SSW Update - Does backward compatibility kill good code?
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SSW Tech Breakfast

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G'Day Developers!

Supporting old operating systems and old versions means you have more (and often messy) code, with lots of if or switch statements. This might be OK for you, because you wrote the code, but down the track when someone else is maintaining it, then there is more time/expense needed.

I believe when you realize there is a better way to do something, then you should change it, clean code should be the goal, however because this affects old users, and changing interfaces at every whim also means expense for all the apps that break, the decision isn't so easy to make.

Our views on backward compatibility starts with asking these questions:

  • Question 1: How many apps are we going to break externally?
  • Question 2: How many apps are we going to break internally?
  • Question 3: What is the cost of providing backward compatibility and repairing (and test) all the broken apps?

Lets look at an example:

We have a public web service /ssw/webservices/postcode/
If we change the URL of this public Web Service, we'd have to answer the questions as follows:

  • Answer 1: Externally - Dont know, we have some leads:
    We can look at web stats and get an idea.
    If an IP address enters our website at this point, it tells us that possibly an application is using it and the user isn't just following the links.
  • Answer 2: Web site samples + Adams code demo
  • Answer 3: Can add a redirect or change the page to output a warning Old URL. Please see www.ssw.com.au/ PostCodeWebService for new URL

Because we know that not many external clients use this example, we decide to remove the old web service after some time.

Just to be friendly, we would sent an email for the first month, and then another email in the second month.  After that, just emit "This is deprecated (old)."  We'll also need to update the UDDI so people don't keep coming to our old address.

We all wish we never need to support old code, but sometimes the world doesn't go that way, if your answer to question 3 scares you, then you might need to provide some form of backward compatibility or warning.

See more of the SSW Rules pages.

Adam Cogan

Got a comment for Adam? Email Adam

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In every day software development, we often encounter bugs that are difficult to reproduce and even more difficult to find. This problem is accentuated when it’s a reoccurring bug in the system. Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 introduces heaps of new features that will help testers and developers in squashing these bugs once and for all.

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