Test post from Diarist 1.2!

A while ago I posted that I was going to try using Diarist (a blogging client for Pocket PC). My experience was mixed. While it was useful I didn’t really like the way that it formatted the eventual content on my blog. In fact I blogged about the experience.

Well, Kevin Daly the author of Diarist and we exchanged a few e-mails and drew out a few more requirements. After a few days he had a new build available – which I am running now.

Looking good Kevin! Thanks!

Checked Exceptions

Almost like clock work, a discussion on exceptions always ends up comparing .NET’s implementation with Java’s. One of the significant features in Java is checked exceptions. Nick mentioned that he liked the feature but I’m not convinced.

My issue with checked exceptions in Java was that it would encourage sloppy deveopers not to say their method could throw Exception, but rather the people calling those APIs would do things like:

try
{
   DoSomething();
}
catch (Exception)
{
}

Basically – just swallow exceptions consequences be damned. It would be better if the language allowed you to “acknowledge” that an exception could be thrown but not actually handle it. I also think that empty exception handlers should be a hard compiler error.