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…
I would imagine that most developers reading have heard of code smells. I’ve also seen various references to other concepts such as design smells (which are probably similar to code smells) or process smells. Generally, when you read these, you chuckle or nod in agreement, thinking that you’ve seen them before. For those not familiar…
