re: How Things Work: Events in .Net

Myron — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:06:07 GMT

Nice summary article. Recently I've been doing some java, and while there are a few things I prefer about the java platform compared to .NET, I've got to say that after being spoiled with the way .NET (and VB.NET in particular) handles events, the java way is a royal PITA. In .NET they took the observer pattern and baked it right onto the CLR and the languages themselves. In java, you've got to manually implement the Observer interface on your subscriber object, and your publisher object has to derive from the Observable base class. With java's lack of multiple inheritance, you're in trouble if you have a class that derives from some base class, and you want to add events to it. You either create your own observer/observable interfaces and implement those, or find a way to accomplish what you want to do without events. I googled the issue to see how other java developers addressed this issue, and the typical response I found was "you're not following good object-oriented design principles if you run into this problem. Fix your design." Really? You can't imagine ever having a base class, another derived class, and wanting to make the derived class observable? It boggles the mind.

That said, I think that the way VB.NET handles events is a bit *too* magical. I didn't have a clue how events worked when I first started working with VB.NET, and I'm sure I created more than my fair share of memory leaks when I forgot to desubscribe from an event (or set the WithEvents field to Nothing) after finishing with an object in the cases where this is necessary. Actually, "forgot" isn't accurate--I didn't even realize I needed to until we had memory leak issues shortly before one of our releases and we discussed this and addressed it. I like how C# makes you more aware of what's going on with the object references, at least for when you first start working with events. Now that I do understand how events work, I like the simplicity VB.NET provides :). I just think it may not be best for new .NET developers to use VB.NET first, until they understand how events work and when they need to desubscribe from events to prevent memory leaks.

re: Great Software of 2007

Myron Marston — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:54:23 GMT

Silverlight might be the greatest thing since whatever was the last greatest thing since sliced bread, but I don't think it stands a chance of widespread adoption as long as its owned by Microsoft.

The last time a Microsoft product became the standard for the internet (IE6), Microsoft sat around and didn't update it for what....6 years? Meanwhile, their browser didn't support the industry standards very well, and we all know how most web developers feel about that. There's too many web developers that hate Microsoft, either because of their history or simply because its popular to hate Microsoft. Silverlight doesn't stand a chance to see widespread use.

Unless they open sourced it....then it might.

I found the ASP.NET MVC / URL Routing extensions to be interesting. Sounds almost identical to Ruby on Rails (which I'm still using, by the way). I guess Microsoft is seeing too many ASP.NET developers switch to Rails....

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re: How Things Work: Events in .Net

re: Great Software of 2007