Monday, June 15, 2009

Odd final sentence in Fowler on UI Architecture

Fowler's overview of UI architectures is pretty much the standard article on the subject. I stumbled on it most recently when MSDN linked there from its Prism docs.

The final sentence has an odd little error, though--odd because this is an important sentence in a widely read article, and the error is quite apparent. The sentence reads, "Mappings will tend to be smaller for Supervising Controller than for Presentation Model as even complex updates will be determined by the Presentation Model and mapped, while a Supervising Controller will manipulate the widgets for complex cases without any mapping involved." (emphasis mine)

Clearly, the highlighted word should have been "simple". The Presentation Model is a stricter mediator of updates than the Supervising Controller is.

I suppose one could make the case that final sentences are so often overwrought, to the point of emptiness, that nobody really reads them anymore. But am I really the first person to be anal enough to notice this? Or is Fowler simply too busy to deal with web errata?

Like many motorists' failures to use turn signals, or the paving of our sidewalks with chewing gum and cigarette butts, overwrought final sentences are yet another symptom of the inexorable collapse of civilization as we know it, or would have known it, had we survived.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

WinMerge in VS2008

James Manning has an MSDN post for VS2005 that still helps when configuring alternative merge and compare tools.