Category: <span>Best Practices</span>

Using Git for Peer Reviews

This post is really more of a reference for me than anything else.  If you’re using Git (and you should be), and you are doing code/peer reviews (you are, right?), there are a few simple commands that can simplify reviewing a feature that’s spread across multiple commits.  Here are those commands. [more] First you’ll want…

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Things Every Senior .NET Developer Should Know–Introduction

.NET will officially turn 10 years old in February.  Our platform and our community have matured and grown in that time, and today it is virtually impossible for a developer to truly be an expert in everything .NET-related.  There are, however, several things that I think everyone on the .NET platform, particularly those of us…

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What’s in your Definition of Done?

Every team, whether you are practicing agile or not, regardless of platform or language, should really have some Definition of Done.  What does it mean for a story/feature/defect/whatever to be “done?”  What things have to happen to achieve “done” status?  Defining these things will help with estimating effort, and it may also help increase the…

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Sync Your Visual Studio Environment Through THE CLOUD

When you read “THE CLOUD,” I hope the voice in your mind sounded powerful and a bit haughty.  The cloud holds lots of promise (and more than a few perils).  If you find yourself using Visual Studio on multiple machines, you probably spend at least some of your precious time keeping your various development environments…

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Using An Application Bus To Raise Events

I’ve been writing recently about the Application Bus pattern and how it’s used in RageFeed.  So far, I’ve shown you how it can be used to send both one-way commands as well as synchronous request-reply commands, enabling you to decouple the pieces of your application.  There’s another type of communication that is even more loosely…

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RageFeed’s Application Bus, and Why I Built My Own

In my last article, I introduced the Application Bus pattern, a specialization of the  Message Bus pattern.  I’m employing an Application Bus in RageFeed, the hobby social networking application I sometimes work on.  Today, I’ll show you how the bus utilizes StructureMap for locating message end points and for dispatching messages.  I’ll also explain why…

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Want to be a better developer?

I’ve been trying to put together a link list of things that have helped me improve as a developer over the last couple of years.  This is far from complete, but it’s a start.  I’m not saying this is an absolute "you have to know these things" list or that it will work for everyone…

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Data Storage: Why is the answer always "relational"?

I’ve been thinking a lot about persistence and storage lately, and I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that relational databases are almost universally being used incorrectly, and that many times an alternative persistence medium is actually a much better solution.  I think relational databases are good for holding data that needs to be…

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When good architectures go bad…

Today has not been a fun day.  I have spent most of today and a large part of yesterday trying to fix a problem in our system.  The problem seems very simple at first, and indeed we came up with a dozen or so ideas for solutions to the problem.  In the end though, none…

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Unit Testing in .NET Part 3 – Asserting That Your Code Rocks

In the previous entries in this series, you’ve learned about the basics of unit testing, and you’ve seen how to create a very basic unit test.  In this post, you will learn how to fully use NUnit’s Assert class to create a full suite of unit tests.  This post builds off the sample described in…

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