David Heffernan

These tools are really useful, but they aren't a substitute for understanding the workflow.

I don't really understand how tools can support specific workflows. Aren't workflows just conventions that you put on top of the vcs? I mean, I'm sure that I can do git flow, gitlab flow, github flow etc. with any tool.

Fix it in development branch, and then merge on to feature branch and release branch,

Read up on git submodules properly, and read about the potential pitfalls. Just like svn externals they sound compelling but you can easily get into a bind with them.

This works fine. The key point is to keep separate branches for development and releases.

I don't think it matters how many developers there are. That doesn't change anything. Even with one developer you still need to maintain separate branches for current development and historical maintained releases. I work exactly the same way on my solo projects as I do on my collab projects. I strongly recommend reading up on this subject, you'll get a much better idea than this sort of threaded discussion. Here is a great place to come ask questions once you've read up the subject but I wouldn't recommend starting like this.

This is pretty simple with git submodules and svn externals. For svn externals you specify the commit that you want to reference, and so when you create a release branch, that commit is captured there. If you update the external reference on the development branch, that won't change anything in the release branch. I believe that git submodules work in the same way, they are a reference to a specific commit in a repo.

That's very risky for release branches. Release branches are typically meant for bug fixes. Updating shared libraries as you do is likely to lead to new bugs being introduced to your release branches which are supposed to have a reducing bug count!

Thus isn't how I do it. I have a development branch. New features and bug fixes go there first. Now, if they are anything other than completely trivial they will be developed on feature branches and then merged back to the development branch. Then whenever you do a release you branch off a release branch. And then you choose which commits from the development branch need to be merged on to the release branch or branches. You don't implement anything twice, it's just merges. Obviously sometimes there are conflicts to deal with. You can also buy books that go into this in detail.

The former must be used to create the main form. Otherwise there's no need and you can just call the constructor. That's what I do. Use the Application method for the main form and call constructors directly otherwise. The other difference in these two snippets is the second one has no owner, but the former is owned by Application.

These aren't sprints. Those are a term used in scrum. You can read about that to learn what they are. The simple answer is that you need to use branches. Every time you make a release, create a branch for that release. All bug fixes are made on trunk and then merged onto whichever release branches are supported. This is much simpler and much safer than your current approach.

All I said, and you can go check, is that it is sometimes desirable to distinguish null from empty.

Can't use the operators that we have in other languages

No. Really not a good suggestion. Please don't tell me that you have nil checks every time you use an object.

Generally you know that the list has been assigned. Usually they are created in the same function above the use, or passed in to the function and known to be assigned, or created in the constructor. So no its quite rare to see code like that.

Only there's no language support for that. Why does C# code ever have those all over the place? Mine doesn't. Is sounds a bit like poorly designed code. Or am I missing something?

Not sure I agree. It can be useful to distinguish between null and length 0 array. It can be useful to have these as different conceptual things.

Well in the case of structured storage, it's an old legacy technology that won't change. So does it matter that your library isn't actively maintained?

It's Java. Very early on many C# programs were also valid Java programs.

That's not really why byte is useful. Byte is primarily useful to store binary data, typically as TArray<Byte>. It's rare to use Byte to store a count for example.

No there is not. However, you really should not be using short strings at all. These only exist for backwards compatibility with legacy code.

I don't understand the question. Obviously the code here is not valid. Can you describe what you want to achieve.

I remember working with the ExpressSpreadsheet xls code which is based on BIFF records and COM structured storage. The developers had implemented a lot of code to handle the structured storage side of it all, and whilst it mostly worked, there were a couple of obscure bugs which were flushed out by writing huge files. After spending some time debugging it all, we threw away all of the third party code that implemented structured storage and replaced it with the system provided COM objects. So I guess what I am saying is that the approach outlined by @Alexander Elagin above seems likely to be good advice to me.

This has always been a total heap of crap

Ah, yes, I see now! Wise