16 valuable tips to better express your intent. Posted August 20, 2015 by by Alain There is no single definition for good or clean code. The definition will change per developer or team, but one thing the definitions will have in common is that good code expresses its intent properly. When your code looks like the hard to read scripts they show in Hollywood movies, take these tips to improve…
How abstraction can reduce complexity, and increase testability and maintainability Posted August 18, 2015 by by Alain When I was a junior developer I had no clue what I was doing and I had no one above me that guided me in the right direction. All I had was a lot of confidence (that I was the best software developer in the world) and a lot of good intentions. Since one of…
The Gang of Four Decorator Pattern Posted July 6, 2015 by by Alain Design patterns can be defined as time-tested solutions, or problem solvers for recurring code problems. At You_Source, we love design patterns as they help us save time communicating about code, architecture, and they help reduce the time developers spend on understanding code (which, according to various studies, developers spend 20% up to 80% doing). The…
11 Tips for Successful Unit Testing Posted June 25, 2015 by by Alain Unit testing makes or breaks a software development project. In small scale projects with a short life expectancy, this may not be integral but this is not the case for long-term projects. Maintainability of the source code matters, and testable code equals maintainable code. Unit testing your code will increase the lifespan of your application…
GhostDoc Posted June 14, 2015 by by Alain If you are using StyleCop then GhostDoc is a tool you can’t do without. GhostDoc will help you document your C# code. GhostDoc is a Visual Studio plugin that runs from the editor in Visual Studio. It creates skeleton documentation, and even attempts to guess the documentation based on the name of your methods. If you…
StyleCop Posted June 14, 2015 by by Alain StyleCop is an extremely useful Visual Studio plugin that helps you validate your style against a set of predefined rules. It runs straight from the editor and shows errors and warnings in your error list. The big benefits of using this tool become clear in projects with larger team sizes. All developers will code in…