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C# Comments: A Complete Guide, Including Examples

Carlos Schults4 Comments

C_sharp_comments_sign_with_arrowTime for another C#-related post. We’ve already covered a fair amount of the language’s keywords, types, and concepts in previous posts. Today’s post covers C# comments, a topic that you might think is trivial.

My mission in this post is to convince you otherwise. True, comments are far from being the most exciting programming topic you could think of, I admit. And sure, comments have gotten a negative reputation over the years. But there’s more to comments than you might think.

In this post, you’ll learn about the definition of C# comments, followed by common justifications for their usage. Then we’ll proceed to show you the different possible types of C# comments and how to use them in practice. Let’s get started.

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DateTime.Now: Usage, Examples, Best Practices, and Pitfalls

Carlos Schults3 Comments

Datetime.now_code_snippet_hand_drawn

For many developers, their first experience handling time in C# is by using DateTime.Now.

When needing to retrieve the current date and time, they’d search for it, reaching a StackOverflow question or some documentation page by Microsoft. They’d quickly find that the way you get the current instant is by using the “DateTime.Now.” They’d go back to their code, use the property, and be done with it.

Also, for many developers, the scenario described above is the extent of their education about DateTime.Now. This isn’t good. Why?

Well, time is one of the trickiest topics in programming. Not knowing about its intricacies can get you into trouble. We’re here to help avoid that, by taking a look at the dos and don’ts of DateTime.Now.

We’re going to cover what DateTime.Now is the basics of its use. Then we’ll go a bit deeper, showing some more advanced usage scenarios (i.e. output formatting), covering the best practices you should employ and also the pitfalls you must be aware of when working with this property.

Let’s get started.

Want to know if you're getting it right as you learn C#?
Download a free trial of CodeIt.Right and get an instant, automated code review.

(more…)

CodeIt.Right Rules Explained, Part 22

Carlos SchultsNo Comments

CodeItRight_Rules_22Welcome back to the CodeIt.Right Rules Explained series. For those of you who haven’t seen an installment in this series, let’s explain what it’s all about.?CodeIt.Right?is a tool that performs automated code review for .NET. It checks your code against a set of rules, giving you valuable feedback on its quality. Throughout the series, we’ve been explaining these rules, always three at a time.

In every post in this series, we start with the following two rules of thumb:

  • Never implement a suggested fix without knowing what makes it a fix.
  • Never ignore a suggested fix without understanding what makes it a fix.

Trust me?we don’t phrase it this way to sound funny or anything. It’d be the same thing to say ?figure out why the tool is suggesting this.? But we don’t. And here’s why.

Each time CodeIt.Right shows you a warning, you must decide to either address it or ignore it.?Make that choice for the right reasons. Ignore the warning when you’re truly convinced it doesn’t apply to your situation or doesn’t provide enough benefits. Don’t ignore it because you don’t understand it very well and don’t feel like handling it.

Now that you understand what this post is all about, let’s get to today’s three rules.

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Code Contracts: A Technique to Cut Down on Bugs

Carlos Schults2 Comments

Two Hands Handshake signifying code contractsRent, employment, house buying: you name it. If you’re an adult, chances are that you’ve signed several contracts in your life (and will probably sign many more). A contract is an agreement that defines the rights and obligations of two or more parties in order to accomplish something.

Having a proper contract in place is a powerful tool to clear doubts about what you’re allowed or not allowed to do to the apartment you live at, for instance. A contract also defines penalties for the parties that fail to fulfill their part of the agreement. If you don’t put down your house payments when they’re due, you’re pretty much guaranteed to suffer some consequences.

Contracts are everywhere in the real world. But what would it look like if we could use something similar to contracts in our code? For instance, what if we could specify “clauses” that defined the conditions required at the start and end of a function? Or maybe that specified and enforced the invariants of our objects? In this case, I’d say our programs would definitely improve in readability, safeness,?and self-documentation.

And now, what if I told you something like this already exists?

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exasperated programmer with her head on a desk resenting code review practices

The 4 Code Review Practices That Make Devs Quit

Carlos SchultsNo Comments

If we start with the premise that having code reviews?is better than not having them, the next step is to figure out how to make them better. And though we’re all aware that code reviews are a good thing, they can quickly degenerate into toxic scenarios. We don’t want that.

In this post, we’re going to see four code review practices that can make developers feel frustrated and alienated. In the more extreme cases, developers might even leave a company to escape from what they perceive as tyrannical, nonsensical demands. Keep reading to learn what those practices are, how to avoid them, and how to leverage the benefits of automation in your code reviews to prevent many of these toxic scenarios from happening in the first place

Once you know that, you’ll be empowered to turn your code reviews into healthy processes that lead to higher code quality and more happiness for the developers in your team. Let’s get started! (more…)

CodeItRight_Rules_21

CodeIt.Right Rules Explained, Part 21

Carlos SchultsNo Comments

Welcome to another installment of the “CodeIt.RightRules Explained” series. If the previous sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t despair?here’s a quick recap.

