Today I was having another round of conversations with a buddy of mine about the concept of waste and unused code. In agile there is a concept called YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) that basically states that you should not add code that is not immediately needed as it is waste. In Lean software...

In the past I have written about the Fail Fast principle.  This is a principle I try to live my development life by.  I would rather explicitly check for possible failure points then have a runtime error crop up.  In the past when writing these failure check we have had to resort to a...

This post is another in the recent string of How-to's. But it is just so hard to resist. .Net 3.5 has so many cool features, it is just fun to explore them all. Ok, so here is the issue we are going to solve today. We have a list of entities and we need to sort them. In this post I will show you...

Ok, so I know this is a odd question but I am stumped. Normally when I have a private instance level variable that is exposed via a property I format my class file as such. { ..... all instance variables ..... any constructors ..... any public/private/protected methods ..... any properties } Now that...

Before I get started, I personally am a fan of using #regions in my code.  I think it cleans up everything, allowing me to only see what I want to see.  I also know that many of you disagree with me, and that is fine. Here are 2 posts that voice their disapproval for regions if you are interested...

Today I was refactoring some sql procs along with the corresponding .net code that called the procs. My primary focus was to implement some new business rules (ways to get totals) in the proc.  In doing so, I completely re-wrote the proc.  In the end the return values (column names) were the...

How many times as developers have we taken a look at someone else's code and said 'This stuff sucks' or 'WTF where they thinking'? I know I have said this plenty of time. I also am pretty sure that others have said this about my code. In fact I am KNOW I have said that about my own...

Pretty much any developer with half a brain (or any real world experience) knows that you MUST keep your source code in some sort of source code repository. There are many of them out there, VSS, Vault, TFS, CVS, SVN, the list goes on. If putting your code (C#, C++, VB, etc) into a source control system...

As someone how has been designing and developing WinForms based applications for the past 7+ years, I have learned that subclassing UI controls is a must. You may be thinking, why would I want to subclass a text box? Or a combo box? The answer is simple, the better future proof your app. How many times...

Recently I was asked about backing in unit tests into an existing project. In particular I was asked A) was possible and B) is it worth it. In short my answers to both these are Yes and Yes. However, backing in unit tests is not without its challenges. I thought today I would go express my experiences...