Skip to main content

Writing better code in action...

Early this year, Andy Kramek wrote about Writing better code (Part 1).

I just saw an example that I thought would be worth sharing.

This system was using a treeview with two different "purposes". One was to show a list of about 10 nodes and the other showed a list with about 200 nodes on it.

When the system ran, it just seemed super slow. The first list would appear fairly quickly but then when it switched between the two, it would reduce to a crawl, even just to show 10 nodes.

Why?

The loop looked like this:
SCAN
lnRec = RECNO()/RECCOUNT()*100
Treeview.Nodes.Add(xxx,xxx,xxx)
DOEVENTS
ShowProgress(lnRec)
ENDSCAN

DOEVENTS is useful for allowing any Windows activity to refresh - so it's useful to call it - but calling it within the SCAN means it will take a hit on performance as well as the ShowProgress for every record.

As Andy notes: "Inform your users, but don’t compromise performance to do so"

With a few minor tweaks, the code now runs incredibly fast and I was able to point the programmer in question to Andy's great post about it.

As I noted last week, these are the types of things that the development environment need to be catching to make us all better developers.

Kind of like having a Peer Review happening in real time.

Thanks Andy - once again for having great tips easily available!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

MS has just introduced their portal and it's pretty comprehensive. Nothing quite like learning that some people use AIM instead of MSN messenger, or that there really may be a need for supporting 4 monitors ( Cyrus Complains ) However, it's really a great sign that MS is serious about supporting the blogging community which seems to have um, exploded in size in the past year. Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

FoxInCloud Stats

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP

5 Great Reasons to attend Virtual FoxFest

What's coming up? Virtual FoxFest is coming up soon (sessions start October 14th). Like last year, the conference is entirely virtual yet includes great breakdown rooms and sessions to add that nice one-on-one feel that you get in person. It's also staggered so you can choose which days you want to attend - October 14th, 20th and 26th. This is great if you can't break away for a consecutive three days. But really, I've gone through the sessions and I see five great sessions that I'm eager to check out. 1. A Decade of Thor (Rick Schummer) Thor has been an extension for Visual FoxPro that many developers swear by, yet many don't know even exists. Visual FoxPro's built-in extensions are great but Jim Nelson's Thor supercharges your IDE. I can't believe it's been ten years - so Rick's session should be able to not just whet your appetite but give you all the reasons you should be using it. 2. VFP C++ compiler.  Last year, we saw DotNetX as well