Studying design patterns
The Channel 9 video prompted some interesting questions. One question asked about common patterns and design guidelines. Seemed like a good opportunity to mention that we're currently lucky enough to have Jeff Stylos from Carnegie Mellon University working with us as an intern until the end of December. While he's here he's studying different object creation patterns, particularly the use of required constructors versus default constructors. This is one of the first studies we've done that doesn't focus on a specific API but looks at design guidelines and patterns instead.
Check out one of Jeff's recent projects: https://gem.pebbles.cs.cmu.edu:8080/mica/.