While Java didn't invent putting a toString method in the base class of every object, it certainly made it mainstream. The nice thing about the method is that it allows you to turn any object into a string, though it's up to the implementor to decide what a good string representation is. But what if you want to ensure that the object you're handed is...

Comments explain a lot about our code. And sometimes, the comments explain more than the code itself. Alastair found this lovely comment, which demonstrates an excellent, if confusing, understanding of a boolean "or": // Only add delivery option if it has no weight bands or at least one weight band. The developer has left the company, so no one...

While poring through some VB .Net code, John noticed some odd things in their datamodel. For example, a different process would scan files, and log any "suspicious" files into a database. The program John supported would then report on that data. One of their classes had a property which looked like this: Public ReadOnly Property SuspectedItem As...

You have some text, and need to replace every sequence of spaces with a single space. E.g., My text becomes My text. Now, if you're most of us, you ignore the famous quote and reach straight for regexes. But Samuel's co-worker isn't most of us. toReturn = toReturn.Replace(" ", " "); toReturn = toReturn.Replace(" ", " ").Replace(" ", " ").Replace("...

An anonymous friend sent us our frist test in prod for this week. And then there will be more, and more, and more. "This came up in Kaspersky's Blog's RSS. If you're lucky they might still have the error up in the original URL." I don't know if "chron" is just how "cron" translates to Russian and back, but the test appears to have succeeded....

Greg's co-worker really wanted to make sure that a variable was correctly set to true or false. So they did this: if (isValid == true) { isValid = true; } else { isValid = false; } If isValid is true, set it to true, otherwise set it to false. isValid is a boolean in C#, so the only options it could have are true and false. The real WTF...