It works on so many levels. As an historical document of the cold war it is a fascinating look behind the curtain. As a philosophical discussion  it poses many difficult ethical questions.  And as a portrait of a conflicted individual it is an engrossing look at Robert McNamara.

Overall, The Fog of War is a highly recommended documentary that leaves you feeling a little smarter for having seen it.

Exception shielding is important in order to hide internal implementation details from service consumers.  This can make your service easier to use and, more importantly, prevent exposing sensitive internal information in your exceptions.

Enterprise Library Exception Shielding seems to be a good use of configuration to decouple a service interface from the underlying implementation.

Those two ideas -- exceptions as flow control and making code look wrong -- led me to think about why I really, really dislike Microsoft's Enterprise Library Exception Handling Block: it combines the worst parts of both.

Consider the following:

My objection: you have no idea what the exception handler does!

Since you can't tell what will happen at this one point, you can't mentally trace the program flow to see if it's logically sound. This makes development, tracking down bugs, and overall maintenance difficult.

"Wait, wait, wait", you say. "You can create meaningful policy names to avoid this kind of confusion". Yes, you can change the policy name to something more meaningful like "BusinessLayerMustRethrowPolicy" so you can understand the intent of the code -- which is a good thing. However, you still have no idea of the actual behavior at run time since the configuration could be set to not rethrow (for some reason). Plus, if you are making your exception handling configuration based, then you are implicitly saying that you allow the configuration to be changed to another setting (e.g. not rethrow an exception). Isn't that the point of putting things in configuration? To allow behavior to be changed without changing the code.

Since throwing an exception changes the flow of the program, if you modify the Exception Handling Block configuration (behavior) then you are actually creating a new execution path. Does that mean the program should run "properly" for all possible settings of the configuration? (Not likely!) Do you then have to test all of those possible code paths?

Maybe you could implement a policy of no configuration changes without a full test cycle but then how is that much different than performing a code change? You do skip the issue of introducing a new coding bug
and you avoid a build but you still need to create some sort of deployment package and go through a release cycle (which is the most expensive part in this lifecycle). Plus there is always the chance of the configuration becoming incorrect "by accident" and the new execution path may introduce some undesirable behavior. e.g. maybe database changes are committed because, even though an exception occurred, the policy said to not throw an exception and the calling code assumed that all errors would be reported as exceptions.

Other objections to the Exception Handling Block:

• As a framework, the "if rethrow" construct doesn't really offer a lot of abstraction; you still need to pepper your code with "if rethrow" code in every catch block.
• If you try to use the logging block to log an exception, every log entry for that handler shares all of the same basic log entry information (e.g. event ID). This can be restricting if you need that kind of control.

In general, I avoid the Exception Handling Application Block because it obfuscates the functioning of the program which makes the program harder to understand and maintain. To me this outweighs any functionality provided by the block.

In honor of the finale here is my list of best Scrubs episodes (in no particular order -- almost):

1. My Old Lady

2. My Monster

3. My Own American Girl -- Elliot gets a backbone!

4. My Occurrence

5. My Screw Up

And, in my opinion, the best Scrubs episode ever:
6. My Way Home

Although I was not quite an adult, I still bought quite a few over the years and they were worth the extra money.  Yum!

If anyone has any other information or memories please share.

No, I didn't pay for it.  I didn't even ask for it!

In a previous post, I wrote about why I wouldn't be using QuickTax any longer. It seems that Intuit has decided to mail out physical CDs of QuickTax in the hope of getting folks to install it and then purchase the software.  I think it reeks of a desperate attempt to recapture their lost sales and I'm hoping that people don't fall for this and that this ends up costing Intuit more money than they recoup.

Yes, I'm still bitter over last years money grab. 

For the first installation, we honor the late great cereal: Crispy Wheats 'N Raisins.  For those of you who don't remember, Crispy Wheats 'N Raisins launched in the late 70's and, in 1996, was re-branded Crispy Wheaties 'N Raisins.  Unfortunately, even that name change couldn't change the cereal's fortune and it was eventually discontinued.

Man, that was a good cereal.

I couldn't track down the classic "Wizard of Oz" commercials so here is another one:

Anyone have any other selections?

Whichever way I decide, one thing is certain, Intuit will not be receiving any more of my money.

The first episode of season 9 was one of the best single episodes in recent memory (the miniature killer arc was great from season 7) and Petersen's performance was masterful in its controlled emotion.  In the opening scene, Grissom's clenched jaw communicates so much.

Four days later, publisher John Cruickshank offers up...well not quite an apology.  I'm not actually sure what you would call it.  I guess the best would be an admission of judgment error.  On the plus side, Mr. Cruickshank indicates that the CBC will attempt to expand it's diversity of opinions.

I think that is a good step.  By all means let the CBC present opinions but let's focus on the ideas, reasoning and thoughts behind those opinions and not on how people look, what gender they are or what their family is like. And if opinions are presented, then please present a wide range of opinions from all sides.

It seems like the least we could ask from Canada's public broadcaster.