Technical debt is usually seen as a negative factor in a development process. While having too much technical debt is indeed a good indicator for a project gone bad, technical debt is not always a bad thing. What is technical debt? When you start writing code you usually have a choice: either do it quick […] Read More...
Code Reviews: why and how?
Of all the practices implemented to improve code quality, such as unit testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, daily stand-ups, I find the most important one is doing proper code reviews. Code reviews have a lot of advantages: It’s much easier to spot problems with other people’s code than with your own Knowledge of the codebase […] Read More...
Build 2016 announcements
Build 2016 is finished and as always it was great to see Microsoft bringing new opportunities to businesses and developers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend, but luckily, the live stream of all the important sessions, especially for the keynotes, made up for that. These are the announcements that excited me the most. Microsoft Bot […] Read More...
Dependency management: strategies and pitfalls
In the wake of the issue with NPM, I wanted to share my view and experience with dependency management. First of all, what happened? I’m not going to go too deep on what actually happened (there’s plenty of information about that), but essentially, because of a copyright dispute a package was removed and replaced with […] Read More...
Vertical slices in ASP.NET MVC
Why? In ASP.NET MVC, applications are divided into horizontal layers, which is reflected in the project structure: Controllers Views Models Scripts Style It’s a good idea to divide you application into logical parts. While the idea of horizontal slices might look like a good idea, in practice I have noticed that it’s not necessarily the […] Read More...
Testing REST clients
With the proliferation of REST API’s, external ones and internal ones (think microservices), we very often find ourselves depending on these external services in our applications. Usually we have some designated class in front of the access to such a REST API. That class takes care of authentication, serialization and other plumbing. Testing this part […] Read More...
New features in C# 7, part 2
In my previous post about probable new features in C# 7, I talked about Tuples, Record Types and Pattern Matching. These are the most obvious candidates for inclusion. In this post I want to highlight a few more new features that are not getting as much attention but are also very useful features. C# 7 […] Read More...
C# 7: New Features
It seems like only yesterday we got C# 6, but as it goes in software development land, the next thing is already on its way. In this post I want to describe the most likely new C# 7 features, what they look like and why they’re useful. C# 7 Tuples Update 22/07/2016: Tuples are planned […] Read More...
Programming in the zone
Much has been written and said about programming in “the zone”. Most articles give you tips on how to get in the zone and keep there. I haven’t found any article though that challenges the usefulness of ‘being in the zone’ (If I have missed some, please let me know). What is the zone? The […] Read More...
The test pyramid
The test pyramid is a concept that was developed by Mike Cohn. It states that you should have an appropriate amount of each type of test. In the pyramid he distinguishes different types of tests: Exploratory tests: Performed manually by a tester System tests: Executed by a program or script that automates the UI (also […] Read More...