Getting a Foot in the Door
By Felipe Lodi
It has been copied from our applied book I assume. But better title than that to the article is difficult to figure out. Indeed this is the technique I’ve been using for the past years. In between Projects that I am coder, architect or even project manager, I really wasn’t aware of methodologies such as top-down or bottom-up as part of stepwise refinement.
Glenn says what it follows about both techniques: “…stepwise refinement is a top-down methodology in that it progresses from the general to the specific. In contrast, a bottom-up methodology progresses from the specific to the general.” (Brookshear, 2009)
And funny that is, I realized that I had ever used the bottom-up one method.
But this was a long time ago. Since I started to use Frameworks, Objects Models and Libraries, no further efforts were required to do as much as you need to achieve your needs. Taking the given problem on the first discussion where I was requested to seek a string inside another one, strings have become classes where I can instantiate an object and easily use, let’s say, indexof and it does the job perfectly, I would say.
The same applies for generic collections and the method sort. It is so easier than using the insertion sort algorithm where we need to “…indentify the constraints under which we will work...sort the list within itself” (Brookshear, 2009)
Amongst several routines (or algorithms), the Windows API is commonly used to manipulate the Operating System behavior, mostly the shell. As well the Windows Registry (or the Windows configurations database) may be manipulated by these instructions and as developer I can get rid of hard understanding and concentrate myself on the business itself.
“Windows APIs are dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) that are part of the Windows operating system. You use them to perform tasks when it is difficult to write equivalent procedures of your own. For example, Windows provides a function named FlashWindowEx that lets you make the title bar for an application alternate between light and dark shades.” (Microsoft Corporation, 2010)
Now imagine how hard would be to achieve the same above by coding. Several routines manipulating pointers and binaries, I would say that it is the end of the algorithms.
Working on this big project currently as I am, amongst hundreds of objects and their methods, functions and instances we are close to use only if’s and cases. Whiles were replaced by foreaches too.
Other day we needed a way of zipping and unzipping files in order to create some sort of caching of uploaded files in SharePoint. Neither the oldest professional on the team thought on developing this from the scratch. How many lines of coding we prevent when we downloaded a third party assembly. The work has been done very fast and no one had to be aware of the algorithms behind.
REFERENCES LIST
Brookshear, J.G., 2009. Operating Systems. In Computer Science an Overview. 10th ed. p.220.
Brookshear, J.G., 2009. Operating Systems. In Computer Science an Overview. 10th ed. p.228.
Microsoft Corporation, 2010. Walkthrough: Calling Windows APIs (Visual Basic). [Online] Available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/172wfck9.aspx [Accessed 20 August 2010].
