The Problem If you find yourself immersed in a code base that is sometimes or often fast and loose with APIs and internal contracts between components, you might get into the habit of writing a lot of defensive code. This applies to pretty much any programming language, but I’ll give examples here in C#, since…
Back Story Recently, I set up a media wiki installation. The surrounding requirements were such that I was forced to use a Windows 2003 server instead of Linux, which would have been my preference, but hey, when life gives you lemons, turn the lemon into a WAMP stack. And that’s just what I did. The…
Context I’m a member of the LinkedIn group “Software Craftsmanship.” I’m not an active member, but I do like perusing the discussion topics. Recently, I read through this discussion on whether software is more of an “art” or a “craft.” This set me to musing a bit, so I thought I would post about it…
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:…
