After my recent post on the introduction of Code Contracts in .NET 4.0 , I got some strong reaction that they would rather rely on TDD, or the better term, Example Driven Development specifications to ensure correctness. Instead, it's my intent to talk about how they can complement each other in some...

As I've said in many posts before, I'm a big fan of stating your preconditions, postconditions, invariants and so on explicitly in your code through the use of contracts in the Design by Contract Parlance. Spec# is a project that came from Microsoft Research as a language based upon C# to add Design...

Very recently there has been an ongoing debate between static and dynamically typed languages. Since it seems that there has been some Star Wars references, I thought I'd add my own. I originally wanted to cover this as part of the future of C#, but I think it deserves its own topic. There have been...

It was often asked during some of my presentations on F# and Functional C# about the future direction of C# and where I think it's going. Last night I was pinged about this with my F# talk at the Philly ALT.NET meeting. The question was asked, why bother learning F#, when eventually I'll get these things...

I decided to stay on the Design by Contract side for just a little bit. Recently, Raymond Chen posted "If you pass invalid parameters, then all bets are off" in which he goes into parameter validation and basic defensive programming. Many of the conversations had on the blog take me back to my C++ and...

In one of my previous posts about Command-Query Separation (CQS) and side effecting functions being code smells, it was pointed out to me again about immutable builders. For the most part, this has been one area of CQS that I've been willing to let break. I've been following Martin Fowler's advice on...

After talking with Greg Young for a little this morning, I realized I missed a few points that I think need to be covered as well when it comes to side effecting functions are code smells. In the previous post , I talked about side effect free functions and Design by Contract (DbC) features in regards...

I know the title might catch a few people off guard, but let me explain. Side effecting functions, for the most part, are code smells. This is a very important concept in Domain Driven Design (DDD) that's often overlooked. For those who are deep in DDD, this should sound rather familiar. And in the end...

In a previous post, I posted about the Lang.NET symposium and rolling your own compiler. I cited an MSDN article that was a good starter for someone interested in writing that new language in .NET we've all been waiting for. It's not by any means to get you towards finishing IronRuby by yourself, but...

Lately, I've been talking about the new feature coming to .NET 4.0, Code Contracts , which is to bring Design by Contract (DbC) idioms to all .NET languages as part of the base class library. Last week, I attended QCon, where Greg Young, one of my CodeBetter cohorts, gave a talk titled "TDD in a DbC...