Monday, May 21, 2012

When Refactoring smells...

My rule of Software Project fiddling... *cough* refactoring

Eventually, you will get brave enough to make a major change, using an automated tool that will simply and easily stuff your project up.  You will also be between comits to SVN and have hours of little fiddling work that you don't want to loose.  It will seem easier to simply "reverse" the change you have made.  Everything will seem fine.... you will continue making small stupid changes without thoughly testing what you have done... burning the change deeper and deeper into your work stack until its nearly impossible to get back out with the lovely automated tools you used to put it there. 

Try running find and replace to replace x86 with Win32 in a set of project files to fix a stupid inconsistency in Wix, then try to undo it with "ignore caps" option on.... then try to figure out why your projects will suddenly not build and spews errors like bastards.  (Think of the effect of quietly changing the WIN32 pre-processor directive to Win32....)

This raises the question about how the hell can you refactor something that has so many possible variables as a solution with multiple project files, multiple build targets and platforms and integrates with a coupld of flakey external tools... some custom build rules and is in an indeterminate state of upgrade/crossgrade shitgrade from multiple versions of Visual Studio chewing on it over time....

Going home... fuck it all.  Tired of looking at this moldy old pile of fucking code.

BTW the Wix documentation sucks nuts. 

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