What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
I've recently finished the book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper, a well known proponent for interaction design. To be honest, I never really saw the purpose of interaction design in our projects. But after reading this book, I now know I didn't really understand what it was abou...
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
This morning, on the Developer Days 2010, I did a talk on the current state of affairs of the 4.0 version of the Entity Framework, including a rough comparison with NHibernate 2.1. Apparently this is something that’s on the mind of many people. The room was supposed to accommodate a maximum of 80...
Some of you who have been visiting the Dutch Developer Days 2010 in The Hague today may have noticed the flyers and banners for promoting the new online version of the .NET Magazine. Those who already know me may have noticed that it’s me on those banners. Since the photographer spe...
As part of my effort to improve the type-safety of Fluent Assertions, I’ve been investigating the possibility to use C# extension methods all the way. Unfortunately I think I’ve ran into the limitations of C# 3.0 (and C# 4.0 since it doesn’t add anything useful for this). Essentially, I’d like to...
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
In response to my posts on Peer Reviews, Unit Testing & TDD, and Common Code Layout, someone noticed that all these posts were part of my Team Foundation Server Development Practices series, but not every post actually mentioned TFS. Obviously, he was right. The reason for using the TFS prefi...
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
Thanks to all the voters who voted for my wildcard proposal on Entity Framework 4.0, I will be speaking at the Microsoft Developer Days 2010, again. Last year, the whole wildcard thingy was a bit fuzzy, but this year, the organization has gone through great lengths to seriously include us wildcar...