Is "simple" better?

Just thought I'd pass along a lesson that I continue to learn.

A couple of years ago I had the need to know my ever-changing home IP address. Granted there are some free tools like Dynamic DNS and others that do this, but I had some special requirements that the IP had to be placed on another server for special reasons.

When I wrote the code, I created a service that ran on my home server. I used a C# interface so that I could "one day" move other types of data from my home PC to a server. I also had to have Visual Studio create the service installer and manually install the service. I created my Visual Studio solution with nicely decoupoled projects (assemblies). I was a genius.

Recently I had to change some stuff in that piece of code. The more I thought about it (and tried to remember all the code parts), I realized had I just taken a pure TDD (test-driven development) approach I could have done it much simpler. I then sat down and wrote a simple console app main() with about 4 lines of code to call a web page with a magical query parameter that did everything I needed. A quick job creation in Windows Task Manager and things were now running nicely.

Much less code and more importantly, much easier to maintain and make sense of. I know we all hear often (and I preach it as well) that we are to develop "extensible" code, but the reality of it is that probably 90% of the code we write will never even need to be extended. Given that, a TDD attribute is warranted in many cases (if not all of them).

I'm still learning that "simple is better" a lot of the time.