>Years? Goodness, I don't have years.

Well, I may be particularly dull. I wonder at times. But, I just know that I've expected to have developed skill in this sooner than I actually did. So, patience is a virtue in learning OO.

>I need to get this project done. The project itself is really quite simple and doing things the old way, it would have been done a long time ago. I just decided since it was an in-house project to hijack it to improve my skills. Even so, I can't take forever on it because there's billable stuff to be done.

Like you say, you do one thing at a time and build from there.

I try to do utility routines in an object oriented fashion rather than procedural, for example. It takes a bit longer to write, at least at first. But, an OO approach does give some interesting and unanticipated side benefits. It's a lot easier to test, because the object is instantiated and you can play with it live rather than having to repath and invoke the procedure. The exposed properties means it's easier to modify the behavior than sending along a kazillion parameters to the routine. And, it's easy to do unit testing with the emphasis on small methods.

I find that it's worth it <g>!

Jay

>
>I did go to refactoring at Whilfest, and if there was a whitepaper, I have it. I'll have to look it over again. Whilfest was so much so fast it's all a bit of a blur. :)
>
>Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll keep it in mind.
>
>Michelle
>
>>Michelle --
>>
>>A couple resources that address using OO effectively in the act of programming.
>>
>>Not sure if you had a chance to take in Steve Sawyer's presentation on Refactoring at DevCon or Whilfest, but his is a wonderful, self-reflective approach towards programming in an OO style.
>>
>>As he mentioned, the term Refactoring and at least part of his inspiration was a recent book by Martin Fowler, Refactoring, publ by Addison-Wesley. I picked that up a couple weeks ago, and it's the first programming book that I could say grabs me like a detective novel. Hard to put down!
>>
>>He talks about doing object oriented design in the process of programming. Program development tends towards disorganization as we start from a good plan, but make changes in coding without changing the design, and do kludges to get things working. He suggests continually "refactoring" -- that is rewriting code with the goal of enhancing the organization. Some of it is familiar from writing well-structured procedural code, but much is new in being fully aware of design patterns, etc. The steps are simple and easy to follow (though the code is in Java). The overall impact, though has been significant on my programming practice.
>>
>>Maybe it's just hitting me at the right point, but I think it addresses what you're looking for.
>>
>>As for the time spent and the state of confusion -- I think that's just a product of trying to work effectively with a different mindset. I've been working with this stuff for several years and its only now beginning to make sense as a tool that I can use effectively and creatively.
>>
>> Jay