.NET enabled Microsoft’s marketing people to emphasise the “Network”-ing aspect of its technologies, and was also a reaction to the marketing blitz by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s whose theme was “The network is the computer”. The term “Dot-Com” was synonymous with the Internet that time, and “Dot-NET” was a play on that term. … Read more
1) Is there a well-defined difference between “destructor” and “finalizer” as used in industry or academia? There certainly appears to be. The difference seems to be that destructors are cleanup methods that are invoked deterministically, whereas finalizers run when the garbage collector tells them to. 2) In that case, the C# spec gets it wrong … Read more
Issue tracking systems usually integrate more with customers and customer issues. An issue could be “help me install this” or “How do I get the fubar into the flim flam.” They could even be something like “I need an evalutation key for your software”. Bug tracking systems help you keep track of wrong or missing … Read more
Synchronization primitives are simple software mechanisms provided by a platform (e.g. operating system) to its users for the purposes of supporting thread or process synchronization. They’re usually built using lower level mechanisms (e.g. atomic operations, memory barriers, spinlocks, context switches etc). Mutex, event, conditional variables and semaphores are all synchronization primitives. So are shared and … Read more
Databases that use MVCC to isolate transactions from each other need to periodically scan the tables to delete outdated copies of rows. In MVCC, when a row is updated or deleted, it cannot be immediately recycled because there might be active transactions that can still see the old version of the row. Instead of checking … Read more
The “array subscripting” operator [] works just as well for pointers as it does for arrays. No, in fact it only works for pointers. Whenever you type [] in an expression, you always get a pointer to the first element. This is guaranteed to happen since arr[i] must be equivalent to *(arr + i). The … Read more
I assume you are referring to the terminology as introduced by Meszaros. Martin Fowler does also mentions them regularly. I think he explains the difference pretty well in that article. Nevertheless, I’ll try again in my own words 🙂 A Fake is closer to a real-world implementation than a stub. Stubs contain basically hard-coded responses … Read more
“Opaque” is defined, in English, as “not able to be seen through; not transparent”. In Computer Science, this means a value which reveals no details other then the type of the value itself. People often use the C type FILE as the classic example but often this is not opaque – the details are revealed … Read more
An IS-A relationship is inheritance. The classes which inherit are known as sub classes or child classes. On the other hand, HAS-A relationship is composition. In OOP, IS-A relationship is completely inheritance. This means, that the child class is a type of parent class. For example, an apple is a fruit. So you will extend … Read more
Perhaps this trick might help: A scending A B C D D escending D C B A