How to understand an existing code-base

Developers usually love working on a “green fields” project: building something brand new. Green fields projects are fun because you have a lot of creative freedom, you can use the latest technologies and because it’s fast and easy when you don’t have to worry…

WPF tip: executing code after UI has finished updating

I faced an interesting challenge, where a data-bound property executed logic, but before the Visual Tree had refreshed, so my control did not work as expected.

To VAR or not to VAR?

C#’s VAR keyword is very useful. It was introduced originally (for the most part at least) to allow dynamic language features and use of anonymous types.

Since I don’t use those features very often, what I really like is that it gets rid of unnecessary junk in your…

Exception handling and Exception throwing principles

Return exceptions for exceptional situations. Return result objects for other non-happy-path results.

How to identify when is something “exceptional”?

• Exceptional is usually technical in…

Actually useful Visual Studio debugging features

Visual Studio 2015 can be a big, slow, beast. But when you’ve got enough horsepower to run it properly it has some fantastic features.

I find these features particularly useful when debugging:

Why use the Console instead of a GUI?

Why use the console instead of a GUI? Or why use a simple text editor instead of an all-powerful IDE?

I was perplexed with the shift in the industry towards Consoles and Text Editors. Why would anyone in their right mind use VIM instead…

Debugging a tricky production issue

Debugging a tricky production issue. Here is what I usually do, in order of preference:

• Replicate locally and step through code to figure out what is going on.
• Add logs and replicate in production, then use logs to…

Underscores are perfectly fine

I have noticed a stigma attached to underscores being used in method or variable names. For example, most people I have worked with prefer AMethodNameLikeThis() over a A_Method_Name_Like_This().

When it’s not over-architecting

There is a lot of push-back lately against over-architecting and too-early-abstraction. I think this is great, “DRY” often leads to bad architectures.

However, I feel it can be harmful if we don’t decide when exactly a thing is “over-architected”…

How to identify “over engineering”

This is how I identify “over engineering”:

When adding complexity to code in order to…

• Cater for scenarios that will probably never happen. Eg. Switching to a different database.