Software Quality Blog - SubMain Software - Code Quality Tools, Automated Code Review and Refactoring

Visual Studio Extensions: 7 You Should Check Out

November 26, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchultsNo Comments

Visual studio extensions illustrated by hands If you’ve been a .NET developer for any reasonable amount of time, then you’re surely aware of what Visual Studio extensions are. If you haven’t, well, they’re pretty much what it says in the name: pieces of software (plugins, if you will) that you can add to your Visual Studio IDE to extend its capabilities.

Today’s post features a list of eight extensions that we believe are worth your time. By the end of the article, you’ll have a good grasp of the available extensions out there, and will potentially adopt some of them to make your life easier. Let’s get started.

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C# Select and Where: Writing SQL-Style Queries in Code

November 12, 2019Eric BoersmaArticles, CodeBasics, EricBoersmaNo Comments

code illustrating c# select C# is a marvelous language. It’s powerful, fast, and easy to learn. It also exposes advanced features that make doing otherwise difficult things simple. Even more impressively, it manages to make reading the code to do those complicated things easy, too. Many programming languages struggle with this last part. You might be able to do something really cool, but the code is opaque for other developers to read.

One example of a feature where C# makes the difficult easy is in the Language Integrated Natural Query (LINQ) interface. If you’ve been working with a C# code base for a little while, you might have run up against some LINQ code. The first time you see it can feel a little confusing. Some variations of LINQ code look like an entirely different programming language from the C# that you’re used to. Even for variations of LINQ that aren’t entirely different syntax, it can be difficult to parse just what the code you’re looking at is doing.

In this post, we’ll walk through the basics of LINQ and talk about how they work, so the next time you see some LINQ code, it’ll be because you’re writing it yourself.

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Code Cleanup: 7 Simple Daily Steps That Pay off in the End

October 29, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeIt.Right, LegacyCode, TechnicalDebtNo Comments

Code cleanup with a vaccum cleaner “Code cleanup” is a phrase that sounds like it’s a lot of work. Well, sometimes it may be an arduous task, indeed. But that doesn’t mean it’s the way it should be. As with many things in software development—and in general life—it’s often more comfortable, less painful and more productive to do an unpleasant task every day, little by little than let it accumulate and become a monster.

That’s what today’s post is about. We’ll present seven simple code cleanup tasks that you can perform daily, to keep your codebase readable, easy to navigate, and maintain. We don’t necessarily expect you to perform all of the steps every day. On some days, you might be able to pull it off, but on others, it might be harder to do so.

Think of the seven tips you’ll read as a practical embodiment of the scouting principle: leave the code better than how you’ve found it. Let’s get started.

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C# Documentation: A Start to Finish Guide

October 15, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, Documentation, GhostDocNo Comments

a treasure map signifying c sharp documentation If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that?code documentation is a topic we tend to cover with a certain frequency. Another common topic is concepts related to the C# language. In today’s post, we make these two common subjects converge, by presenting a guide on C# documentation.

We’ll show you a step-by-step guide that will walk you through the necessary steps you need to take to create documentation for your C# code. You’ll start by adding documentation to your code using special XML comments and end by seeing how to generate rich documentation created from these comments. You’ll learn about the importance of code documentation, see how Visual Studio can turn the documentation you create into useful help messages, and get to know some tools that can help you in this work. Let’s get started!

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C# Inheritance: A Complete but Gentle Introduction

October 1, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeBasics2

Time for another dive into a concept of the C# language. Today’s post will cover inheritance, a concept that will make us analyze the object-oriented side of C#.

Example of c# inheritance As the title of the article makes clear, this post is a gentle introduction to the concept of inheritance. It’s aimed at beginners that still haven’t mastered inheritance. That means that, despite being a complete introduction, we’ll not venture into more advanced aspects of the concept. By the end of the post, you’ll not know everything there is to know about C# inheritance. Instead, you’ll have a solid working knowledge, upon which you can keep building more and more.

Let’s get started.

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Building a Pragmatic, Lightweight Code Review Checklist

September 17, 2019Eric BoersmaArticles, CodeIt.Right, CodeReviews, EricBoersma1

The CodeItRight Bird holding a pencil to complete a code review checklist A good code review can feel like magic. A skilled code reviewer will deftly work through each part of a pull request, noting potential problems and proposing elegant solutions. If you’re like many developers, you recognize a good code review when you see one. You’ve probably even created a few yourself. But you’re probably also a bit unsure as to how to make sure that your code reviews are good every time.

One way to improve your code reviews consistently is to create a code review checklist that you run through every time you review code. A checklist makes sure that you don’t forget anything. At the same time, that checklist will stop you from turning the code review into a giant slog. You don’t want a simple code review to take hours, but you also don’t want to be the person who approves sketchy code, either.

In this article, we’ll break down the core parts of a pragmatic, lightweight code review checklist that you can use with your team.

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C# Operators: A Detailed Guide to All Of Them

September 16, 2019Phil VuolletArticles, CodeBasics, CodeIt.Right, PhilVuollet8

Every programming language has operators. Operators are the components of the language that, well, operate on variables mostly. Most C# operators are symbols such as % and ??. And some are words, like async and is. In this guide, you’ll see all of them, including an example of each one. We’ll start with the operators that are common among programming languages and end on some that are more specific to C#.

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XML Comments: Using Them in XML and Other Languages

September 5, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, DocumentationNo Comments

XML_comment_sign_with_java_c_sharp_language_logos Does the term “XML comments” confuse you? Well, rest assured. You’re not alone. “Does that refer to comments inside an XML file?” you might wonder. Or maybe you have this vague notion that it has something to do with some kind of documentation for programming source code. Both assumptions are kind of right. But you’re still reading this post, which means that “kind of” isn’t going cut for you, right?

So this post is all about XML comments. You’re going to learn what this term actually means, what XML comments are (and aren’t) good for, and learn a thing or two about software documentation. If you’re ready, then let’s get started!

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What to Look for in a C# Documentation Generator

September 3, 2019Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, Documentation, GhostDocNo Comments

Printer spitting out paper signifying c# documentation generator “Everything automatable will eventually be automated.” Have you heard that saying? I’d prefer to tweak it a little bit and say that everything automatable should be automated. If you’re a regular reader of the SubMain blog, you’ll know that we enthusiastically advocate for automation. In today’s post, we continue that trend, focusing on documentation generation. More specifically, we’ll walk you through some essential features you should consider when trying to pick a C# documentation generator. (more…)

Visual Studio Comment Shortcuts: Efficiency Tips

August 23, 2019Phil VuolletArticles, PhilVuolletNo Comments

Cntrl shift d keys for GhostDoc launch shortcut visual studio comment shortcuts By now, we all know Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V like the backs of our hands. Heck, some developers write entire programs using these copy/paste shortcuts! But what about using other shortcuts to make yourself more efficient? That’s right, I’m talking about Visual Studio comment shortcuts.

You may be aware that the Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C chord creates a comment, but there’s a bit more magic to it than the shortcut alone.

This post will delve into some details about context, language, and efficiency when it comes to comments in Visual Studio. If you’re looking for reasons why you should know this, Mark Henke does a nice job explaining four good reasons.

Now, let’s follow tradition by starting with the basics and working our way to more advanced concepts as we go along.

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