.NET and Multiple Inheritance

Thanks to LinkedIn, I hooked up with an old colleague from SR Telecom last week. We had only worked together for a few months, so I asked him if he still remembered me. He replied with the affirmative and asked me if I still hated multiple inheritance.

"Of course I do and thankfully I'm working in VC#.NET which has interfaces that you can use in addition to abstract or base classes!" . My friend replied that he is still using (abusing!) multiple inheritance and C++ at his new job. I got the impression that he still likes it, in spite of his many years of work experience. That begs the question : has he ever had to maintain any of his code ?

Luckily, I got my first taste of multiple inheritance early in my career when I inherited someone else's code. At first, I was impressed with the complex structure. I felt that my predecessor had left me a clever puzzle to decode! Tracking down the final implementation of virtual classes that had been specialized in a child class of two incestually related parents was a good challenge for a junior programmer. However, I quickly tired of this task and joined the growing ranks of weary developers who wanted better rules so that they could get on with building features instead of tracking down bugs.

Since then, I have not been called in to clean up any other multiple inheritance code. Now, that I've been doing VC#.NET for a year, I am hoping that I won't ever have to go back to it again.

Interfaces are a clean solution for allowing designers to present a "tailored" view of their objects for various clients while still allowing for sharing of common code through specialization.

I'm still using .NET 2.0 so I'm looking forward to using mixins on 3.0. That reminds me, I better get searching for a free trial version of it to play with.

swim effects

I tried out a morning swim today, at 6h00, in the Walter Baker Sports Centre just down a few roads from my home. It was dark and spitting large warm drops so I drove the car instead of commuting. I was a bit tired and stiff from yesterday's early morning weight training , so was pretty hopeful when I walked into a quiet , empty changeroom. "Maybe it's cancelled for the last week of August before the new fall schedule starts... " but when I walked into the pool area, I saw at least a dozen swimmers chatting around the deck. So I compromised with myself and agreed to just take it easy today. It's a good thing too, since every muscle in my body ached as I reached and pulled and kicked and turned in the water. Finally things got better, but at just that moment, my coach asked me to do some breast stroke. Like a rusty machine, all the muscles that had escaped from the freestyle stroke, complained and held back. But I got over that hump and ended my swim feeling triumphant over the mornings stiffness. I was deluded though : just a few hours later, I get up from my desk for a tea and ... eeek... I'm a creaky tin woman again!

nora-drop tuesday ride on sasaparilla

Last night's ride on the Sassaparilla trail was a lot of fun. My bike was not exactly co-operative though. I had TWO flats on the way back from Lime Kiln over to Emeka's house (for BBQ!) . Worse, I LOST my husband's yellow lensed glasses when I left them in the parking lot where we changed the flat.

Enough of the bad stuff, here's the good stuff : I got to trail run with my sweet HID light , carrying my injured bike on my arm for awhile and then running alongside it through the jeeptrack and paved trails. It was very pretty.

Thank god Richard and Christian waited for me , otherwise I would surely have got lost. There were tons of Tees in the singletrack from Lime Kiln to the parking lot where Richard was waiting, so I was very grateful when I saw Christian riding back to get me.

Richard knows his way through that maze of trails and he guided us back on a short path. Nonetheless, it felt long since I was running with 2L of water , plus repair kit and HID battery bouncing around on my back. Yeah, my appetite was well worked up for the burgers at Emeka's.

Much later..

I had a moment of inspiration today. So I thought I try to blog again.

I went for a dip in the river this morning, around 7h30. It was very cold. I went with my hypnotist to get over the fear of the deep dark water. I wore my wetsuit and we stood in the shallow water, up to my shoulders looking out at the beautiful river. A curled little white feather floated lazily nearby. I was drawn into the tips of these weeds just peeking out of the water so I grabbed the canister and headed out there, humming a few bars of Bach to keep any possible anxiety in check. When I reached the weeds, my legs and feet got tangled up but it was so enchanting to be right there looking at them. It was quite thrilling to be in the deep water without being immobilized with fear, even though I was holding on to the bright red canister hat Susan had affectionately named "Athena". I kicked about around the river and we eventually headed back to shore. It was so beautiful though. The cool river had a rhythm of its own which stayed with me throughout the day. Having drunk such a beautiful calm morning at the river made me feel connected to the world.