The Curious Coder

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…

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…

Building quality public-facing websites

I’m busy adding two very simple screens to our website and feel anxious about how long the work is taking. That got me thinking about what kinds of things you need to consider when you’re building top quality public-facing websites.

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.

Things that depend on things

It’s nice to see the IT industry moving in a positive direction, maturing, and building upon earlier good practices. I’ve been reading recently about microservices, and I notice how previous practices enable microservices (which I think is a good thing, by the way).

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:

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.