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Taming the Lint Monster Review

Now it's dark so early it's quite exciting rolling past Canary Wharf on the train and seeing all the lights and thinking of Lehman building standing empty. It still fills me with excitement, just like the first time I went there for a job interview. Anyway, I wasn't in London last night to see Canary Wharf. I was there to see Anna-Jayne Metcalfe speak about PC-Lint.

Although it pains me to say it and the possibility of a C++ project came up just this week, I don't do C++ any more. The last two years have been a really big change for me in that regard. However, I am more than a little responsible for the fact that Anna is speaking in London tonight, having volunteered her to Allan Kelly when he was looking for a speaker for November, so I went to show my support and take any flack.

Anna had a really good turn out. ACCU London meetings usually attract between ten and twenty attendees and Anna had somewhere between ten and fifteen. She was obviously nervous and at times difficult to hear, but she knows her stuff and has a passion for it. I was also impressed that she managed not to mention her company's Visual Lint product until the question and answer session at the end.

The group were intensely interested and questions were asked throughout. Although it was looking unlikely at one stage, Anna did manage to get to the end of her slides and there was only a slight overrun, that wasn't helped by technical problems at the beginning.

I found it quite nostalgic revisiting memory leaks, uninitialised variables and other problems that PC-Lint can detect and that, in the world of dynamic garbage collected languages, I rarely need to worry about in quite the same way these days.

I'm hoping Anna will speak at the ACCU conference this year and give us an insight into Visual Lint and Riverblade's new Incredibuild integration.

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