Month: March 2006

Vista and External Memory Devices

By jonskeet

Update – read the first two comments. I'm leaving the rest of the article as it is in order to avoid revisionism. The solution is in the first two comments though. According to the Windows Vista feature page, Vista is going to be able to use external memory devices (USB flash drives and the like to you and me) to act as extra memory to save having to go to the hard disk. I've heard this mentioned at a few places, and it's always asserted that EMDs are slower than memory but "much, much faster" than disks. This has just … Continue reading Vista and External Memory Devices

Inheritance Tax

By jonskeet

Introduction There aren’t many technical issues that my technical lead (Stuart) and I disagree on. However, one of them is inheritance and making things virtual. Stuart tends to favour making things virtual on the grounds that you never know when you might need to inherit from a class and override something. My argument is that unless a class is explicitly designed for inheritance in the first place, you can get into a big mess very quickly. Desiging a class for inheritance is not a simple matter, and in particular it ties your implementation down significantly. Composition/aggregation usually works better in … Continue reading Inheritance Tax