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Software Development Productivity
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Scott Bellware has an interesting series of posts where he discusses how to get back to productive development teams. As usual in his writing (IMO), in a rather verbose way he brings up quite a few good points. Please go ahead and read them. He links from the first entry to the next so you can follow the flow.
I agree with the analysis that unnatural organizational structures kill productivity, motivation and leadership. And I believe this is one of the reasons why even big companies turn to so-called "boutique development shops" (shameless plug there): by being small and very cohesive, these shops offer creativity and productivity levels that "mere big" ISVs can only dream of.
And it's not always only a matter of design principles, I'd add. Sometimes you need a specific area of expertise which you're better off outsourcing (i.e. Visual Studio extensibility, hardcore WCF, framework/runtime libraries, WPF/Silverlight/Blend UEX, etc.). Small shops of highly specialized professionals can save you tons of money and time. But your own dev team will certainly benefit from applying sound design principles for what matters most to your business: the business rules and logic....
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How to transform old properties to automatic properties with a ‘simple’ search and replace
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Say you have a (typically autogenerated) class with properties like:
public partial class Project : IExtensibleDataObject
{
public System.Runtime.Serialization.ExtensionDataObject ExtensionData
{
get
{
return this.extensionDataField;
}
set
{
this.extensionDataField = value;
}
}
Now you can fire up the Find & Replace dialog in VS and enter the following "simple" expression in Find What:
\n:b*\{[:b\n]*get[:b\n]*\{[.:b\n]*.*[.:b\n]*\}[.:b\n]*set[:b\n]*\{[.:b\n]*.*[.:b\n]*\}[.:b\n]*\}
And use the following expression for the replace:
{ get; set; }
Don't forget to set the Use: Regular expressions option....
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How to get out of the GAC all the registered assemblies
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You know how annoying the GAC shell extension makes it to access the actual assemblies:
Utterly useless.
Of course, you surely know that you can get to those elusive assemblies via the command-line and side-step the shell extension:
But, now you need to go to each assembly folder, then its version, and so the actual assemblies are scattered through various locations.
This one-liner powershell command will get them all out in a folder of your choosing for easy Reflector-ing (create the target before running it):
Get-ChildItem C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL -filter *.dll -recurse | Copy-Item -destination C:\GAC
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Why Windows Media Center is dead
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Windows Media Center (WMC) is based on a relatively simple (albeit awfully implemented) principle: you have ONE "server" PC holding and running your media, and then you associate any number of Media Center Extenders to it that are typically (except for the XBox 360) single-purpose devices that can only act as such and are fancy and silent enough to deserve a place in your living room.
I guess back in 2005, the entire model and most of Microsoft design decisions on this product may have be justifiable. 5 years later, none of them make any sense and IMO mean that WMC is currently a totally flawed, doomed and generally useless product for most common needs.
Why it (kind of) made sense back then
- Hardware: In 2005, you wouldn't dare subject your family to the noise, ugliness, quirkiness, uex, power comsumption, and cost of a full-blown "Home Theater PC" (HTPC) or an XBox power sucker. The Media Center Extender model made sense because you couldn't buy a full PC that was silent and nice-looking enough for the price of an extender. (but the extenders weren't without ...
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How to mock extension methods
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. without paying for a TypeMock Isolator license to do it ;-)
There's going to be no magic here. You have to explicitly design for testability. That's one of the things I like about mocking: if you can mock a dependency, then it means your design is loosely coupled (e.g. not tied to a particular implementation of that dependency), and you're not "cheating or taking any shortcuts. If a test can replace a dependency at test-time, your'll surely be able to replace the real implementation with something different when/if time comes to do so.
Extension methods are tricky because they are static methods, really just syntactic sugar for a "good" old static class with static methods (typically a "helper" of some sort. But what is special about them, is that they show up (provided you have the right usings/imports) in the target type API as if they were its own instance methods. This is significant, because it also means that it's very easy to pollute the target type API as you (and other referenced libraries) keep piling up these methods on it....
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Resetting Visual Studio Experimental Instance to its super-clean initial state
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If you are doing Visual Studio extensibility (VSX) work, you are probably aware of the existence of the Visual Studio "Experimental" instance. This is basically an instance of VS that has its own isolated registry, settings, extensions, etc. This allows you to test your extensions to VS without polluting your main development environment.
Sometimes, the environment might get corrupted for whatever reason, or it might be that you just want to test your extension with a clean environment after messing with it for a while.
The Visual Studio SDK does come with a tool to reset the experimental instance, available from your Start menu with the name "Reset the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Experimental instance". That will not, however, give you the pristine environment you got the first time you start the experimental instance to test your first extension....
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Reactive Framework Extensions Generator
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You probably know already that the Reactive Framework Extensions (Rx) is a new library on top of .NET 4.0 and Silverlight that allows developers to leverage the expressiveness and power of LINQ for .NET events. It brings an entirely new paradigm for doing event-driven apps, and therefore shines in WPF/Silverlight scenarios.
Read more about Rx at the team blog, the project home page and Matthew excelent blog series.
Even with the general availability of the bits for VS2010 beta2 at DevLabs, there's still quite a bit of work you need to do in order to leverage the extensions. Specifically, you need to turn your events into IObservables that can then use the Rx extensions for querying and subscribing. This is a lot of repetitive and boring code that can be easily automated. ...
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The myth that TDD or test-first slows you down is true
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I'm sad to say it, but it is true. It slows you down. But not everytime, and not for everything. So let's be more specific on the cases where it DOES slow you down noticeably:
- Cowboy or Duct Tape Programming Mode: If you code all day like crazy in a "cowboy" or "duct tape" programming mode, then it WILL slow you down, significantly. In this mode, you're hacking together stuff that works by pure luck, you're only superficially and typically manually "testing" the thing, before calling it "done" and move on. Someone will come after some day when the customer complains about a bug, and figure out what to do. Not your problem though, for sure. For all you care about, you might even have another job by then. Your productivity kicks ass, you're the fastest guy in the team, and can get "complete" features to your boss in record time. Everyone (who hasn't worked with you long enough) thinks you're a genious, 'cause you can get something that works on the first shot. Brilliant!...
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Writing meaningful, self-documenting, behavior-oriented tests
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Over the years I've come to realize that the one-fixture-per-class approach to unit testing just doesn't scale. As the amount of variations in state and interactions increases, that file starts becoming a big soup of "Should" methods that are increasingly difficult to traverse and find later on. Essentially, since every test is doing the first "A" in AAA (Arrange-Act-Assert) too, that means the context is also part of the test method.
You can only make a method so long and remain understandable at a glance: IfRepositoryContainsACustomerAndAddingANewOneWithSameIdButDifferentAliasThenThrowsInvalidArgumentException. So, a while ago at Clarius we started exploring some of the concepts behind BDD (Behavior Driven Development), Context/Specification, etc., while working on an internal project. ...
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