In an ideal world one would write unit-tests before writing any new code following the tenants of TDD. In reality it is quite common to have to rely on a legacy library to do some heavy lifting. Pex is a great new tool available from Microsoft Research that can be used to generate unit-tests automatically.… [Read more…]
November 25, 2008
Indexers allow objects to behave like arrays. Dictionary class in .NET, for example, provides an indexer that allows the retrieval of the item from the dictionary that corresponds to a particular key. There are two ways you can go about mocking indexers defined on interfaces when using NMock. You can use the Get property to… [Read more…]
November 6, 2008
If you have been blessed with a windows-forms application that has business-logic invading the user-interface, I have something that’ll help you. The most practical approach in this situation is to rearchitect the business layer and switch the UI over in a piecemeal fashion. While you’re doing this, automated testing of the user-interface will make your… [Read more…]
October 29, 2008
Let’s say we have a class called ShoppingCartItem. We’re going to concern ourselves with two properties here namely TaxID and Taxable. The business logic dictates that an item is definitely non-taxable if it has a tax-id of zero, otherwise it may or may not be taxable which is decided by some code situated outside the… [Read more…]
October 24, 2008
There should be a compiler supported way in C# to declare a property with custom getter/setter logic without having to explicitly declare a backing field. In the absence of such a feature, if you want to have custom getter/setter logic you have to ditch automatic properties, declare a backing field explicitly and then there’s nothing stopping a… [Read more…]
July 22, 2008
Had to do a bit of head-scratching on this one. New projects created in Visual Studio 2008 did show the “Add Service Reference” when right-clicking on a project in Solution Explorer while some existing ones didn’t. Using “Add Web Reference” instead of “Add Service Reference” has its own set of issues in that WCF services… [Read more…]
June 10, 2008
I was describing how a simple yet extensible report-generator could be implemented quickly to somebody. I’m posting it here as some of you might find it useful (and I can refer to this link in future conversations ). The concept: …is really simple. The idea is to look for a placeholder like @Fruit and replace… [Read more…]
June 6, 2008
What’ll be the output of the following piece of code (asked here)? One might expect… True True But what you’d actually get is… False False …because of boxing. a.Add(1) boxes the integer 1 into an object and stores it in a, while b.Add(1) boxes the integer 1 into a separate object and stores it in… [Read more…]
May 1, 2008
I am fortunate enough to work with a couple of great individuals. Recently I was able to hypnotize persuade them into discussing things which should and shouldn’t be done in a software project I am absolutely sure that the discussion will help me in the future (and them). However I thought the merged list is… [Read more…]
April 29, 2008
Try-Catch-Finally A try-catch-finally is converted into IL by the C# compiler as a try-catch inside the try block of another try-finally. This allows for finally block to execute even when exceptions are raised in the catch block. Use ildasm and check it out yourself! throw football; Though you cannot throw an arbitrary managed object as… [Read more…]
December 2, 2008
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