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5 Ways You Might Be Failing at Software Doneness

Vlad GeorgescuArticles, CodeBasics, VladGeorgescuNo Comments

Meat_thermometer_not_reading_even_close_to_rareOne of the most anticipated acts at a circus is the juggler?a performer who can move five or six or more balls in the air at the same time. The really complicated juggling acts, however, add something extra to wow the crowd. The juggler?first climbs some stairs, high up but still close enough for everyone to see. He’s on a platform. The overhead lights are dim while one bright spotlight is on the juggler as he starts to juggle?one, two, three, four, five, and six balls moving effortlessly through the air, all in balance. He’s good!

But now, a new spotlight illuminates everything to his right … and everyone is amazed. It’s a tightrope that runs across the entire stage to another platform. The juggler then turns and faces the tightrope while juggling the six balls, and he starts walking slowly across. Step by step, balancing and juggling, he gets to the other side. He then turns to face the crowd, catches each ball, and bows. The crowd roars in delight! He’s done!

In many ways, a software developer is a juggler who is keeping many balls in the air while simultaneously walking on a tightrope. If you drop any balls or you walk in the wrong direction, you will fail. If, on the other hand, you get to the right destination with all the balls in the air, you get to stop, take a bow, maybe get some applause, and be done with your software.

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C# Interface: Definition, Examples, Best Practices, and Pitfalls

Phil VuolletArticles, CodeAnalysis, CodeBasics, PhilVuollet4 Comments

C_sharp_interface_code.The C# interface isn’t exactly intuitive.

Interfaces, in general, are common. We use them all the time. You’re using at least one interface right now as you read this article.

Keyboards, mice, and screens are interfaces to your operating system. It’s the same concept with C# interfaces.

In this article, I’ll start with these familiar device?interfaces as a metaphor for explaining the C# interface. I’ll use examples and alert you to some of the pitfalls. You’ll also learn about industry best-practices when using C# interfaces.

By the end, you should have a clear picture of the C# interface.

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.

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How to Document Code: 5 Ways to Help Maintenance Programmers

Vlad GeorgescuArticles, Documentation, VladGeorgescu6 Comments

Maintenance_guy_with_how_to_manualImagine you’re a software developer working on a financial application. One day you’re assigned (or, if you’re agile, you pick yourself) to implement changes to the overtime computation logic so your company can sell the application in France. In France, the official work week has 35 hours (lucky them) instead of the 40 hours in the US. Being new to the team, you’re not sure where to begin, so you start searching the codebase for the keyword “overtime.”

Let’s see the search results. No, no, no, maybe, no, no, maybe. Hmmm. OK, looks like it’s in this file, and then in this other file as well. Let’s take a look inside.

I see final static int HOURS = 8. What’s that? Looks like eight hours per day…maybe? Then final static int WEEK_HOURS = 40. Looks like 40 hours per week…maybe? Or maybe it’s in this method called getOvertime? I’m not sure where to find the logic I’m looking for.

This is a typical scenario when the meaning of the code is unclear. And it’s a time suck.

What would help you as a developer when modifying and fixing existing code? It’s easy to complain about code written by someone else, but what about the code you write yourself? What do you include so you can help the maintenance programmers who’ll come after you?

The simple answer is that you have to document your code?so your logic is clear, easy to understand, and easy to change.

This article will explain how to do that. We’ll explore what software maintenance is. Then we’ll talk about how to document our code so we can help the other developers who’ll be fixing and modifying the code we write. And since we often get to fix and modify our own code, this will be an article about how we can help ourselves, too.

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Code Contracts: A Technique to Cut Down on Bugs

Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeQuality2 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 SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeReviewsNo 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 SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeIt.RightNo 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 SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, CodeQualityNo 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.

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

Visual Studio IntelliSense Not Working? What To Do.

Carlos SchultsArticles, CarlosSchults, General12 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_Qualimark_with_bag_of_code

Automated Code Reviews: 5 Manual Checks You Can Automate

Mark HenkeArticles, CodeQuality, CodeReviews, MarkHenkeNo Comments

I am curious about how infrequent automated code reviews seem to be in the workplace. As software?developers, we pride ourselves on our ability to automate?away other people’s problems. Much of what we do is scrutinizing manual work done?by our customers?or business?stakeholders. We find tasks that could be performed more efficiently, automate them, and the customer hopefully praises our efforts.

Yet it seems?that we rarely scrutinize our own work. Manual code reviews run rampant on many software teams. We take our “expert opinion” and turn it into either a mental or written checklist. Then we apply the checklist through manual labor, looking over one file at a time. Oftentimes we miss things; perhaps we’re tired or distracted by other tasks.

Why not do to our own processes what we do to others: automate them? After all, computers will be better at handling some of these checklist items than we are.

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Clock_with_bugs_as_hour_markers

How Much Time Do Programmers Spend Debugging? Too Much

Mark HenkeArticles, CodeIt.Right, CodeQuality, CodeReviews, MarkHenke2 Comments

We’ve all been in that situation where you’re streaming along, banging out some sick code for a new feature. You’re excited to see how many minds you’ll blow when you demo it. And then you see a blip on your radar. Something is going wrong with your production system. Oh no. You give it a cursory look and you realize you don’t understand what’s going on. At this point, you know your day is shot. Why? Because you already know you’ll need to spend too much time debugging.

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