OOP - The SAS Workshops Blog

Can Your Code Be Too SOLID?

You can have too much of a good thing. Lots of code is hard to read because it uses too many unnecessary abstractions.

I inherited a project written using Actor Framework recently. I started to do a little refactoring to make it easier to add some of the changes I needed to make, following Kent Beck’s idea of “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” What is in a

Book Reviews , OOP

The Object Oriented Thought Process

This book was recommended to me by 2 different people. Several years ago Nancy recommended this book to me when I was first learning OOP. I generally trust Nancy’s recommendations (she has made some very good recommendations in the past such as XUnit Test Patterns and Continuous Delivery) and

Coding Philosophy , OOP

Command Query Separation of Class Methods

In reading Micheal Feather’s book on Legacy Code, on page 147 it mentions the idea of command and query separation. A method should be a command or query, but not both. A command is a method that can modify the state of the object, but doesn’t return a

How to , Design Patterns , OOP , Software Engineering

What is a plugin architecture?

I wrote a previous post about ppl plugins and it occurred to me that maybe not everyone knows what a plugin architecture is. So I decided to clarify a little bit in case it wasn’t clear. I’m going to talk in terms of classes inside packed project libraries

Continuous Integration , SCC , How to , OOP

Branch by Abstraction

In the past I have been a big fan of Git Flow. I still am, but I recently read the book Continuous Delivery and it has me rethinking some things. In particular they talk about Continuous Integration and not using feature branches, which is a very large component of Git

Design Patterns , How to , OOP

Dynamic Unloading of Classes

In my previous post, I did a demo of the factory pattern. In it I showed how to dynamically load classes based on their path. One thing you may have noticed in that demo is that the classes stayed in memory even after the Test VI stopped running. If you

Design Patterns , OOP

Gang Of Four Patterns in LabVIEW

I have written a bit about design patterns previously. Recently Tom McQuillan and I were talking about how it would be nice to have examples on how to implement the GOF design patterns in LabVIEW. To be fair, Elijah Kerry put together some great examples several years ago, but he

Unit Testing , OOP

Unit Testing And Seams

One of the topics I found very interesting form the Art Of Unit Testing was seams. I wanted to write a blog post to explore that a little bit. What is a Seam? Seams are places in your code where you can plug in different functionality … Art of Unit Testing,

Book Reviews , Design Patterns , OOP

Book Review Dive into Design Patterns

Stefan Lemmens put me onto this book a few months in response to a review I wrote of the original GOF Design Patterns Book. He remarked that is was much more approachable and he was right. While I still find value in the original GOF book, I think this book

Unit Testing , OOP

Mock Objects Advanced Features

In the last post, I talked about how to use Mock Objects in Unit Tests. In this post, I am going to talk about some advanced features of the Mock Objects. It is worth going back and reading my previous posts on Mock Objects if you have not already done

Unit Testing , OOP

How To Use Mock Objects in Tests

In the last couple posts, I talked about Mock Objects: what they are and how to implement them in LabVIEW. In this post, I am going to talk about how to use them in unit tests. For reference, the video below shows how to use the Class Refactoring Toolkit and

Unit Testing , OOP

Anatomy of a Mock Object

In the last post, I talked about Mock Objects and what they are. In this post, I am going to talk a little bit about what they look like when you implement them in LabVIEW. The video below shows how to use the Class Refactoring Toolkit I created to create

Unit Testing , OOP

Creating Mocks in LabVIEW

In my last article, I introduced the concept of Mock Objects. The obvious next question is how do you implement them in LabVIEW? Many other languages either have builtin or readily available third party mock objects frameworks. LabVIEW does not. Until Now. I’ve create some tools for class refactoring

Unit Testing , OOP

Mock Objects

At the upcoming CLA Summit, I will be giving a presentation on mock objects. I thought I would introduce them here first for those who aren’t familiar with them. If you read any literature on unit testing you are bound to run into them. A Different Kind of Test

Design Patterns , Unit Testing , OOP

Test Doubles In Action

In the last post, I talked about Test Doubles and some various types that we can use and how to implement them. The next obvious question is how do we actually use them in our tests. Dependency Injection Understanding Test Doubles first requires understanding the concept of dependency injection. This

Design Patterns , OOP

A Business Case For Applying Design Patterns

This is my fourth article in a series on the Gang of Four book on Design Patterns. I thought four was an appropriate number of articles. Here are links to the first 3 articles: 1. Design Patterns – A Review 2. OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1 3. OOP

Design Patterns , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post on GOF Design Patterns in the Actor Framework. I found a lot of examples, so I decided to break it into 2 posts. You can access part 1 here and my review of the GOF Book here. Part 1 showed examples found

Design Patterns , Frameworks , OOP

OOP Design Patterns in Actor Framework Part 1

Last week I wrote a review of the GOF Book on OOP Design Patterns. This week I would like to share some examples of these design patterns in action, so you can go look at them and see how they are implemented and used in LabVIEW. When I took Allen’

Book Reviews , Design Patterns , OOP

Design Patterns - A review

I recently finished reading “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Erich Gamm, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissades. Due to its popularity, the length of the title, and the fact that it has 4 authors, it is affectionately known as the “Gang of Four” book or GOF

Software tools , Frameworks , OOP

Events for UI Actor Indicators

Allen Smith and I have been working on a side project we called Events for UI Actor Indicators for a couple months (we’ve both been busy lately). It started with a discussion at a CLA summit in Austin. That prompted Allen to come up with an idea and then

OOP

NI Classes on Object Oriented Programming and Actor Framework

For those of you who want to take your programming to the next level, there are 2 classes coming ot Denver (actually the NI training facility in Louisville.) One is an introduction to LVOOP – LabVIEW Object Oriented Programming. It talks about how to apply Object-Oriented techniques to LabVIEW applications using