I got my start in the software industry in that building, too. I was an intern at Rose-Hulman Ventures in 2005, building tax administration software for Indiana counties in C# 1.0 WinForms with Visual SourceSafe and Microsoft SQL Server. VSS required you to take a lock on a file to be able to edit it (there’s no merge ability) so I spent a full afternoon one day separating our data access layer class into partial classes so it would be spread across multiple files, and more than one developer could write a stored procedure wrapper at a time! Likewise, our bug database also only had enough licenses for one or two people to be logged in at a time, so we printed out our tickets to work on them. Learned a lot that summer, especially the fundamentals of databases and software architecture. Also learning C# that early gave me a ton of experience and willingness to work with C# again in my next few jobs.
Well, you survived using Visual Source Safe. (I've lost so much hard work with that tool). I worked on stuff one generation before C#. Visual FoxPro was my money maker for awhile.
We had a “robust” backup strategy. (Taking a copy of the source code onto the file share every night.) Definitely lost VSS revision history at least once. I don’t know how VSS ever made it to customers!
You’re right, I misremembered! I made a hideous inheritance chain instead:
abstract class UserDAL { }
abstract class ParcelDAL : UserDAL { }
...
abstract class DAL_n : DAL_n_minus_1 { }
class DataAccessLayer : DAL_n { }
each in their own file, of course. I tried to give them descriptive names and very narrow scopes. But inheritance is pretty dumb here. What does it mean for ParcelDAL to extend UserDAL? A parcel is not a user. When C# 2 came out, I was able to get rid of the inheritance and make them all part of one big partial class, keeping the file names the same.
