Code Quality is a Feature, Not an Afterthought

I must admit something… I must admit that I get more and more frustrated with the lack of code quality in all projects I work on as a contractor. Some are okay, but most are very far from it. What frustrates me more that most of this poor-quality code I analyze is written or supervised …

dotNetDave Rocks The DotNetSouth.Tech Conference

For the first time, I will be speaking at the DotNetSouth.Tech conference in Atlanta, Georgia on May 13th and 14th. I'm excited to present the sessions below. Rock Your Code: Real World Cloud App From Start to Finish Room: Room 104 @ 2:40pm on May 13th This session will show how I created a cloud …

Proper Type Encapsulation – Part 2

In part 1 of this article, I explained how to implement proper data encapsulation. In part 2 I want to talk about encapsulating business logic. I see this missing in a lot of type design, especially when using an ORM like Entity Framework. It’s the job of the architect and coder of that type to …

Performance Tip: Checking For Empty String

In all my books and conference sessions I talk about the proper way to test if a string is valid. Microsoft .NET has been around almost two decades and I still see code like this: if (testValue.Trim() == "") This code is even wrong since it's not checking for null. A better way would be like this: …

Proper Type Encapsulation – Part 1

Encapsulation is the first pillar of Object Oriented Programming and maybe the most important. This is how wikipedia.org defines encapsulation: Encapsulation is one of the fundamentals of OOP (object-oriented programming). It refers to the bundling of data with the methods that operate on that data. Encapsulation is used to hide the values or state of …

Is Quality Part of Open-Source Projects Your App Is Using?

Is code quality important to your team? It should be at the top of the list, not only to make your customers happy, but make your team happier when bugs arise and when features need to be added. Putting quality in your code in the future is a lot more expensive than doing it when …

Defensive Programming – Let Type Checking Work for You

Since I have been a speaker and a teacher, I have always stressed the importance of practicing proper object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques. If you don’t practice OOP, no matter what language you are using, I guarantee you will end up with a “house of cards” and they all eventually fall. The first “pillar” of OOP …