I feel a burning in my eyes, a pain in my  temples. What can it be? Perhaps it is this code that I just read? Unfortantely I can't post it, but it's a TheDailyWTF candidate for sure. The authors carefuly considered each and every best practice in .Net, and gave them a very careful, very... interesting twist. For instance, on the subject of business objects vs. datasets, the code implements ORM on top of DataSets, Argh! And that isn't the least of it!

So, I'm not going to write any more code today in protest for WTF code everywhere. I actually had a sort of morbid enjoyment watching this code work. I counted a WPM (WTF Per Minute) of ~15, which I believe to be a world record.

This time I actually did nothing for this release. Jeff Brown added support for Out & Ref parameters for Dynamic Proxy, and all I had left to do is hit the build button a couple of times and upload the stuff to the server.

This closes the next to last big problem with Rhino Mocks. The very last one has to do with generic methods, which I hope to be able to fix this week.

 You know the drill, you can download it, or access the source directly.

I'm getting another 1Gb of RAM tomorrow. My main machine has 1Gb of RAM, and I constantly has to monitor the memory usage because I use a lot of applications simultaneity. Right now I'm using 967Mb:

• Outlook is the usual culprit, with 91Mb.
• RssBandit add another 68Mb to the pressure.
• NAnt is currently compiling Castle, so it's happily eating 110Mb.
• WBEditor (which I use to write this post) is taking a hefty 59Mb to allow me to do that
• Firefox is no mincemeat with 55Mb taken.
• Winword is active because I'm writing a mail message, add another 48Mb to the cake.
• SQLServer is a modesy 46Mb
• Explorer is another 30Mb

I'm reporting only the current mem usage, there is also the peak mem usage to consider, since I don't see it being returned the the free memory pool until the process is closed. And I've not even talked about the amount of memory Visual Studio feels free to grab. While I wrote this post the memory usage went up to 1037Mb, the peak memory usage for this machine is 1.5Gb.

I'm pretty pissed that I need to do that, even though the last upgrade I made on this computer was over a year ago, I expect 1Gb to last, damn it. The one thing that I can't stand is when I'm thinking faster than the computer can follow. The problem is that the moment that this starts, I can feel the thoughts going away, and I know that I'm going to lose them while I wait the computer to finish whatever it is that it is doing.

Swapping is a great idea, but it make the computer totally unusable for the user seating in fornt of it. It breaks every assumtion that you have with regard to cheap/costly operations. To everyone who says that memory is cheap, consider this: I'm probably going to break Outlook 2003, since it's not capable of handling more than 1Gb of RAM (but it has a hotfix).

What is the most useless, annoying, brainless thing that an application can do? It is to shout: "Error occured". Tell me you haven't ever sat in front of the computer, staring at a completely helpless error, knowing that the program had the information that you need, but it just won't tell you.

I just revised an exception message four times, and on each time, I added more and more information to it.

Here are the iterations:

• Property must be virtual on classes with lazy loading enabled - This one explain the problem, but doesn't really say what happened to caused it.
• Property must be virtual on classes with lazy loading enabled [ActiveRecord(Lazy=true)] - This one gives a little more info, now even someone without intimate knowledge of the way ActiveRecord works can just search for it.
• Property DemoProp must be virtual because the class is lazy loaded [ActiveRecord(Lazy=true)]  - Better, now I've information that says where the error happened. I still don't know in which class this happened, and if this is a common name, I'm still in a problem.
• Property DemoProp must be virtual because the class DemoClass is loaded loaded [ActiveRecord(Lazy=true)] - Much better, now I know the name of the property and the name of the class, I can easily find it, and fix it.

Any horror stories about silent exceptions? Any way to improve the exception?

BTW, there is another side to the coin, the verbos exception, but that isn't nearly that much of a problem. You can reduce information, but you can create it. On the other hand, the misleading exception is the worst beast of them all.

It has been a week since I released any software, and I begin to itch :-)

Okay, this one is a bug fix release for NHibernate.Generics, it's meant to fix an error that I run into where NHibernate.Generics was modifying a collection when NHibernate was iterating over it. The download is here.