerance)
{
    double root = n / 2;
    while (abs(root - (n / root)) > tolerance)
    {
        root = 0.5 * (root + (n / root));
    }
    return root;
}

Alternatively, if you don’t like the verbose comment at the top, you could either rename the method to something like newtonRaphsonSquareRoot (if you are happy for the method name to be tied to the implementation) or put an inline comment in the body explaining that this is the Newton-Raphson method.

SQL 2008 Support

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release.  Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases. 

ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities:

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, which allows developers to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over their relational data, and then program in terms of this model.  Concepts like inheritance, complex types and relationships (including M:M support) can be modeled using it.  VS 2008 SP1 now includes built-in designer support to help with this modeling: