Scott Hanselman is also on the kick of reading other peoples code to become a better developer, could it be the path to enlightment?
It dawned upon me that at work I have rarely had the need to tread outside my projects. All this time i've been searching far and wide for great code when I had a veritable treasure trove of unread code right under my nose.
We have a VB contractor doing some work for us and I caught wind that someone asked him to do it in C# ASP.NET. Wow. Might not be so bad I thought. So I had a look in SVN and came across this:
1 public static string Proper(string StringIn) {
2 string Temp = StringIn;
3 if (Temp.CompareTo(String.Empty) != 0) {
4
5 char[] Delimiter = { ' ' };
6 string[] Words = Temp.Split(Delimiter);
7 Temp = String.Empty;
8
9 for (int i = Words.GetLowerBound(0); i <= Words.GetUpperBound(0); i++)
10 if (Words[i].Trim().CompareTo(String.Empty) != 0)
11 Temp += Words[i].Substring(0, 1).ToUpper() +
12 Words[i].Substring(1).ToLower() + " ";
13 return Temp;
14 }
15 else
16 return String.Empty;
17 }
18
Apart from the upper case local variable names, in-efficient string concatenation and re-inventing the wheel, the dude did alright. Absolute respect to him, he's smart, he got it working, but it is obvious that C# is not his native tongue. That is textbook VB in C#.
Here is something roughly equivalent I came up with that produces the same output (don't lambast me for not getting the current culture, "en-AU" does weird shit that "en" doesn't) :)
1 using System.Globalization;
2 public static string TitleCase(string str) {
3 return String.IsNullOrEmpty(str) ? String.Empty
4 : new CultureInfo("en").TextInfo.ToTitleCase(str.ToLower());
5 }
It's not his fault really. He was asked to code in a language he wasn't familiar with and he got by. But what he did was speak English in down-town Nairobi.
Now I don't know what my point is but just look at the API's if you are using an unfamiliar language. I'm not shit-hot with C#, give me C, Java or Ruby and I've got a fighting chance. The thing is I'd assume that .NET would provide a way to title case a string. Instead of re-inventing the wheel I did a google search and came across the TextInfo class. You think he would have twigged that if VB has StrConv there might be something vaguely similar in C#.
Moral of the story, if you're asked to code in a language you are not familiar with, knock it back or make it clear it might not look pretty. But i guess who doesn't like getting paid?