CodeIt.Right?is one of the SubMain’s offerings. You can think of it as an automated code review tool, which puts it into the category of?static code analyzers. CodeIt.Right checks your source code against a set of rules, which could be the default set or ones customized by you.

In this ongoing series, we focus on the standard, pre-packaged sets for obvious reasons: those are the ones that will apply to everyone. In each installment?of the series, we explain three CodeIt.Right rules so that you know why you should or shouldn’t deactivate the rule when using CodeIt.Right.

Speaking of which, we tend to start these posts with the following sentences:

  • Never implement a suggested fix without knowing what makes it a fix.
  • Never ignore a suggested fix without understanding what makes it a fix.

Basically, you can condense these two rules into: ?Always understand a suggested fix.? But we prefer to present them as two separate rules to emphasize the choice you have in front of you: ignore the warning or implement a fix. If you decide to ignore the warning, do it only when you understand the implications. If you go for the fix, make sure you know what you’re doing and why implementing the fix benefits your code.

With that out of the way, let’s get to today’s rules.

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“String Was Not Recognized as a Valid DateTime.” Why It Happens and How to Avoid It.

Carlos SchultsNo Comments

Ah…error messages.

Sometimes very useful, other times not so much, but always present in a developer?s life. And that?s what today?s post is about.

Not ?error messages? in general, but one message in particular: ?String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.?

Datetime mistake: string not recognized as valid datetime.

As a developer, you?re pretty much guaranteed to have to write code that handles date and time. Which means you?re also bound to have some problems while parsing strings to DateTime values, and that?s what this post will cover.

We?ll start out by talking about the causes of the issue. You’ll learn about globalization and how big a role it plays in the consistency and correction of your application. Then, we?ll close with practical advice on what you can do to prevent such problems from happening in the first place.

Let?s get started!

Want to prevent runtime issues and design problems?

Download a free trial of CodeIt.Right and get an instant, automated code review.

(more…)

Man shrugging, trying to figure out why intellisense isn't working

Visual Studio IntelliSense Not Working? What To Do.

Carlos Schults12 Comments

There are certain tools that have become indispensable for developers in this day and age. These tools often start as “nice-to-haves” but quickly graduate to “must-haves” due to the benefits they provide. Once you get used to relying?on them, it’s terribly frustrating when you’re prevented from using them for some reason. And there’s a very specific tool in that category I want to talk about today. It’s called Visual Studio IntelliSense.

This intelligent code completion tool present in Visual Studio is definitely a must-have for a .NET developer. The .NET Framework BCL (Base Class Library) is just too large for a human?brain to grasp. There’s no way you could remember all those classes, interfaces, and methods. Being able to put a period after some variable and get a nice list of all the possible members you can call isn’t only a nicety: it’s a survival need. So, what to do when you need Visual Studio IntelliSense but, for whatever reason, it’s not working? That’s what this post is about.

We’ll start out by doing a quick overview of Visual Studio IntelliSense. We’ll cover a little bit of history, plus a few definitions, so you can grasp why this tool is more than a simple autocomplete. Then we’ll proceed to cover the different solutions you can try to get you out of this nightmarish scenario.

We’ll then close the post with quick advice on how to get IntelliSense to work for your own classes and types.

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CodeItRight_Rules_20

CodeIt.Right Rules Explained, Part 20

Carlos SchultsNo Comments

Time for yet another deep dive into three more CodeIt.Right Rules. For those of you who don’t know about our CodeIt.Right Rules series, here’s a brief explanation.

CodeIt.Right is one of the tools offered by SubMain. It’s a static code analyzer tool or, more specifically, an automated code review tool. CodeIt.Right works by checking your code against a set of rules and giving you instant feedback on how to solve potential problems. It even offers automatic fixes when applicable.

In each installment on this ongoing series, we explain three CodeIt.Right rules, usually picked from as diverse a category?as possible, to showcase the flexibility and breadth of the ruleset.

Readers of this series know that we like to start these posts by stating two things:

  • Never implement a suggested fix without knowing what makes it a fix.
  • Never ignore a suggested fix without understanding what makes it a fix.

Yeah, you could simplify this down to ?always understand a suggested fix.??But I choose to not put it that way since I want you to really think and consider your options. If you decide to ignore a fix, do so understanding the consequences. On the other hand, if you accept a suggested fix, do it with a full understanding of how that’s going to benefit your application.

With all that in mind, let’s get to today’s rules.

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C# Switch Statement: What Is It, How to Use It, and Why You Should Beware

Carlos Schults1 Comment

Time to cover yet another construct of the C# language. In this series, we’ve already covered the C# list, array, and string, to name a few. Today’s post is a little bit different, though. Its subject isn’t a data structure or type, but instead, a decision structure: the C# switch statement.

In this post you’ll learn all about the switch statement. What is it, how should you use it, and when should be careful using it?

Le’s get started!

Want to know if you're getting it right as you learn C#?
Download a free trial of CodeIt.Right and get an instant, automated code review.

(more…)

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