Manas Garg Speaks

Code Review Cartoon

For those who don’t know, code reviews, as the name suggests, is going over the code you have written before you incorporate it into your product. Oh - I should have mentioned - you don’t review your own code - you get someone to review it for you. The primary purpose is to find bugs.

Though many folks look at code reviews as just another process overhead (we all write perfect code, don’t we ;), I find code reviews very intellectually satisfying.

So, when someone reviews your code, you roughly follow the following steps:

1. Ask someone to review your code
2. Get review comments
3. If no comments, either you wrote great code, or (greater chances) the reviewer did not review it very thoroughly. Consider going to step 1. If really sure, Goto step 6.
4. Discuss comments, make changes as necessary
5. Goto step 1.
6. Done!

If you are a new developer, or writing a big chunk of code, chances are that you’ll loop through this multiple times before your reviewer is completely satisfied.

As a new developer, at times people tend to take review comments personally - it’s natural. It is important to understand that code review comments are to be taken personally only if you get the same comment more than once. Code review comments are one of the best ways you can refine your coding skills. If you admire someone’s coding skills, ask them to review your code. Don’t be overly defensive - as I mentioned before - code review comments are not personal. Learn from them - and be a better developer! If you’re lucky, your reviewer will also look at the class structure instead of just the individual statements. You’ll improve upon you design skills too. And of course, you’ll introduce fewer bugs into your product.

On the other side, doing code reviews for someone is also an enriching exercise. Things when performing a code review -

1. Find bugs. Make it a fun exercise. You’ll find a bug if you look hard enough. It just has to be there :)
2. Learn from the patterns your fellow developers are using - especially true when reviewing code of experienced developers.
3. Understand components that you don’t work with on a day to day basis.

Personally, I find code reviews fun and exciting. And luckily, I have a great set of folks who do great code reviews, and give out great code to review.

Here are the ones I found till now:

http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

The other two are in Korean and Japanese and so not posting them here.

Will update if I find any more :)

Happy April fool’s day everyone! Its your day! ;)

Update: Here is the BIG one!! The Virgle project!

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Update #2 : Orkut turned into yogurt:

So many of us looking to make a quick buck by starting websites :) See this.

Thanks Murali for sharing the link :)

Its easy to programatically generate XML instances from XSD schema if you have BizTalk libraries installed. All you need to do is this (Replace “http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003″ with the Target Namespace of your XSD):

XmlSchemaCollection schemaCollection = new XmlSchemaCollection();
schemaCollection.Add(null, “c:\\schema1.xsd”);
System.Xml.XmlQualifiedName rootName = new System.Xml.XmlQualifiedName(“BAPI_PO_GETDETAIL_Request”);
DocumentSchema docSchema = new DocumentSchema(schemaCollection, “http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003″, rootName );
Stream stream = docSchema.CreateXmlInstanceWithData();
//Do whatever you feel like with the stream!

The class Microsoft.BizTalk.ParsingEngine.DocumentSchema can be accessed by adding a reference to Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline.dll.

Update : To do the same without using BizTalk assemblies, this code will help you : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302296.aspx

Love Firefox? Try Internet explorer with this add-on: http://www.ie7pro.com/ 

Its amazing! Mouse gestures - to close tabs or to move to next / previous tabs is cool. Even cooler is drag drop a link to open it in a new tab and drag drop selected text to google it! Block ads, search inline, restore sessions and loads more! A real must have. I have it on all my systems (Don’t ask me how many :P)