void main(void)

Calls, Returns and In-Between.

December 2006

I know that's a rather festive holiday title, but I confess I'm not discussing Christmas decorations here. Red Threads and Greed Threads correspond loosely to the best and the worst possible integration scenarios your customers have faced or might face with your products. As Johnathan Nightingale explains in his article "Green Threads," a "Red Thread" is a trail of blood and pain through your product that customers tread. It's just another word for negative feedback, and most companies make use of this sort of thing to improve their next generation of product. But a "Green Thread" is something much more proactive: It's the path you want your customers to be able to take as their workflows pass through your various products and brands.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:35 PM  Permalink |

There are huge gains to be had by choosing to use a third-party component vendor. But there are huge pitfalls as well. In his article "Selecting Third-Party Components," Richard Stafford explains that the time-saving benefits need to be weighed against the costs. The financial cost is an easy calculation. What's murkier is the cost of handling defects and changes in the component over time. And that, in turn, all boils down to how well the vendor supports the component. The upshot is that you really need to treat your choice of vendor the way you would treat the hiring of an in-house programmer. Research and references are your friends, here.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:16 PM  Permalink |

In his article "Practical Parsing for ANSI C," Daniele Paolo Scarpazza tackles some of the reasons why building a C parser front-end can be surprisingly tricky. Many of the problems center around misconceptions, such as the common belief that lexical analysis is largely regular-expression matching. Sometimes that can be true, and if so, the job can be easy. But often, it's more complicated.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 04:46 PM  Permalink |

Programming style isn't just about how you use whitespace, or how you indent your code. When a language gives you the flexibility to do a task in multiple ways (and C++ certainly does), the word "style" takes on other meanings that have as much to do with your choice of algorithm as they do with where you place your curly braces. A language like C++ allows you to endlessly reinvent even the simplest of functions, trading off various levels of readability, efficiency, maintainability, and ease of use. Jack Crenshaw has been experiencing this principle firsthand lately, as he has been building a library of vector and matrix math classes, and getting lots of helpful suggestions from readers.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:31 PM  Permalink |