Report from the battlefield #11 - premature optimization is the root of all evil?

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Have you ever heard that "premature optimization is the root of all evil"? Probably yes. It's quite well known Donald Knuth's phrase. However, the whole cite is much less known:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

Why Am I writing about that? Because recently I had on occasion to fix an application which was written according to the fist part of this cite. Or even worse it was written according to the rule "any optimization is the root of all evil". Here are some examples what not to do and some tips what to do.

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.NET Developer Days 2017

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In the post .NET Developer Days 2016 - Grand finale I wrote that it hadn't been my last my last .NET Developer Days conference. Recently, I've been asked again to become a media partner of this year's edition so I agreed without much hesitation. Disclaimer: It also means that it is a sponsored text.

The well known aphorism says that perfect is the enemy of good. The organizers of the conference must have heard that because the form of the current edition will be similar to the previous one i.e.:

• What: 3 tracks with session about different topics and of different difficulties.
• Where: EXPO XXI Exhibition Center – Warsaw, Prądzyńskiego 12/14
• When: 18th-20th October 2017. 18th October is reserved for full-day training sessions (so called pre-conf) and the actual conference will start on 19th October.
• Language: 100% English

The agenda has not been published yet and we have to wait until June. However, the last time the range of topics was wide and I didn't have any problem to find something interesting from my perspective. I keep my fingers crossed this year will not be worse. What is very important the earlier you buy tickets the less you will pay. If you are interested do not think too much. The current price for the conference without pre-conf is 275€. In June 325€ it will be and in August 375€.

The best and the worst thing when doing science

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A few months ago, I returned (partially) to the university. I'm working in the project in the field of the computer vision for Google company. The project is related to Google Tango technology and is really interesting. However, within these few months there were also moments when I was really fed up. The same happened when I was doing Ph.D. so I started thinking what I like the most in doing science and what I don't like.

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How I removed 50% of the code

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My last 2 posts were about problems with using Roslyn. Nonetheless, even if I sometime hate it, I'm still using it so the time has come to show some practical example of using Roslyn. Recently, I've been working on the task that can be summed up as: Take this ugly code and do something with it. i.e. more or less the refactoring task.

Now I'll give you some intuition of what I have to deal with. The code that I have to refactor was generated automatically based on XML schema. These were actually DTO classes used to communicate with the external service. Here are some statistics:

• 28.7 thousands lines of code in 23 files.
• 2200 classes and 920 enums.
• Many classes and enums seems to me identical or very similar.

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Why I hate Roslyn even more

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In my previous post I wrote about my problem with "empty" projects and Roslyn. The symptom was that in some cases according to Roslyn my C# projects didn't contain any files. For quite a long time, I haven't been able to find a solution. Especially because I couldn't reproduce problem on my local machine. Fortunately, today I noticed exactly the same problem on another computer.

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