Writings of Urda

Today marked the beginning of my real co-op experience and work tasks here at Mercer. The morning started off with a conference call with dev-team members from China, India, and the rest of us here in Louisville via teleconferencing. The reason for the meeting was to demo the new features and functionality of the latest release for a Mercer product. Deployment will be occurring later this week, but before that could happen some last minute testing needed to be done.

I had the opportunity to get a rundown of the internals of the product, and from there performed testing on a new file manager to check for any missed bugs or problems. Throughout all of this I learned how Mercer developed any project starting from conception, to testing, and final delivery to production. While no single step is an easy task, Mercer’s method produces undeniable results and amazing software.

On Monday I started my first day of my second co-op with a new employer. I will be working with Mercer, a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, developing and supporting C# and .NET Mercer applications. The past two days have been filled with standard new hire training and orientation sessions and plenty of reading. However it is the brief product overview and C# introduction sessions I learned the most from.

I have learned a handful of C# specifics and design ideas from my supervisor Zane Thorn. Out of all the topics touched, C# ‘delegates’ was the most new and interesting idea to me. A C# delegate is best defined as…

…a method to call and optionally an object to call the method on. They are used, among other things, to implement callbacks and event listeners. It encapsulates a reference to a method inside a delegate object. The delegate object can then be passed to code which can call the referenced method, without having to know at compile time which method will be invoked.

Source: Delegate (CLI) - Wikipedia

So we can define a simple delegate name, and have our main program use it as a callback hook for asynchronous applications. All of this is done without the need for a program to know what in the world the method actually does. Our program is not bound to knowing which method exactly will be called when the delegate is used. This offers flexibility to defining the back-end method used by the delegate, without trigger compilation issues while working on a project.