I’ve recently started to play around with Microsoft Pex, and I’m discovering (1) that there is a non-trivial learning curve; and (2) that it seems like a pretty powerful tool. As best I can tell at this early stage (and admittedly, I’m certainly a neophyte), there seem to be two major components. The first is…
When I first became aware of the Extension Method in C#, my reaction was similar to that of a lot of people–I thought it was a pretty neat trick. For anyone not familiar with extension methods, they are a construct introduced in C# along with LINQ to allow ‘extension’ of a class. Here’s an example:…
I’m currently working on an ongoing side project, and we’re using Microsoft Code Contracts, so I thought that I would create a series of posts documenting my experience with this as a new and curious user. The basic idea of it is to standardize and formalize preconditions, post conditions, and invariants in your classes. For…
One of the central idioms of WPF development is having presentation tier classes implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Anybody who has done more than a “Hello World” WPF application or two is almost certainly familiar with this and quite probably knows it like the back of his or her hand. As I’ve been learning WPF with…
In my last post, I alluded briefly to the concept of “tribal knowledge” when developing software. I’ve heard this term defined in various contexts, but for the sake of discussion here, I’m going to define this as knowledge about how to accomplish a task that is not self-evident or necessarily intuitive. So, for instance, let’s…
