An anti-pattern I have observed in some .NET projects, though it could equally be relevant in any object-oriented environment, is placing all constants for a project (or even a solution) in a single class file (e.g. Constants.cs). There are two major problems with this: 1. Cohesion The constants very often have nothing…

Compiler warnings can be an indication of potential problems in your code project. For this reason it can be good practice to treat all warnings as errors. Enabling treat warnings as errors can be set in the .NET project file directly. For example: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk"> <PropertyGroup> <TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework> …

This might seem remediable to more senior .NET developers however I wanted to address a mistake I often see more junior .NET developers make. In .NET the enumerable extension methods First and Single are used to select single elements from a sequence. First: literally as the name implies, takes the…

This is a post aimed at the slightly more junior .NET developer audience. Something I’ve seen time and again is the wrongful (over)use of the File.Exists method or more specifically using File.Exists before attempting to read from a file. The overuse of File.Exists Consider the following simple C# code: string path = @"C:\MyFile.txt"; if…

StyleCop is an open source tool that can be used within .NET projects to define and enforce code style guidelines in an automated manner. If you are completely new to StyleCop then you can read more about it in the submain guide to StyleCop. There are various different ways to…

Writing unit tests is certainly a good software development practice, however there are a number of things we should not actually test when writing unit tests. These include… The framework Do not unit test any frameworks you are using. Unit testing an external framework is the author of the framework’s job, not…

The purpose of a software developer’s job is primarily to write code that: Works. Obviously not only compiles but does something functional. Your client wants the system to do “X” then your code should do “X”. Communicates with other developers. Code should be readable, easy to understand and by virtue…

The following describes some of the various different types of bad code comments and anti-patterns as well as what we can do to improve them. Rotting comments Rotting comments are ones that have become out of date and are misleading. They make no sense and bear no relation to the code they…

The ISO defines standards that are internationally agreed by experts. However, for the scope of this article we will only examine different ISO defined standards for classes of data codes (country codes, currency codes, etc.) that can often come up when working as a software developer. The sections below define…