Book of Red Gate 2010 - Red Gate Software

Code of the Year 2009
Heaps of astonishingly good engineering is created and
French polished by hand at Red Gate every year. We’ve
decided to celebrate this and from a field of seven entrants,
Neil ‘First Coder’ Davidson managed to pick the winner of the
Golden Brackets Trophy 2009, “because it has lots of complicated-looking
shit in it and it’s better than Rob’s solution (which
I’m assuming was awesome)”.
This is (part of) the code that allows us to put blue blobs on the object
explorer in SQL Source Control.
This bit of code is clever because the first two approaches we took to solve
this problem were completely different (Rob and Elliot’s proof of concepts),
and we eventually settled on this approach because it should cause
the least problems for SSMS: it already expects there to be many different
kinds of builders for the different types of nodes in the tree, and therefore
it shouldn’t cause SSMS to deadlock, crash, or misbehave in other ways.
Finally, I like it because it has an anonymous delegate,
a lambda function, a bug was found and fixed in it (follow the SOC
number), it uses our own wrapping around both the C# locking and the
reflection APIs, it uses the Set class from Shared.Utils, and even though
it’s fairly short it provides rather a lot of the start-of-day functionality
that is needed for blue blobs.
Cheers,
David Simner
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