Software Generalist

Reading Notebook: 05-Jan-09

Comments in italics are mine and express my own views, thoughts and opinions

Developer’s Guide to Debugging by M. Wloka, et al.:

The notion of debugging opportunities - the flow of opportunities to debug from earlier macro instrumentation using source code preprocessing techniques to run-time debugging tools (p. 6)

The notion of debugging breaking personal relationships (p. v, foreword by A. Zeller)

Solution-oriented way

13 rules extend 9 rules of Agans

Rule 3: Simplify the Test Case (p. 9) - Very important in postmortem debugging when someone collects data for you

Rule 4: Read the Right Error Message (p. 9) - Good rule for postmortem debugging too

Rule 6: Separate Facts from Interpretation (p. 10) - Good one

Side-by-side debugging (pp. 11-12) - very important in real life: ETW-based CDF traces from normal and problem scenarious

Rule 8: Match the Tool to the Bug (p. 12) - psychology of debugging

Rule 10: Keep an Audit Trail (pp. 12-13) - for example, logging in WinDbg

Concurrent Programming on Windows by J. Duffy:

Why concurrency? (pp. 3-4) - one reason is missed: to understand memory dumps, traces and logs better - the view from software technical support

Natural scalability: latent -> actual concurrencly during the course of software evolution (p. 5). Some degree of inherent latent concurrencly in programming languages constrained by stylistic habits (p. 5)

“Concurrency begins with architecture.” (p. 6) - merits a new quotation

Decomposition of programs into agents (roughly: entry points interacting asycnronously with envorinment), tasks and data (pp. 6-7)

Architecturing to ease the synchronization burden (p. 7)

Natural domain parallelism (pp. 8-9)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -