A story about User Stories
My personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements
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ALM
Continuous Delivery within the .NET realm
Continuous what? Well, if you browse the internet regularly, you will encounter two different terms that are used rather inconsistently: Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. In my words, Continuous Delivery is a collection of various techniques, principles and tools that allow you to d...
Software versioning without thinking about it
Solving the versioning problemIf you're building libraries, products or any other software system, versioning is usually a pretty big deal. It's the only way to determine what version of that library, product or system you're looking at. Before an organization settles on a versioning strategy, ma...
Prioritizing projects and tasks with minimum loss of time and money
Last week, I was so fortunate to attend a marvelous talk by Donald Reinertsen on a amazingly effective approach for prioritizing projects within an agile organization (and which is part of SAFe). Most managers will tend to prioritize their projects based on non-quantifiable attributes such as the...
How Flowdock helps you get better cross-team collaboration
Is your inbox also filling up with loads of emails all part of some kind of discussion where each reply contains the entire history again? Do you also get all kinds of notification emails from build servers, source control systems, and other things to which somebody is supposed to react? Do you o...
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Slides and demo code for my SpecFlow/WaTiN talk
Yesterday I did a 2-hour talk on getting the most out of UI automation, particularly using SpecFlow and WaTiN. You can find the slides down here and the demo code at GitHub.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.s...
Quick Review of The Cucumber Book from a SpecFlow perspective
This week I completed reading a new book titled The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy. Aslak is the founder of the Cucumber project (which is what SpecFlow for .NET is based on), and Matt is one of its most active developers. T...
In Retrospect: About getting through your Sprint
This is the fourth of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than a year of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the m...
In Retrospect: About Bugs
This is the third of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at th...
In Retrospect: About the Sprint Planning
This is the second of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at t...
In Retrospect: About Requirements Management
This is the first of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we decided throughout 14 sprint retrospective. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the mistakes a team of 9 develop...
Speaking at Developer Developer Developer North
I’m honored to have been selected to speak at my first event in the United Kingdom, Developer Developer Developer North, hosted at the University of Sunderland, near New Castle. Our job as a software developer seems to revolve mostly around programming languages, frameworks and Visual Studio. And...
Where to find me during the Developer Days 2011
Somebody recently asked me what sessions I was planning to attend at the upcoming 2011 edition of the Microsoft Developer Days in The Hague. To be honest, my primary reason for going to a Dutch conference is to chat with fellow .NET enthusiasts, and attending sessions is usually a side-effect of ...
Speaking engagements for the next months
I’m very happy that I’ll be speaking at a number of very nice local and international conferences. On Saturday March 26th, I’ll be joining the Dutch Code Camp event where I’ll be doing a chalk’n’talk on my Silverlight Cookbook initiative. <ul> <li>On Wednesday, April 27th, I will t...
ALM Practices every developer should know about
So now that I’ve finished my multi-part post on getting the most out of user stories, it is time to provide a nice convenient overview of some essential practices that I’ve blogged about. I don’t have any additional parts planned, but if I come up with something new, I’ll make sure this list is u...
More quotes from QCon
Well, QCon 2010 is over, so it is time to travel back to the Netherlands and finally see my wife and daughter again. However, after the previous post, the quotes have been coming in on Twitter space. So, to complete one of the most intense conferences ever, here are some more funny, inspiring and...
Deliberate Discovery, No SQL and CQRS at QCon
The 2nd day of QCon was not one where I chose wisely. My focus for this conference was everything Agile and anything from the well-known speakers. So I ignored most sessions that had words like REST, SQL or Java in it. How wrong I was…. But I did not discover that until I heard and read about all...
Quotes from QCon
One of the funny things of this QCon is the many tweets that the attendees have been throwing into the world wide web. That's great for a speaker because now they get immediate feedback on their performance, both good and bad. These are some of the quotes I found funny, inspiring or refreshing: ...
Commercial support for the C# 3.0/4.0 Coding Guidelines
A few weeks ago I had a chat with Paul Jansen, CEO of a small Eindhoven-based company named Tiobe. You might indirectly know Tiobe for its programming language index and their commercial code checker ClockSharp. But they have also been hosting a C# Coding Standard I co-wrote for Philips Medical S...
ALM Practices Part 9: Ubiquitous Language
What is it? The Ubiquitous Language is a unified language consisting of verbs and nouns from the business domain of an enterprise system and should be used by all team members, stakeholders and other involved persons. Why would you do it? Because it creates a bridge of understanding between th...
ALM Practices Part 8: Automatic Builds & Continuous Integration
What is it? An automatic build is a fully automated compilation of a specific version of your source code repository and which runs at regular intervals. More often than not, such a build includes additional steps such as running a static code analysis and code coverage, executing all automat...
ALM Practices Part 7: Refactoring
What is it? A mindset and practice that requires you to continuously reevaluate a region of code each time you make a change. In essence, you need to look at the code related to your changes and reconsider whether the original solution is still the best solution accounting for the information you...
Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 now available
As promised earlier, you can now download the concept version of my new Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 from a dedicated CodePlex site at www.csharpcodinguidelines.com. The list of changes is quite big, and includes new guidelines covering object-oriented design, design principles, C# 4.0...
ALM Practices Part 6: Code Analysis & Guidelines
What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
Interaction Design according to Alan Cooper
I've recently finished the book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper, a well known proponent for interaction design. To be honest, I never really saw the purpose of interaction design in our projects. But after reading this book, I now know I didn't really understand what it was abou...
Fluent Assertions 1.2 has been released
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
ALM Practices Part 5: Checklists
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
TFS, ALM, what’s in a name?
In response to my posts on Peer Reviews, Unit Testing & TDD, and Common Code Layout, someone noticed that all these posts were part of my Team Foundation Server Development Practices series, but not every post actually mentioned TFS. Obviously, he was right. The reason for using the TFS prefi...
ALM Practices Part 4: Common Code Layout
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
User Stories, a different story altogether
My Dutch article on User Stories in Team Foundation Server 2010 is now available online at the SDN site. Read it over here. I will translate it to English soon.
ALM Practices Part 3: Unit Testing & TDD
What is it? In essence, Test Driven Development (TDD) is a practice in which the interface and the behavior of a component is designed while writing a unit test. In other words, you typically start writing a test case and define the exact members, behavior and names on the fly. In fact, the wor...
ALM Practices Part 2: Peer Reviews
What is it? A formal review of all code and artifacts related to a requirement or task by another person than the original developer. Rework because of review comments must be revalidated afterwards. Why would you do that? Because the average developer introduces 10-50 bugs per 10...
Storyotypes in Visual Studio 2010
Storyotypes are stereotypes for user stories that can help to define the right scope for your user stories. You can read more about these in the article Using Storyotypes to Split Bloated XP Stories and these slides. Team Foundation Server 2010 includes a new VSTS for Agile process template close...
ALM Development Practices Part 1: An Introduction
As part of my many assignments, I’m compiling a bunch of Application Lifecycle Management practices into a set of development guidelines for bootstrapping our internal projects using Team Foundation Server. I’ve decided to share these with the community so that others may benefit from it as well....
Visual Studio 2010 is huge!
During this week’s PDC 2008, I’ve been spending particular attention to sessions related to the new features of Visual Studio 2010 Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010. The one statement almost every session started with was that this release is huge, and I totally agree! I’ve not seen so ...
ALM Practices
A story about User Stories
My personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements
ALM Practices every developer should know about
So now that I’ve finished my multi-part post on getting the most out of user stories, it is time to provide a nice convenient overview of some essential practices that I’ve blogged about. I don’t have any additional parts planned, but if I come up with something new, I’ll make sure this list is u...
ALM Practices Part 12: Reducing Technical Debt
What is it? Technical Debt is every change to your code base that does not comply with the usual level of quality your team has agreed upon. Since this level of quality has been introduced to guarantee a healthy code base throughout the life time of the system, introducing technical debt essenti...
ALM Practices Part 11: Modeling the business domain using Domain Models
What is it? A domain model is typically depicted by a UML class diagram in which the classes and associations represent the business concepts and the relationships between them. Although you can use a piece of paper to draw up a domain model, in most cases a UML case tool is better suited for t...
ALM Practices Part 10: Work Item Tracking
What is it? Using Team Foundation Server’s User Story, Task and Bug work item types as the central unit of work for all the activities done within a project. Why would you do it? Because it adds traceability between the functional requirements and the way these requirements have been realized ...
ALM Practices Part 9: Ubiquitous Language
What is it? The Ubiquitous Language is a unified language consisting of verbs and nouns from the business domain of an enterprise system and should be used by all team members, stakeholders and other involved persons. Why would you do it? Because it creates a bridge of understanding between th...
ALM Practices Part 8: Automatic Builds & Continuous Integration
What is it? An automatic build is a fully automated compilation of a specific version of your source code repository and which runs at regular intervals. More often than not, such a build includes additional steps such as running a static code analysis and code coverage, executing all automat...
ALM Practices Part 7: Refactoring
What is it? A mindset and practice that requires you to continuously reevaluate a region of code each time you make a change. In essence, you need to look at the code related to your changes and reconsider whether the original solution is still the best solution accounting for the information you...
ALM Practices Part 6: Code Analysis & Guidelines
What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
ALM Practices Part 5: Checklists
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
ALM Practices Part 4: Common Code Layout
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
ALM Practices Part 3: Unit Testing & TDD
What is it? In essence, Test Driven Development (TDD) is a practice in which the interface and the behavior of a component is designed while writing a unit test. In other words, you typically start writing a test case and define the exact members, behavior and names on the fly. In fact, the wor...
ALM Practices Part 2: Peer Reviews
What is it? A formal review of all code and artifacts related to a requirement or task by another person than the original developer. Rework because of review comments must be revalidated afterwards. Why would you do that? Because the average developer introduces 10-50 bugs per 10...
ALM Development Practices Part 1: An Introduction
As part of my many assignments, I’m compiling a bunch of Application Lifecycle Management practices into a set of development guidelines for bootstrapping our internal projects using Team Foundation Server. I’ve decided to share these with the community so that others may benefit from it as well....
Agile
Continuous Delivery within the .NET realm
Continuous what? Well, if you browse the internet regularly, you will encounter two different terms that are used rather inconsistently: Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. In my words, Continuous Delivery is a collection of various techniques, principles and tools that allow you to d...
Understanding a growing organization and the effect on technology
The characteristics of a growing organizationDuring this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. Randy explained us how every start-up goes through several phases, each with a differ...
Why software innovation is not a free pass for doing whatever you want
Somebody on Twitter recently posed the question whether innovation in software and agile development can co-exist or not. To remove any misinterpretation - something quite common for Twitter discussion - I asked him to clarify what he meant with the word 'innovation'. In short, any kind of softwa...
The real challenges of building the right thing right
Suppose you're in the following situation.You and your team are supposed to start working on some important architectural changes that were long due.Your team is then asked by your manager to help build an important feature that requires the unique skills of your team, and ...
Dude, you can’t solve all the problems by yourself
I think that the gist of this post should be pretty clear. Unfortunately I've fallen in that same trap myself many times. So often, I had to refrain myself from pulling somebody's keyboard from under their hands, just because I thought I could fix the problem at hand myself much faster. But with ...
Software versioning without thinking about it
Solving the versioning problemIf you're building libraries, products or any other software system, versioning is usually a pretty big deal. It's the only way to determine what version of that library, product or system you're looking at. Before an organization settles on a versioning strategy, ma...
Prioritizing projects and tasks with minimum loss of time and money
Last week, I was so fortunate to attend a marvelous talk by Donald Reinertsen on a amazingly effective approach for prioritizing projects within an agile organization (and which is part of SAFe). Most managers will tend to prioritize their projects based on non-quantifiable attributes such as the...
How to do a tech talk without utterly boring the audience
Over the last year or two I attended numerous sprint demos, product demos and technical talks hosted by technical teams and individuals. Although I can definitely improve as a speaker myself, standing at the side-line and observing other speakers have made me pretty opinionated. I also get bored ...
Getting your teams to communicate effectively
Lets be honest here. For a very long time, if I had to choose between an averagely skilled but well-spoken developer and a very skilled and experienced introvert, I would probably choose the first. And yes, I do realize that these are two extremes and that most people have characteristics of both...
A scalable software development organization? This is how you do it!
Hey architect! Building a complex system with four talented developers is one thing. Building one with 40 developers is a whole different league. The quote above is closer to the truth than you might expect. Many large organizations develop software systems with hundreds of software developers. ...
What kind of software architect are you? Strategist or tactician?
If there’s one term next to agile that’s so overloaded nobody knows what to expect, then it must be architect. Yes, you can specialize it by prefixing it with software, as in software architect. And with that, you would be able to determine that he or she is probably designing some kind software ...
A beacon of light in the shadow of failing builds
As long as I can remember, I've been using an automatic build system to regularly verify the quality of the code based I've been working on. First using Team Foundation Server, but since a year or so, Jetbrains' Team City. In my current project we use continuous integration builds for running the...
Evolving your agile architecture without losing any people
I’m a big fan of just-in-time architecture (a.k.a. agile architecture) because it prevents me from trying to predict the future which, frankly, I suck at. So, although I generally start out with a reference architecture, a lot of changes happen after that point, when the functional requirements g...
You don’t know what you don’t know
More or less since the start of my assignment at my current client, four years ago, we have had some form of a cross-team stand-up at 10:00 every day (often named Scrum-of-Scrums). But now that we have around 10 teams, we started to notice some issues lately. People joined too late or didn't even...
How Flowdock helps you get better cross-team collaboration
Is your inbox also filling up with loads of emails all part of some kind of discussion where each reply contains the entire history again? Do you also get all kinds of notification emails from build servers, source control systems, and other things to which somebody is supposed to react? Do you o...
Fluent Assertions 2.0 is out of the beta phase
After six weeks of beta testing, it is time to remove the beta mark from Fluent Assertions 2.0. Since the beta was released, we fixed several little bugs that you won’t notice, but the original release notes still apply. Release 2.0 adds a lot of new features and improvements, most noticeably the...
Quick Review of The Cucumber Book from a SpecFlow perspective
This week I completed reading a new book titled The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy. Aslak is the founder of the Cucumber project (which is what SpecFlow for .NET is based on), and Matt is one of its most active developers. T...
Required Reading Material for July 2012
Since I was already collecting the better articles that I read during the month for sharing with my colleagues and client’s coworkers, I might just as well share them here. Have fun reading them. Virtual Panel: Code-to-Test Ratios, TDD and BDD A great discussion by the authorities on TDD, B...
In Retrospect: About getting through your Sprint
This is the fourth of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than a year of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the m...
Architecture
Principles for Successful Package Management
How applying the SOLID principles on package design can help prevent the dependency hell
Scaling a growing organization by reorganizing the teams
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous two posts I discussed a model to understand the needs of an organization in its different life phases, as well as a...
Scaling a growing organization by rearchitecting the monolith
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous post, I elaborated on Randy's classification system to illustrate the phases of a growing organization and how that...
The magic of hiding your NuGet dependencies
Welcome to the dependency hell While working on a little open-source demo project, I ran into that well-known challenge of NuGet dependency management again. This little project results in a NuGet package, that on itself also relies on other packages. Now, if I would just add those dependencies ...
To DRY or not to DRY, it is a matter of boundaries
For a very VERY long time I've been convinced that aggressively refactoring your code in such a way that every piece of logic is repeated only once is a good thing. This practice, often referred to as DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself, has been one of the many of my tools of choice and goes hand in h...
Profiling legacy code using characterization tests
As you might have read, I've been refactoring some example code for a multi-threaded cache that I got from CodeProject into a source-only NuGet package which will soon be published as FluidCaching. Since this cache has been built to be very performant, the internal algorithms are not trivial to g...
How architecture and the constraints that apply to it cannot be seen as separate things
In a previous project, I observed a typical communication mismatch. One team was demonstrating the technical details of architecture that, on first glance, was supposed to be a replacement for an existing architecture. The team demonstrated all kinds of technical solutions and showed us how much ...
What kind of software architect are you? Strategist or tactician?
If there’s one term next to agile that’s so overloaded nobody knows what to expect, then it must be architect. Yes, you can specialize it by prefixing it with software, as in software architect. And with that, you would be able to determine that he or she is probably designing some kind software ...
Evolving your agile architecture without losing any people
I’m a big fan of just-in-time architecture (a.k.a. agile architecture) because it prevents me from trying to predict the future which, frankly, I suck at. So, although I generally start out with a reference architecture, a lot of changes happen after that point, when the functional requirements g...
Entity Framework 5 and 6 vs NHibernate 3 – The State of Affairs
It has been almost two years since I've last compared NHibernate and Entity Framework, so with the recent alpha version of EF 6, it's about time to look at the current state of affair. I've been using NHibernate for more than 6 years so obviously I'm a bit biased. But I can't ignore that EF's fea...
Planning the Windows 8 Cookbook
I'm currently at Microsoft's Build conference and we're all receiving a Surface RT tablet. That means it's a great moment to talk about my plans for the Windows 8 Cookbook. I know, I know, it's a cheesy name so just be aware that I'm open to better suggestions. Since Silverlight is mostly dead, I...
Required Reading Material for July 2012
Since I was already collecting the better articles that I read during the month for sharing with my colleagues and client’s coworkers, I might just as well share them here. Have fun reading them. Virtual Panel: Code-to-Test Ratios, TDD and BDD A great discussion by the authorities on TDD, B...
If you write an article about TDD, make sure it is correct
I spend a majority of my private time reading articles and blog posts, having discussions on Twitter, or engaging in conversations on conferences and community events. I'm realistic enough to understand that my opinions are not necessarily the truth, so I use those opportunities to challenge my o...
About the future of the Silverlight Cookbook
Since my first blog post on the Silverlight Cookbook in September 2010, I’ve invested a lot of private time in sharing my best practices on building line-of-business application in Silverlight. I shared my code on CodePlex, wrote an entire series of blog posts, and talked about the Cookbook at se...
Silverlight Cookbook: Switching to another IoC Framework
The Rationale As long as I have been using the Dependency Inversion Principle, Microsoft Unity has always been my preferred Inversion-of-Control framework. So it’s not strange that the Silverlight Cookbook has been using Unity 2 in both its WCF/REST layer as well as within the Silverlight client....
Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook
In the 2nd half of 2010 I was so fortunate to get the chance to build my first enterprise-class line-of-business application written in Silverlight 4. And although I designed my original reference architecture earlier that year, actually building it is a completely different thing. I learned a lo...
More quotes from QCon
Well, QCon 2010 is over, so it is time to travel back to the Netherlands and finally see my wife and daughter again. However, after the previous post, the quotes have been coming in on Twitter space. So, to complete one of the most intense conferences ever, here are some more funny, inspiring and...
Quotes from QCon
One of the funny things of this QCon is the many tweets that the attendees have been throwing into the world wide web. That's great for a speaker because now they get immediate feedback on their performance, both good and bad. These are some of the quotes I found funny, inspiring or refreshing: ...
Agile Architecture according to Dan North
Updated on March 3rd 2012 with a PDF of Dan North’s mind map On the first day of the QCon conference in San Francisco, I attended a full-day tutorial titled "Secrets of Agile Architecture" hosted by Dan North. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was hoping for some refreshingly new insight...
Silverlight Cookbook: ViewModels, Coroutines and Binding Conventions
This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate proper design choices for building enterprise-class line-of-business applications with Silverlight (and WPF if you will). It currently consists out of the following part...
ALM Practices Part 12: Reducing Technical Debt
What is it? Technical Debt is every change to your code base that does not comply with the usual level of quality your team has agreed upon. Since this level of quality has been introduced to guarantee a healthy code base throughout the life time of the system, introducing technical debt essenti...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: The Domain Model
The Domain Model is roughly designed according to the DDD principles where cross-aggregate logic is handled by the command handlers instead of the more traditional domain services. One thing that I changed after I attended Greg Young's DDD/CQRS training is that I no longer allow my domain entitie...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Querying
After having put the introduction and the commanding part behind us, let me explain how I deal with querying. Consider the following slice of the reference architecture. My original intention was to use WCF Data Services combined with NHibernate on the query side. For one, because it allo...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Commanding
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”>After sharing my thoughts on unit testing in Silverlight and the combination of NHibernate and WCF Data Services, it is time to discuss the updated version of the Silverlight reference architecture from one of my posts of last year. To put the discu...
Silverlight Cookbook: WCF Data Services and NHibernate
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p>This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate prope...
CQRS and Event Sourcing
Yesterday evening I did a talk on building a .NET-based system using Command Query Responsibility Segregation and Event Sourcing. We had a lot of awesome discussions on its applicability, and as usual, I ran out of time again. I could have easily spend a full day on this subject, but unfortunatel...
Defining a reference architecture for Silverlight LOBs
Update October 2010: I’ve started a new in-depth series on my current Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture. Recently I've been catching up on Silverlight by reading Pro Silverlight 2 in C# and the many blogs and articles on Silverlight 3 and I'm seriously impressed. The reason for this sudden in...
Book
About ideas that stick
A while ago, some business man from the US who travels a lot throughout the US as part of his job, was sitting in his airline's business lounge for a drink. Right after finishing his 2nd, an attractive women approached him and offered him a drink in exchange for somebody to talk to. Somewhere hal...
Quick Review of The Cucumber Book from a SpecFlow perspective
This week I completed reading a new book titled The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy. Aslak is the founder of the Cucumber project (which is what SpecFlow for .NET is based on), and Matt is one of its most active developers. T...
Build 2012
Build Day 4: WP8, Line-of-Business, Web Essentials and lots of laughs
Here we are at the fourth and last day of Microsoft Build 2012. That so many people showed up at the first session is quite surprising considering the attendee party that went on until midnight in downtown Seattle. It was a typical attendee party; free food and drinks and live music. Since being ...
Build Day 3: ASP.NET MVC, TypeScript, SignalR and Node.Js
So at this 3rd day here at Microsoft Build 2012, I'm actually getting lucky. Three great sessions in a row is obviously not something I've seen before. Hey, maybe I'll get to see four great sessions tomorrow. Anyway, with some of the technical debt from last night's Beerfest and a Halloween party...
Build Day 2: Azure, JavaScript and even more XAML and Windows Phone
Because day 2 of the Build conference wasn't any different, it seems that I must learn to accept that a maximum of two good sessions per day is going to be the standard. Fortunately the keynote was top notch with both Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie taking stage. They showed some of the power t...
Build Day 1: Surface, WP8, TFS, Windows Design Guidelines
Day 1 of Microsoft Build was in some way disappointing and at the same time exhilarating. To be honest, I was expecting to be updated on the new stuff Microsoft plans for the near future. The fact that the session list was not disclosed until a day ahead also helped reinforce that expectation. Bu...
C#
Entity Framework 5 and 6 vs NHibernate 3 – The State of Affairs
It has been almost two years since I've last compared NHibernate and Entity Framework, so with the recent alpha version of EF 6, it's about time to look at the current state of affair. I've been using NHibernate for more than 6 years so obviously I'm a bit biased. But I can't ignore that EF's fea...
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Fluent Assertions 1.7.0 has been released
It has barely been more than two months ago, but the number of downloads through CodePlex and Nuget combined has exceeded 2000. Me and co-author Martin Opdam thought that to be a nice reason for releasing a new version of Fluent Assertions. This isn't a big release, but since we are following sem...
Feedback Requested: Is there any valid usage for the ‘new’ keyword?
Yesterday I ended up being part of a discussion about using the ‘new’ keyword to hide base-class members. A colleague of mine used it to alter a base-class property in a derived class with the purpose of making it more strongly typed. I’ve always rationalized guideline AV1010 (Don’t hide inherit...
Fluent Assertions is finally gaining some momentum
Indeed it is, in particular within the part of the .NET community that believes test-first development is non-negotiable. We receive more and more suggestions, contributions and questions, and we’ve started to notice some blog posts here and there. It’s not that it is being downloaded thousands ...
So what does Windows 8 mean for .NET developers?
Last updated on September 22nd Unfortunately, the Microsoft Build conference conflicted with our company's 5-year anniversary and the associated sailing trip in Greece. Fortunately, the blogosphere and twitter-space provided plenty of opportunities for trying to grasp what the stuff Sinofsky and...
Why I created Fluent Assertions in the first place
A few weeks ago I read The value of open-source is the vision not the source code and that made me think about my own reasons for starting Fluent Assertions, now more than a year ago. In the light of that article, lets briefly go over my own goals for Fluent Assertions. The intention of a unit te...
Fluent Assertions 1.5 is done! Now it’s time for that summer.
In the last couple of months, me and colleague Martin Opdam have spent a considerable amount of time on both improving the reporting capabilities of Fluent Assertions as well as fixing and incorporating various community contributions. Because of the many changes required, a very busy client proj...
Another release for Fluent Assertions
It’s only February, but I’ve received so many requests from the community that another release of Fluent Assertions was easily warranted. New Features Somebody working under the name of CtrlAltDel pointed me at the little-known fact that floating point variables are inheritably inaccurate and...
A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions
Christmas usually means a week off and a whole lot of free time between the social obligations and spending some quality time with my wife and daughter. That’s why I decided to get rid of some of the backlog items for the next version of Fluent Assertions. And I’m done, version 1.3.0 is a fact. N...
December Update of the Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0
I finally found some time to update the coding guidelines with some feedback I received since it’s original release in June this year. I’ve removed the following guidelines because I found that they were either very exotic or not general enough for most developers: Avoid side-effects when...
CQRS
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Commanding
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”>After sharing my thoughts on unit testing in Silverlight and the combination of NHibernate and WCF Data Services, it is time to discuss the updated version of the Silverlight reference architecture from one of my posts of last year. To put the discu...
CQRS and Event Sourcing
Yesterday evening I did a talk on building a .NET-based system using Command Query Responsibility Segregation and Event Sourcing. We had a lot of awesome discussions on its applicability, and as usual, I ran out of time again. I could have easily spend a full day on this subject, but unfortunatel...
Coding Guidelines
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Feedback Requested: Is there any valid usage for the ‘new’ keyword?
Yesterday I ended up being part of a discussion about using the ‘new’ keyword to hide base-class members. A colleague of mine used it to alter a base-class property in a derived class with the purpose of making it more strongly typed. I’ve always rationalized guideline AV1010 (Don’t hide inherit...
Collaboration
Why software innovation is not a free pass for doing whatever you want
Somebody on Twitter recently posed the question whether innovation in software and agile development can co-exist or not. To remove any misinterpretation - something quite common for Twitter discussion - I asked him to clarify what he meant with the word 'innovation'. In short, any kind of softwa...
Slack? An even better cross-team collaboration tool?
Two weeks ago, I talked about Flowdock, an online tool to aggregate multiple sources into a single environment where agile teams can work together. I also promised to look at an alternative service named Slack. When we introduced Flowdock, somewhere in November 2013, Slack was still in its very e...
How Flowdock helps you get better cross-team collaboration
Is your inbox also filling up with loads of emails all part of some kind of discussion where each reply contains the entire history again? Do you also get all kinds of notification emails from build servers, source control systems, and other things to which somebody is supposed to react? Do you o...
Cookbook
Planning the Windows 8 Cookbook
I'm currently at Microsoft's Build conference and we're all receiving a Surface RT tablet. That means it's a great moment to talk about my plans for the Windows 8 Cookbook. I know, I know, it's a cheesy name so just be aware that I'm open to better suggestions. Since Silverlight is mostly dead, I...
About the future of the Silverlight Cookbook
Since my first blog post on the Silverlight Cookbook in September 2010, I’ve invested a lot of private time in sharing my best practices on building line-of-business application in Silverlight. I shared my code on CodePlex, wrote an entire series of blog posts, and talked about the Cookbook at se...
Silverlight Cookbook: Looking for a great UI design
Why? Because even though think I have a reasonable idea of when a user interface is consistent and user friendly, I suck at the raw design skills. Just check out the current ‘design’ if you don’t believe me. I’m actually looking for something that resembles the Cosmopolitan theme or MetroTwit: ...
Silverlight Cookbook: Switching to another IoC Framework
The Rationale As long as I have been using the Dependency Inversion Principle, Microsoft Unity has always been my preferred Inversion-of-Control framework. So it’s not strange that the Silverlight Cookbook has been using Unity 2 in both its WCF/REST layer as well as within the Silverlight client....
Yes, the Silverlight Cookbook is still alive
Although it might not seem like that, I am still working on the Silverlight Cookbook. However, I’ve just moved to a new house, so I ran out of time recently. Fortunately, since my colleague Martin Opdam is actively working on Fluent Assertions, so I only have to divide my free time between the co...
Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook
In the 2nd half of 2010 I was so fortunate to get the chance to build my first enterprise-class line-of-business application written in Silverlight 4. And although I designed my original reference architecture earlier that year, actually building it is a completely different thing. I learned a lo...
Silverlight Cookbook: ViewModels, Coroutines and Binding Conventions
This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate proper design choices for building enterprise-class line-of-business applications with Silverlight (and WPF if you will). It currently consists out of the following part...
Silverlight Cookbook: WCF Data Services and NHibernate
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p>This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate prope...
DevDays09
Wildcard Proposal: TDD and SOLID, two ingredients for high quality software
Many attempts have been made to improve the overal quality of our software development efforts, but if there’s one I’d like to put some attention on, it’s Test Driven Development. It’s design-first, test-first approach has proved significant increases in overal quality. However, TDD is not easy a...
Help prioritizing Enterprise Library 5.0
Patterns & Practices has just finished compiling a list of candidate features and improvements for the next installment of the Enterprise Library. Grigori Melnik, the Enterprise Library’s product manager has opened an online survey and invites the .NET community to share their priorities and,...
DevDays10
Is Entity Framework 4.0 ready for the real work?
This morning, on the Developer Days 2010, I did a talk on the current state of affairs of the 4.0 version of the Entity Framework, including a rough comparison with NHibernate 2.1. Apparently this is something that’s on the mind of many people. The room was supposed to accommodate a maximum of 80...
My two days of fame at the Developer Days 2010
Some of you who have been visiting the Dutch Developer Days 2010 in The Hague today may have noticed the flyers and banners for promoting the new online version of the .NET Magazine. Those who already know me may have noticed that it’s me on those banners. Since the photographer spe...
Events
Why Windows 10 is much more than a new operating system
Let's be honest here. Since Microsoft has been shipping technical previews of Windows 10, I've been repaving my laptop a couple of times and then reverted to Windows 8.1. I didn't like the intermediate touch experience and stability was also not its greatest strengths. In fact, I reverted to 8.1 ...
QCon New York Day 2: Freeing people, imperfect architecture, lean coffee and unanswered questions
That was the weirdest conference party ever. No music, no dancing, just free food and beer. Well, our of me, two Austrian guys and a fellow from Dakota had plenty of great stories to share. And did I mention the free beer? Freeing people and optimizing the tools As any good professional would do...
The Staring Game aka The Art of Social Intelligence
So here I am in New York, all alone and looking for something fun to do during a rainy day preceding QCon New York. The Empire State Building was covered in clouds so what can you do? Well, you go to meetup.com and browse the many events that happen in a big city like this. Country dancing and ro...
QCon: The Culture Engine; How to build High Performance Teams
Sometimes you run into a workshop that you didn't have any particular expectations for and then your mind is completely blown. That happened to me on the first day of tutorials here at QCon San Francisco. "By whom?" I hear you asking. Well, by Steve Peha and Amr Elssamadisy and heavily supported ...
Noticeable quotes from QCon San Francisco 2013
As with any conference, speakers and attendees tend to make a lot of interesting, inspiring or funny statements. QCon 2013 was no different. Some key takeaways: “Can't tune until you have real users.” (Stephen Rylander) "If someone comes in suggesting that we move a release date… we mock t...
QCon Day 3: About JavaScript, Scaling GitHub and Twitter, and Cultural Diversity
Man, it really feels like we've been around for ages, but this is just the 3rd day of QCon San Francisco. After a quick breakfast at the local Starbucks we dropped in on another keynote, right after the daily introduction by all track owners. The keynote was done by Brendan Eich, the inventor of ...
QCon Day 2: Persons, Groups and Teams
Although I did get the feeling that QCon isn't at the same quality level as the last time I was here, I did manage to pick up a considerable amount of new ideas and insights on the first day. Not anything mind blowing, but still worth the trip. So let's see what the 2nd day did bring us. The day...
QCon Day 1: Musicians, Google, Open Space & Netflix
So after all that fun during the first weekend (and about which I’ll blog separately), now it's the time to finally shift our attention to the reason for which we're in San Francisco in the first place; InfoQ's highly rated internal software conference QCon. Since my previous visit to QCon was su...
Looking back at Build 2012
A question which was asked many times during the week was whether or not this trip to Build 2012 in Redmond was worth the time and money. Even after four days of raw content, there is no short answer here. As Dennis Vroegop clearly illustrated, the organization was definitely not up to the task...
Build Day 4: WP8, Line-of-Business, Web Essentials and lots of laughs
Here we are at the fourth and last day of Microsoft Build 2012. That so many people showed up at the first session is quite surprising considering the attendee party that went on until midnight in downtown Seattle. It was a typical attendee party; free food and drinks and live music. Since being ...
Build Day 3: ASP.NET MVC, TypeScript, SignalR and Node.Js
So at this 3rd day here at Microsoft Build 2012, I'm actually getting lucky. Three great sessions in a row is obviously not something I've seen before. Hey, maybe I'll get to see four great sessions tomorrow. Anyway, with some of the technical debt from last night's Beerfest and a Halloween party...
Build Day 2: Azure, JavaScript and even more XAML and Windows Phone
Because day 2 of the Build conference wasn't any different, it seems that I must learn to accept that a maximum of two good sessions per day is going to be the standard. Fortunately the keynote was top notch with both Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie taking stage. They showed some of the power t...
Build Day 1: Surface, WP8, TFS, Windows Design Guidelines
Day 1 of Microsoft Build was in some way disappointing and at the same time exhilarating. To be honest, I was expecting to be updated on the new stuff Microsoft plans for the near future. The fact that the session list was not disclosed until a day ahead also helped reinforce that expectation. Bu...
A weekend in Emerald City
This week is Microsoft Build 2012. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s Microsoft largest and most important annual event for sharing the future of the company’s plans around Windows, Windows Phone and their development platforms. Since with most trips to the US, it’s usually cheaper to ta...
Slides and demo code for my SpecFlow/WaTiN talk
Yesterday I did a 2-hour talk on getting the most out of UI automation, particularly using SpecFlow and WaTiN. You can find the slides down here and the demo code at GitHub.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.s...
Noticeable quotes from QCon New York
Just to be clear, I didn’t actually attend QCon New York this year. But after the experience of attending QCon San Francisco in 2010, I never forget the many great quotes you’ll find on Twitter. This time was no different. "Distributed objects failed; for very good reasons. Values rule on the w...
So what does Windows 8 mean for .NET developers?
Last updated on September 22nd Unfortunately, the Microsoft Build conference conflicted with our company's 5-year anniversary and the associated sailing trip in Greece. Fortunately, the blogosphere and twitter-space provided plenty of opportunities for trying to grasp what the stuff Sinofsky and...
Speaking at Developer Developer Developer North
I’m honored to have been selected to speak at my first event in the United Kingdom, Developer Developer Developer North, hosted at the University of Sunderland, near New Castle. Our job as a software developer seems to revolve mostly around programming languages, frameworks and Visual Studio. And...
Where to find me during the Developer Days 2011
Somebody recently asked me what sessions I was planning to attend at the upcoming 2011 edition of the Microsoft Developer Days in The Hague. To be honest, my primary reason for going to a Dutch conference is to chat with fellow .NET enthusiasts, and attending sessions is usually a side-effect of ...
Speaking engagements for the next months
I’m very happy that I’ll be speaking at a number of very nice local and international conferences. On Saturday March 26th, I’ll be joining the Dutch Code Camp event where I’ll be doing a chalk’n’talk on my Silverlight Cookbook initiative. <ul> <li>On Wednesday, April 27th, I will t...
Get me on stage on the Developer Days 2011
Although the Dutch Microsoft Developer Days is mostly about foreign speakers, the organization has a recurring event called the wildcard sessions. This allowed me to speak at the biggest Dutch conference of the year for two years in a row. Unfortunately, the number of proposals has exploded this ...
A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro
Last Thursday, me and my employer Aviva Solutions hosted the December edition of the DotNED user group in Leiden. And yesterday a shared my Silverlight reference architecture on this year’s last SDN Event. I gave two talks that evening and one last night and wanted to share my slides and example ...
More quotes from QCon
Well, QCon 2010 is over, so it is time to travel back to the Netherlands and finally see my wife and daughter again. However, after the previous post, the quotes have been coming in on Twitter space. So, to complete one of the most intense conferences ever, here are some more funny, inspiring and...
Deliberate Discovery, No SQL and CQRS at QCon
The 2nd day of QCon was not one where I chose wisely. My focus for this conference was everything Agile and anything from the well-known speakers. So I ignored most sessions that had words like REST, SQL or Java in it. How wrong I was…. But I did not discover that until I heard and read about all...
Pretotyping, Best Patterns and History Lessons
The compression ratio of the content versus the timing available is quite high here at QCon. Already at the first official day, I attended 7 (!) talks. That's quite a lot of information to process. Unfortunately, the difference in quality is really noticeable. Some talks were absolutely awesome a...
Quotes from QCon
One of the funny things of this QCon is the many tweets that the attendees have been throwing into the world wide web. That's great for a speaker because now they get immediate feedback on their performance, both good and bad. These are some of the quotes I found funny, inspiring or refreshing: ...
Agile Architecture according to Dan North
Updated on March 3rd 2012 with a PDF of Dan North’s mind map On the first day of the QCon conference in San Francisco, I attended a full-day tutorial titled "Secrets of Agile Architecture" hosted by Dan North. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was hoping for some refreshingly new insight...
A weekend in San Francisco
This week I'll be attending QCON, an international conference on architecture and Agile held in San Francisco. Because a flight on Sunday was 400 euros more expensive than a flight on Saturday, I decided to rent a nice convertible and use the day off to take a nice road trip through the area to t...
May 27th: CQRS and Event Sourcing, an alternate architecture for Domain Driven Design
Most of us will be familiar with the standard 3- or 4-layer architecture you often see in larger enterprise systems. Some are already practicing Domain Driven Design and work together with the business to clarify the domain concepts. Perhaps you’ve noticed that is difficult to get the intention o...
Is Entity Framework 4.0 ready for the real work?
This morning, on the Developer Days 2010, I did a talk on the current state of affairs of the 4.0 version of the Entity Framework, including a rough comparison with NHibernate 2.1. Apparently this is something that’s on the mind of many people. The room was supposed to accommodate a maximum of 80...
My two days of fame at the Developer Days 2010
Some of you who have been visiting the Dutch Developer Days 2010 in The Hague today may have noticed the flyers and banners for promoting the new online version of the .NET Magazine. Those who already know me may have noticed that it’s me on those banners. Since the photographer spe...
Fluent Assertions
The definitive guide to extending Fluent Assertions
Some background In my recent post about the responsibilities of an open-source developer I said that the author of an open-source project is fully entitled to reject a contribution. In the case of Fluent Assertions, this is no different. Some things just aren't a good fit for a general purpose a...
The responsibilities of an open-source developer
The proudest moment anybody initiating an open-source project can experience is when that project finally gains the momentum to make a difference within the community it targets. When my colleague Martin and I published the first release of Fluent Assertions on CodePlex in 2011 (yeah, those were ...
Why I am abandoning GitFlow
Now that the number of downloads of Fluent Assertions is about to cross the magic number of 1 million downloads, and the library is quite feature complete, it is time to rethink the release strategy. Since its inception we’ve always used a separate branch for working on future features and improv...
Fluent Assertions supports .NET 4.6, CoreCLR and .NET Native
With all credits going to Oren Novotny, Tommy Long, Stuart Blackler and some of the Microsoft folks behind the .NET Core projects, Fluent Assertions 4.0 introduces support for the new platforms .NET 4.6, CoreCLR and .NET Native. Since Fluent Assertions has adopted the Semantic Versioning scheme...
False positives and semantic versioning
As part of stabilizing an upcoming release, I always dog food a beta package against the 12000 unit tests in one of our bigger projects. In the early days, that would surface all kinds of edge cases I never thought of. In every single case, the first thing I would do is to add a new unit test to ...
Fluent Assertions just a got a little bit better
Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve just published a new version of Fluent Assertions with a load of little improvements that will improve your life as a unit test developer a little bit. New features Added CompareEnumsAsString and CompareEnumsAsValue to the options taken byShouldBe...
Universal Apps, WP8.1, xUnit2 or what else is new in Fluent Assertions 3.1
Yesterday, much later than planned, Fluent Assertions 3.1 as well as its companion project Fluent Assertions for Xamarin were released on Github and NuGet. As is becoming quite common this year, the honors for most active contributors once again go to Adam Voss and Oren Novotny. Next to being the...
Time to break with the past a.k.a. Fluent Assertions 3.0
Boy do I love the .NET community. Since I moved Fluent Assertions to Github, people have been creating 32 forks and provided me with 37 pull requests. In fact, release 3.0 has been made possible by the likes of Adam Voss (who provided a lot of those pull requests), Maarten Balliauw (for setting u...
It took almost a year, but Fluent Assertions 2.1 is done
It has been way too long since I last released a new version of Fluent Assertions, but somehow my intention to deliver at least every three months has once again failed by the obligations a working husband and father of two has. Nonetheless, Fluent Assertions 2.1 is a fact. And although it isn't ...
Planning the Windows 8 Cookbook
I'm currently at Microsoft's Build conference and we're all receiving a Surface RT tablet. That means it's a great moment to talk about my plans for the Windows 8 Cookbook. I know, I know, it's a cheesy name so just be aware that I'm open to better suggestions. Since Silverlight is mostly dead, I...
Fluent Assertions 2.0 is out of the beta phase
After six weeks of beta testing, it is time to remove the beta mark from Fluent Assertions 2.0. Since the beta was released, we fixed several little bugs that you won’t notice, but the original release notes still apply. Release 2.0 adds a lot of new features and improvements, most noticeably the...
Breaking with the past (or…Fluent Assertions 2.0 is in beta)
After many months of development, in particular during in evenings after work and in the weekends, we’re proud to present the first (and hopefully the only) beta of Fluent Assertions 2.0. Together with my good friend and coworker Martin Opdam, and supported by noticeable contributors like Oren No...
Fluent Assertions gets a bug fix release
While we are working on the next major version of Fluent Assertions, we received several smaller bug reports that we bundled in release 1.7.1. Fixed a bug that occurs when two collections are compared for equality but the collection contains null. Fixed a stack overflow while formatting an obje...
Fluent Assertions 1.7.0 has been released
It has barely been more than two months ago, but the number of downloads through CodePlex and Nuget combined has exceeded 2000. Me and co-author Martin Opdam thought that to be a nice reason for releasing a new version of Fluent Assertions. This isn't a big release, but since we are following sem...
Fluent Assertions is finally gaining some momentum
Indeed it is, in particular within the part of the .NET community that believes test-first development is non-negotiable. We receive more and more suggestions, contributions and questions, and we’ve started to notice some blog posts here and there. It’s not that it is being downloaded thousands ...
Why I created Fluent Assertions in the first place
A few weeks ago I read The value of open-source is the vision not the source code and that made me think about my own reasons for starting Fluent Assertions, now more than a year ago. In the light of that article, lets briefly go over my own goals for Fluent Assertions. The intention of a unit te...
Fluent Assertions 1.5 is done! Now it’s time for that summer.
In the last couple of months, me and colleague Martin Opdam have spent a considerable amount of time on both improving the reporting capabilities of Fluent Assertions as well as fixing and incorporating various community contributions. Because of the many changes required, a very busy client proj...
Fluent Assertions as a NuGet package
As of now you can download the latest version of Fluent Assertions directly from within Visual Studio 2010. Just install the NuGet package manager, select Add Library Package Reference from the project context menu and search for FluentAssertions.
Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions
Yesterday, I blogged about the newest release of Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and promised to demonstrate the new event monitoring syntax. Since I’m a Silverlight addict, I decided to show you an example of a MVVM unit test when using the traditional Assert class and the same exampl...
A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions
Christmas usually means a week off and a whole lot of free time between the social obligations and spending some quality time with my wife and daughter. That’s why I decided to get rid of some of the backlog items for the next version of Fluent Assertions. And I’m done, version 1.3.0 is a fact. N...
IDE
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
InRetrospect
In Retrospect: About getting through your Sprint
This is the fourth of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than a year of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the m...
In Retrospect: About Bugs
This is the third of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at th...
In Retrospect: About the Sprint Planning
This is the second of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at t...
In Retrospect: About Requirements Management
This is the first of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we decided throughout 14 sprint retrospective. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the mistakes a team of 9 develop...
Metro
About the future of the Silverlight Cookbook
Since my first blog post on the Silverlight Cookbook in September 2010, I’ve invested a lot of private time in sharing my best practices on building line-of-business application in Silverlight. I shared my code on CodePlex, wrote an entire series of blog posts, and talked about the Cookbook at se...
OWIN Recipes
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 7
In the sixth post of this series I talked about how you can use Swagger to create real useful documentation for your API. In this seventh and probably last post, I'd like to present some spices to make that OWIN middleware component extra special. Spice 1: Automate your entire bu...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 6
In the fifth post of this series I talked about some PowerShell tips to align the versions of all NuGet packages. In this sixth post, I'd like to show you how you can make your HTTP API much easier to use. Ingredient 7: Swagger-enabled documentation If your component exposes an HTTP API based o...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 5
In the fourth installment of this series I proposed a pattern for postponing expensive operations from inside your middleware component until the OWIN pipeline has been constructed. In this post, I'm going to talk about aligning package dependency versions. Why? Well, in my experience a well-desi...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 4
In my last post I talked about unit testing your OWIN pipeline and briefly mentioned that you shouldn't do any heavy lifting from inside your UseWhatever method. Examples of that include starting background tasks or connecting to other services (through that HttpMessageHandler). If you're lucky, ...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 3
In my last post, I talked about decoupling the construction of the OWIN pipeline from the definition of the OWIN middleware component. In this post, I’m going to talk about the next ingredient, the testing story.Ingredient 4: Testing your entire HTTP pipelineIn most projects that are building ASP...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 2
In my last post, I talked about naming conventions and reducing the number of public dependencies, the first two ingredients of a recipe for well-designed OWIN middleware components. In this post, I'm going to talk about separating the OWIN pipeline construction from the middleware defi...
Ingredients for well-designed OWIN middleware components - Part 1
My main focus the last couple of months has been on building components that offer HTTP-based services. This whole component-oriented focus is something we've been focusing on the last year or so because we wanted to actively trying move away from building monolithic systems. Tools like OWIN, NuG...
Productivity
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
Quality
A Git collaboration workflow that provides feedback early and fast
At Aviva Solutions, we’ve been using Git for a little of over two years now and I can wholeheartedly say that after having worked with TFS for years, we’ll never go back… ever. But with any new technology, practice or methodology, you need to go through several cycles before you find a way that w...
Why software innovation is not a free pass for doing whatever you want
Somebody on Twitter recently posed the question whether innovation in software and agile development can co-exist or not. To remove any misinterpretation - something quite common for Twitter discussion - I asked him to clarify what he meant with the word 'innovation'. In short, any kind of softwa...
The responsibilities of an open-source developer
The proudest moment anybody initiating an open-source project can experience is when that project finally gains the momentum to make a difference within the community it targets. When my colleague Martin and I published the first release of Fluent Assertions on CodePlex in 2011 (yeah, those were ...
The real challenges of building the right thing right
Suppose you're in the following situation.You and your team are supposed to start working on some important architectural changes that were long due.Your team is then asked by your manager to help build an important feature that requires the unique skills of your team, and ...
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Quick Review of The Cucumber Book from a SpecFlow perspective
This week I completed reading a new book titled The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy. Aslak is the founder of the Cucumber project (which is what SpecFlow for .NET is based on), and Matt is one of its most active developers. T...
In Retrospect: About Bugs
This is the third of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at th...
Another release for Fluent Assertions
It’s only February, but I’ve received so many requests from the community that another release of Fluent Assertions was easily warranted. New Features Somebody working under the name of CtrlAltDel pointed me at the little-known fact that floating point variables are inheritably inaccurate and...
December Update of the Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0
I finally found some time to update the coding guidelines with some feedback I received since it’s original release in June this year. I’ve removed the following guidelines because I found that they were either very exotic or not general enough for most developers: Avoid side-effects when...
A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro
Last Thursday, me and my employer Aviva Solutions hosted the December edition of the DotNED user group in Leiden. And yesterday a shared my Silverlight reference architecture on this year’s last SDN Event. I gave two talks that evening and one last night and wanted to share my slides and example ...
ALM Practices Part 12: Reducing Technical Debt
What is it? Technical Debt is every change to your code base that does not comply with the usual level of quality your team has agreed upon. Since this level of quality has been introduced to guarantee a healthy code base throughout the life time of the system, introducing technical debt essenti...
Commercial support for the C# 3.0/4.0 Coding Guidelines
A few weeks ago I had a chat with Paul Jansen, CEO of a small Eindhoven-based company named Tiobe. You might indirectly know Tiobe for its programming language index and their commercial code checker ClockSharp. But they have also been hosting a C# Coding Standard I co-wrote for Philips Medical S...
ALM Practices Part 11: Modeling the business domain using Domain Models
What is it? A domain model is typically depicted by a UML class diagram in which the classes and associations represent the business concepts and the relationships between them. Although you can use a piece of paper to draw up a domain model, in most cases a UML case tool is better suited for t...
ALM Practices Part 9: Ubiquitous Language
What is it? The Ubiquitous Language is a unified language consisting of verbs and nouns from the business domain of an enterprise system and should be used by all team members, stakeholders and other involved persons. Why would you do it? Because it creates a bridge of understanding between th...
ALM Practices Part 7: Refactoring
What is it? A mindset and practice that requires you to continuously reevaluate a region of code each time you make a change. In essence, you need to look at the code related to your changes and reconsider whether the original solution is still the best solution accounting for the information you...
Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 now available
As promised earlier, you can now download the concept version of my new Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 from a dedicated CodePlex site at www.csharpcodinguidelines.com. The list of changes is quite big, and includes new guidelines covering object-oriented design, design principles, C# 4.0...
ALM Practices Part 6: Code Analysis & Guidelines
What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
Fluent Assertions 1.2 has been released
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
The curious case of the unsolved extension methods
As part of my effort to improve the type-safety of Fluent Assertions, I’ve been investigating the possibility to use C# extension methods all the way. Unfortunately I think I’ve ran into the limitations of C# 3.0 (and C# 4.0 since it doesn’t add anything useful for this). Essentially, I’d like to...
ALM Practices Part 4: Common Code Layout
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
Silverlight
About the future of the Silverlight Cookbook
Since my first blog post on the Silverlight Cookbook in September 2010, I’ve invested a lot of private time in sharing my best practices on building line-of-business application in Silverlight. I shared my code on CodePlex, wrote an entire series of blog posts, and talked about the Cookbook at se...
Silverlight Cookbook: Looking for a great UI design
Why? Because even though think I have a reasonable idea of when a user interface is consistent and user friendly, I suck at the raw design skills. Just check out the current ‘design’ if you don’t believe me. I’m actually looking for something that resembles the Cosmopolitan theme or MetroTwit: ...
Silverlight Cookbook: Switching to another IoC Framework
The Rationale As long as I have been using the Dependency Inversion Principle, Microsoft Unity has always been my preferred Inversion-of-Control framework. So it’s not strange that the Silverlight Cookbook has been using Unity 2 in both its WCF/REST layer as well as within the Silverlight client....
So what does Windows 8 mean for .NET developers?
Last updated on September 22nd Unfortunately, the Microsoft Build conference conflicted with our company's 5-year anniversary and the associated sailing trip in Greece. Fortunately, the blogosphere and twitter-space provided plenty of opportunities for trying to grasp what the stuff Sinofsky and...
Yes, the Silverlight Cookbook is still alive
Although it might not seem like that, I am still working on the Silverlight Cookbook. However, I’ve just moved to a new house, so I ran out of time recently. Fortunately, since my colleague Martin Opdam is actively working on Fluent Assertions, so I only have to divide my free time between the co...
Choosing the right web technology for business applications
Before I continue with the rest of this post, I first need to make a disclaimer. I'm in no way an expert on all things Microsoft has to offer in the web realm and have yet to complete a full-fledged ASP.NET MVC & JQuery project. However, I see myself as someone who quickly grasps the potenti...
Where to find me during the Developer Days 2011
Somebody recently asked me what sessions I was planning to attend at the upcoming 2011 edition of the Microsoft Developer Days in The Hague. To be honest, my primary reason for going to a Dutch conference is to chat with fellow .NET enthusiasts, and attending sessions is usually a side-effect of ...
Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook
In the 2nd half of 2010 I was so fortunate to get the chance to build my first enterprise-class line-of-business application written in Silverlight 4. And although I designed my original reference architecture earlier that year, actually building it is a completely different thing. I learned a lo...
Another release for Fluent Assertions
It’s only February, but I’ve received so many requests from the community that another release of Fluent Assertions was easily warranted. New Features Somebody working under the name of CtrlAltDel pointed me at the little-known fact that floating point variables are inheritably inaccurate and...
Get me on stage on the Developer Days 2011
Although the Dutch Microsoft Developer Days is mostly about foreign speakers, the organization has a recurring event called the wildcard sessions. This allowed me to speak at the biggest Dutch conference of the year for two years in a row. Unfortunately, the number of proposals has exploded this ...
Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions
Yesterday, I blogged about the newest release of Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and promised to demonstrate the new event monitoring syntax. Since I’m a Silverlight addict, I decided to show you an example of a MVVM unit test when using the traditional Assert class and the same exampl...
A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro
Last Thursday, me and my employer Aviva Solutions hosted the December edition of the DotNED user group in Leiden. And yesterday a shared my Silverlight reference architecture on this year’s last SDN Event. I gave two talks that evening and one last night and wanted to share my slides and example ...
The subtleties of Silverlight’s cross-browser compatibility
Last week we put our first full-blown Silverlight 4 line-of-business application into production, and just yesterday, we’ve run into our first production issue. Consider the width specifications of the DataGrid columns in this XAML fragment: This XAML file was generated by Expression Blend and h...
Silverlight Cookbook: ViewModels, Coroutines and Binding Conventions
This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate proper design choices for building enterprise-class line-of-business applications with Silverlight (and WPF if you will). It currently consists out of the following part...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: The Domain Model
The Domain Model is roughly designed according to the DDD principles where cross-aggregate logic is handled by the command handlers instead of the more traditional domain services. One thing that I changed after I attended Greg Young's DDD/CQRS training is that I no longer allow my domain entitie...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Querying
After having put the introduction and the commanding part behind us, let me explain how I deal with querying. Consider the following slice of the reference architecture. My original intention was to use WCF Data Services combined with NHibernate on the query side. For one, because it allo...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Commanding
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”>After sharing my thoughts on unit testing in Silverlight and the combination of NHibernate and WCF Data Services, it is time to discuss the updated version of the Silverlight reference architecture from one of my posts of last year. To put the discu...
Getting more out of unit testing in Silverlight
As I already mentioned in my previous post, we're building a line-of-business app using Silverlight 4 and WCF Data Services. I really think Silverlight is great for those kind of systems, but since it is based on a different run-time as the full .NET framework, you may wonder what you'll run into...
Silverlight Cookbook: WCF Data Services and NHibernate
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p>This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate prope...
My first thoughts on WCF RIA Services
While working on my demo code for my full-day talk on Software Development Practices in Practice I was a bit ambitious and introduced both Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Apart from the fact that the preparation caused a bit too much of my social live, I ran in some things I don’t really like...
Silverlight Reference Architecture revisited
Update October 2010: I’ve started a new in-depth series on my current Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture. In July I posted about my considerations for a Silverlight Reference Architecture, and in December I talked about it in my chalk’n’talk session on architecture, WCF RIA Services and Silver...
Defining a reference architecture for Silverlight LOBs
Update October 2010: I’ve started a new in-depth series on my current Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture. Recently I've been catching up on Silverlight by reading Pro Silverlight 2 in C# and the many blogs and articles on Silverlight 3 and I'm seriously impressed. The reason for this sudden in...
TFS
How Git can help you prevent building a monolith
During last weeks' Git Like a Pro talk I tried to convey the message that switching to Git is much more than introducing a new source control system. It will affect not just the way you commit source code, branch or merge, it changes the entire development workflow. In fact, I'm willing to claim ...
Why you should abandon TFS and adopt Git
Almost every time I do some kind of talk somewhere, people ask me for advice on how to convince their management that they should drop Microsoft Team Foundation Server's source control system and move over to Git. In this post, I'll be talking about the source control system only. Both Visual Stu...
ALM Practices Part 10: Work Item Tracking
What is it? Using Team Foundation Server’s User Story, Task and Bug work item types as the central unit of work for all the activities done within a project. Why would you do it? Because it adds traceability between the functional requirements and the way these requirements have been realized ...
ALM Practices Part 8: Automatic Builds & Continuous Integration
What is it? An automatic build is a fully automated compilation of a specific version of your source code repository and which runs at regular intervals. More often than not, such a build includes additional steps such as running a static code analysis and code coverage, executing all automat...
ALM Practices Part 6: Code Analysis & Guidelines
What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
ALM Practices Part 5: Checklists
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
TFS, ALM, what’s in a name?
In response to my posts on Peer Reviews, Unit Testing & TDD, and Common Code Layout, someone noticed that all these posts were part of my Team Foundation Server Development Practices series, but not every post actually mentioned TFS. Obviously, he was right. The reason for using the TFS prefi...
How to split a solution into projects
Yesterday, a colleague of mine asked for some guidance on how to partition a Visual Studio solution into individual projects. Instead of simply answering his email I thought that blogging about it may be useful for others as well, so here are my rules: In general, have as few projects as possi...
ALM Practices Part 2: Peer Reviews
What is it? A formal review of all code and artifacts related to a requirement or task by another person than the original developer. Rework because of review comments must be revalidated afterwards. Why would you do that? Because the average developer introduces 10-50 bugs per 10...
Storyotypes in Visual Studio 2010
Storyotypes are stereotypes for user stories that can help to define the right scope for your user stories. You can read more about these in the article Using Storyotypes to Split Bloated XP Stories and these slides. Team Foundation Server 2010 includes a new VSTS for Agile process template close...
ALM Development Practices Part 1: An Introduction
As part of my many assignments, I’m compiling a bunch of Application Lifecycle Management practices into a set of development guidelines for bootstrapping our internal projects using Team Foundation Server. I’ve decided to share these with the community so that others may benefit from it as well....
Testing
Profiling legacy code using characterization tests
As you might have read, I've been refactoring some example code for a multi-threaded cache that I got from CodeProject into a source-only NuGet package which will soon be published as FluidCaching. Since this cache has been built to be very performant, the internal algorithms are not trivial to g...
Fluent Assertions 2.0 is out of the beta phase
After six weeks of beta testing, it is time to remove the beta mark from Fluent Assertions 2.0. Since the beta was released, we fixed several little bugs that you won’t notice, but the original release notes still apply. Release 2.0 adds a lot of new features and improvements, most noticeably the...
Slides and demo code for my SpecFlow/WaTiN talk
Yesterday I did a 2-hour talk on getting the most out of UI automation, particularly using SpecFlow and WaTiN. You can find the slides down here and the demo code at GitHub.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.s...
If you write an article about TDD, make sure it is correct
I spend a majority of my private time reading articles and blog posts, having discussions on Twitter, or engaging in conversations on conferences and community events. I'm realistic enough to understand that my opinions are not necessarily the truth, so I use those opportunities to challenge my o...
Fluent Assertions gets a bug fix release
While we are working on the next major version of Fluent Assertions, we received several smaller bug reports that we bundled in release 1.7.1. Fixed a bug that occurs when two collections are compared for equality but the collection contains null. Fixed a stack overflow while formatting an obje...
Fluent Assertions 1.7.0 has been released
It has barely been more than two months ago, but the number of downloads through CodePlex and Nuget combined has exceeded 2000. Me and co-author Martin Opdam thought that to be a nice reason for releasing a new version of Fluent Assertions. This isn't a big release, but since we are following sem...
Fluent Assertions is finally gaining some momentum
Indeed it is, in particular within the part of the .NET community that believes test-first development is non-negotiable. We receive more and more suggestions, contributions and questions, and we’ve started to notice some blog posts here and there. It’s not that it is being downloaded thousands ...
Why I created Fluent Assertions in the first place
A few weeks ago I read The value of open-source is the vision not the source code and that made me think about my own reasons for starting Fluent Assertions, now more than a year ago. In the light of that article, lets briefly go over my own goals for Fluent Assertions. The intention of a unit te...
Fluent Assertions 1.5 is done! Now it’s time for that summer.
In the last couple of months, me and colleague Martin Opdam have spent a considerable amount of time on both improving the reporting capabilities of Fluent Assertions as well as fixing and incorporating various community contributions. Because of the many changes required, a very busy client proj...
Another release for Fluent Assertions
It’s only February, but I’ve received so many requests from the community that another release of Fluent Assertions was easily warranted. New Features Somebody working under the name of CtrlAltDel pointed me at the little-known fact that floating point variables are inheritably inaccurate and...
Fluent Assertions as a NuGet package
As of now you can download the latest version of Fluent Assertions directly from within Visual Studio 2010. Just install the NuGet package manager, select Add Library Package Reference from the project context menu and search for FluentAssertions.
Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions
Yesterday, I blogged about the newest release of Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and promised to demonstrate the new event monitoring syntax. Since I’m a Silverlight addict, I decided to show you an example of a MVVM unit test when using the traditional Assert class and the same exampl...
A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions
Christmas usually means a week off and a whole lot of free time between the social obligations and spending some quality time with my wife and daughter. That’s why I decided to get rid of some of the backlog items for the next version of Fluent Assertions. And I’m done, version 1.3.0 is a fact. N...
A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro
Last Thursday, me and my employer Aviva Solutions hosted the December edition of the DotNED user group in Leiden. And yesterday a shared my Silverlight reference architecture on this year’s last SDN Event. I gave two talks that evening and one last night and wanted to share my slides and example ...
Getting more out of unit testing in Silverlight
As I already mentioned in my previous post, we're building a line-of-business app using Silverlight 4 and WCF Data Services. I really think Silverlight is great for those kind of systems, but since it is based on a different run-time as the full .NET framework, you may wonder what you'll run into...
Fluent Assertions 1.2 has been released
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
The curious case of the unsolved extension methods
As part of my effort to improve the type-safety of Fluent Assertions, I’ve been investigating the possibility to use C# extension methods all the way. Unfortunately I think I’ve ran into the limitations of C# 3.0 (and C# 4.0 since it doesn’t add anything useful for this). Essentially, I’d like to...
ALM Practices Part 5: Checklists
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
Fluent Assertions released on CodePlex
About a year ago, me and some other colleagues started to create a simple framework for verifying the outcome of unit tests in a more natural way. Martin Opdam already blogged about this in June and since then we have been adding some minor features. A few weeks ago I discovered the much more po...
Wildcard Proposal: TDD and SOLID, two ingredients for high quality software
Many attempts have been made to improve the overal quality of our software development efforts, but if there’s one I’d like to put some attention on, it’s Test Driven Development. It’s design-first, test-first approach has proved significant increases in overal quality. However, TDD is not easy a...
Visual Studio
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
Entity Framework 5 and 6 vs NHibernate 3 – The State of Affairs
It has been almost two years since I've last compared NHibernate and Entity Framework, so with the recent alpha version of EF 6, it's about time to look at the current state of affair. I've been using NHibernate for more than 6 years so obviously I'm a bit biased. But I can't ignore that EF's fea...
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Yes, the Silverlight Cookbook is still alive
Although it might not seem like that, I am still working on the Silverlight Cookbook. However, I’ve just moved to a new house, so I ran out of time recently. Fortunately, since my colleague Martin Opdam is actively working on Fluent Assertions, so I only have to divide my free time between the co...
Choosing the right web technology for business applications
Before I continue with the rest of this post, I first need to make a disclaimer. I'm in no way an expert on all things Microsoft has to offer in the web realm and have yet to complete a full-fledged ASP.NET MVC & JQuery project. However, I see myself as someone who quickly grasps the potenti...
Where to find me during the Developer Days 2011
Somebody recently asked me what sessions I was planning to attend at the upcoming 2011 edition of the Microsoft Developer Days in The Hague. To be honest, my primary reason for going to a Dutch conference is to chat with fellow .NET enthusiasts, and attending sessions is usually a side-effect of ...
Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook
In the 2nd half of 2010 I was so fortunate to get the chance to build my first enterprise-class line-of-business application written in Silverlight 4. And although I designed my original reference architecture earlier that year, actually building it is a completely different thing. I learned a lo...
Fluent Assertions as a NuGet package
As of now you can download the latest version of Fluent Assertions directly from within Visual Studio 2010. Just install the NuGet package manager, select Add Library Package Reference from the project context menu and search for FluentAssertions.
ReSharper versus CodeRush through the eyes of a keyboard addict
I've been a very long-time and very happy user of ReSharper, and I’ve become very dependent of it. I wouldn't know what to do with a plain Visual Studio 2010 installation. However, I also heard many great things about the combination of DevExpress's CodeRush and their Refactor! Pro products. Appa...
Fluent Assertions 1.2 has been released
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
Is Entity Framework 4.0 ready for the real work?
This morning, on the Developer Days 2010, I did a talk on the current state of affairs of the 4.0 version of the Entity Framework, including a rough comparison with NHibernate 2.1. Apparently this is something that’s on the mind of many people. The room was supposed to accommodate a maximum of 80...
ALM Practices Part 4: Common Code Layout
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
How to split a solution into projects
Yesterday, a colleague of mine asked for some guidance on how to partition a Visual Studio solution into individual projects. Instead of simply answering his email I thought that blogging about it may be useful for others as well, so here are my rules: In general, have as few projects as possi...
Visual Studio 2010 is huge!
During this week’s PDC 2008, I’ve been spending particular attention to sessions related to the new features of Visual Studio 2010 Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010. The one statement almost every session started with was that this release is huge, and I totally agree! I’ve not seen so ...
WCF
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Querying
After having put the introduction and the commanding part behind us, let me explain how I deal with querying. Consider the following slice of the reference architecture. My original intention was to use WCF Data Services combined with NHibernate on the query side. For one, because it allo...
Silverlight Cookbook: WCF Data Services and NHibernate
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”></p> <p>This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate prope...
WCF RIA Services
My first thoughts on WCF RIA Services
While working on my demo code for my full-day talk on Software Development Practices in Practice I was a bit ambitious and introduced both Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Apart from the fact that the preparation caused a bit too much of my social live, I ran in some things I don’t really like...
Windows
Why Windows 10 is much more than a new operating system
Let's be honest here. Since Microsoft has been shipping technical previews of Windows 10, I've been repaving my laptop a couple of times and then reverted to Windows 8.1. I didn't like the intermediate touch experience and stability was also not its greatest strengths. In fact, I reverted to 8.1 ...
Windows8
Looking back at Build 2012
A question which was asked many times during the week was whether or not this trip to Build 2012 in Redmond was worth the time and money. Even after four days of raw content, there is no short answer here. As Dennis Vroegop clearly illustrated, the organization was definitely not up to the task...
Build Day 4: WP8, Line-of-Business, Web Essentials and lots of laughs
Here we are at the fourth and last day of Microsoft Build 2012. That so many people showed up at the first session is quite surprising considering the attendee party that went on until midnight in downtown Seattle. It was a typical attendee party; free food and drinks and live music. Since being ...
Build Day 3: ASP.NET MVC, TypeScript, SignalR and Node.Js
So at this 3rd day here at Microsoft Build 2012, I'm actually getting lucky. Three great sessions in a row is obviously not something I've seen before. Hey, maybe I'll get to see four great sessions tomorrow. Anyway, with some of the technical debt from last night's Beerfest and a Halloween party...
Build Day 2: Azure, JavaScript and even more XAML and Windows Phone
Because day 2 of the Build conference wasn't any different, it seems that I must learn to accept that a maximum of two good sessions per day is going to be the standard. Fortunately the keynote was top notch with both Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie taking stage. They showed some of the power t...
Build Day 1: Surface, WP8, TFS, Windows Design Guidelines
Day 1 of Microsoft Build was in some way disappointing and at the same time exhilarating. To be honest, I was expecting to be updated on the new stuff Microsoft plans for the near future. The fact that the session list was not disclosed until a day ahead also helped reinforce that expectation. Bu...
Planning the Windows 8 Cookbook
I'm currently at Microsoft's Build conference and we're all receiving a Surface RT tablet. That means it's a great moment to talk about my plans for the Windows 8 Cookbook. I know, I know, it's a cheesy name so just be aware that I'm open to better suggestions. Since Silverlight is mostly dead, I...
a
The magic of hiding your NuGet dependencies
Welcome to the dependency hell While working on a little open-source demo project, I ran into that well-known challenge of NuGet dependency management again. This little project results in a NuGet package, that on itself also relies on other packages. Now, if I would just add those dependencies ...
agile
20 questions to determine whether your teams are mature enough
In this final post of this series, I’m going to change direction and talk about the predictability and maturity of your development team(s)
9 tips to get your distributed teams to collaborate effectively
I’ve seen a lot of prior attempts to out-source work to remote teams fail, have always wondered what was the main reason for this. Is it a culture thing? Is it the time difference. In this post, I describe the things we do ourselves that have made our remote team endeavors pretty successful for t...
A surprisingly accurate model to improve your communication skills
It may be coincidence, but the two best tutorials I attended at Agile DevOps East both ran on the same day. The first one focused mostly on agile transformation, but briefly touched on the leadership topic. This one, let by Jennifer Bonine, took this further by focusing on being a better leader b...
About smooth agile transformations and the “why” leader
For my annual conference trip, I decided to skip the always-great QCon conference for once and instead attend Agile DevOps East in Orlando, Florida. In addition to the typical conference schedule, I also registered for some of the half-day and full day tutorials. One of them, How to lead high-per...
The Red Hot Developer - A model for removing distractions from your teams
When your project, product or component gets sufficiently big that it has a large impact on the rest of the organization, you’ll automatically get faced with lots of internal and external distractions. Other teams might want to get that pull request merged as soon as possible, all kinds of questi...
agile architecture
Should architecture be constrained by reality?
Should architects make decisions with the constraints of available capacity in mind? Or should they strive to ignore the reality and pursue only the best solutions?
alm
SonarQube for mixed .NET and JavaScript/TypeScript projects
SonarQube always had a bad reputation when it comes to repositories that contain both the front-end as well as the back-end code. Here are two approaches.
api
How to properly test your HTTP API contracts in .NET
The route, the headers and the specific JSON returned by an HTTP API are the contract, and thus should be treated as such
archit
To DRY or not to DRY, it is a matter of boundaries
For a very VERY long time I've been convinced that aggressively refactoring your code in such a way that every piece of logic is repeated only once is a good thing. This practice, often referred to as DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself, has been one of the many of my tools of choice and goes hand in h...
architecture
6 signals that your architecture is not visible enough
I’ve been reflecting on common issues that make it hard for the developers to understand the architecture
15 flags that tell you that your testability practices need maturing
In this fourth post of the series, I’ll share some of the (red) flags I might raise while measuring the maturity of testing.
8 signs that your architecture is causing your developers to stumble over each other
In this third post of the series, I’ll share my perspective on how architectural constraints and decisions can hamper productivity.
8 signals that you don’t control your technical complexity
In this first post of a series, I’d like to focus on the challenges companies are facing while controlling their technical complexity.
16 practical design guidelines for successful Event Sourcing
I’ve written many posts about the strengths and weaknesses of Event Sourcing, but I still thought it might be useful to provide you with a list of the most important practical guidelines and heuristics that I think are needed to be successful with Event Sourcing
asynchronity
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
autofac
The curious case of a deadlock in Autofac
It has been more than two years since we switched from Microsoft Unity to Autofac and we haven’t regretted this a single day. Not only is the resolution performance much better than Unity, but it’s the feature set, in particular the relation types, that makes a world of difference. In terms of co...
automated-testing
Using docker to write automated tests against a real database
It’s 2023, so what if you could run SQL Server in a Linux docker container just before your tests start?
aviva-solutions
Hoe de IT markt het jonge talent te veel heeft verwend
Het was januari 1997. Ik was net afgestudeerd van de HTS Electrotechniek. Trots als een pauw op mijn ingenieurstitel én die dikke 9 voor mijn afstudeeropdracht bij - toen nog - Philips Semiconductors, ging ik op zoek naar een job. Maar dat viel nog niet mee. Philips had een aannamestop en van rec...
azure-devops
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
best-practices
6 signals that your architecture is not visible enough
I’ve been reflecting on common issues that make it hard for the developers to understand the architecture
Are you at your Plateau of Productivity yet?
A little story about the typical adoption process of TDD and how that works for other tools, principles and practices
brownfield
What it takes to make legacy code bases rock solid
Another thing I realized last year is that I really love working on legacy code bases and making them rock solid.
build-automation
14 reasons for adopting Nuke as your next build automation tool
How Nuke solves all of the problems of PSake, Cake and BullsEye and should become your build automation tool of your choice.
build-pipeline
SonarQube for mixed .NET and JavaScript/TypeScript projects
SonarQube always had a bad reputation when it comes to repositories that contain both the front-end as well as the back-end code. Here are two approaches.
build2015
How Microsoft blew our minds at Build 2015
Here we are again. After a little detour to QCon San Francisco and New Yorkin 2013 and 2014, we thought it to be about time to rejoin our fellow Microsoft developers here at Microsoft Build 2015 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Since we couldn't get a direct flight from Amsterdam to San Fr...
building
Merging Git repositories without losing history
With a bit of Git magic, it’s quite easy to merge the commits of one repository into a specific folder of another without losing the Git history
From clone to running a code base in under 5 minutes
If I can’t clone your repository and get the application running in under 5 minutes, you’re doing something wrong
caching
How to get the best performance out of NHibernate (and when not to use it at all)
Use the right tool for the right problem A very common sentiment I'm getting from the .NET community is the aversion against object-relational mappers like NHibernate and Entity Framework. Granted, if I could, I would use an (embeddable) NoSQL solution like RavenDB myself. They remove the object-...
A least recently used cache that you can use without worrying
At the beginning of this year, I reported on my endeavors to use RavenDB as a projection store for an event sourced system. One of the things I tried to speed up RavenDB's projection speed was to use the Least Recently Used cache developed by Brian Agnes a couple of years ago. This cache gave us ...
cake
14 reasons for adopting Nuke as your next build automation tool
How Nuke solves all of the problems of PSake, Cake and BullsEye and should become your build automation tool of your choice.
careers
Hoe de IT markt het jonge talent te veel heeft verwend
Het was januari 1997. Ik was net afgestudeerd van de HTS Electrotechniek. Trots als een pauw op mijn ingenieurstitel én die dikke 9 voor mijn afstudeeropdracht bij - toen nog - Philips Semiconductors, ging ik op zoek naar een job. Maar dat viel nog niet mee. Philips had een aannamestop en van rec...
coding conventions
9 simple practices for writing better object-oriented code
Consider a fantasy game that must track a collection of items, each having a certain amount of quality (or value) that increases or decreases after time passes. This collection contains the following six items:
codingpractices
How modern engineering principles reinforce each other
How modern engineering practices contribute to readability, testability, isolation, tracebility and discoverability.
An opinionated definition of “maintainable code”
I’ve been looking for a better way to explain the difference between a developer complaining about quality and a product owner or manager.
collaboration
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
12 opportunities to improve the productivity of your development teams
In this second post of the series, I’ll discuss the opportunities organizations miss to improve the productivity of their teams.
The many hats of a software architect
After a discussion with some folks on what being a software architect really means, I decided to capture the many hats you have to wear
How to work from home and still keep your sanity
Given the signs that this working-from-home isn’t going to change for another six months or so, let me share some of the things that have helped me to stay sane
The Red Hot Developer - A model for removing distractions from your teams
When your project, product or component gets sufficiently big that it has a large impact on the rest of the organization, you’ll automatically get faced with lots of internal and external distractions. Other teams might want to get that pull request merged as soon as possible, all kinds of questi...
complexity
8 signals that you don’t control your technical complexity
In this first post of a series, I’d like to focus on the challenges companies are facing while controlling their technical complexity.
components
Principles for Successful Package Management
How applying the SOLID principles on package design can help prevent the dependency hell
The magic of hiding your NuGet dependencies
Welcome to the dependency hell While working on a little open-source demo project, I ran into that well-known challenge of NuGet dependency management again. This little project results in a NuGet package, that on itself also relies on other packages. Now, if I would just add those dependencies ...
conference
A surprisingly accurate model to improve your communication skills
It may be coincidence, but the two best tutorials I attended at Agile DevOps East both ran on the same day. The first one focused mostly on agile transformation, but briefly touched on the leadership topic. This one, let by Jennifer Bonine, took this further by focusing on being a better leader b...
About smooth agile transformations and the “why” leader
For my annual conference trip, I decided to skip the always-great QCon conference for once and instead attend Agile DevOps East in Orlando, Florida. In addition to the typical conference schedule, I also registered for some of the half-day and full day tutorials. One of them, How to lead high-per...
confluence
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
cqrs
Event Sourcing in .NET - Dealing with projection exceptions
Transient vs non-transient exceptions If I have to name the single biggest flaw in adopting Event Sourcing, it must be our decision to rely on the synchronous dispatching pipeline of NEventStore. It is based on the idea that every event will be processed by all projectors in a synchronous manner....
Event Sourcing in .NET - Building fast autonomous projections
The characteristics of a great projection implementation Over the course of the last two years I’ve written numerous articles on the good, the bad and the ugly of Event Sourcing as well as on our experiences building and maintaining a distributed enterprise-class based on this increasingly popula...
csharp
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
csharp coding guidelines
Why C#’s “var” keyword can hamper maintainability
Coding conventions never cease to be a great source for heated debates. However, within the C# realm, two specific topics tend to reappear occasionally. The first one is about whether or not to use underscores for class fields (but I'm not going to discuss that here). The other one is the usage o...
culture
Real-world challenges and solutions for building high-performance teams
The open-space format gives you a chance to hear about other people’s challenges and how other experienced folks respond to that. I attended one on building high-performance teams.
Ownership at the right level
Ownership is not an all-or-nothing concept, so Netflix acknowledges up to five levels that each give a leader and its people a tool to clarify the expected/accept level of autonomy
An interesting perspective on what drives people
About passion, grace and fire as ingredients in a recipe for fully formed mature adults and high-performance teams as presented by Josh Evans at QCon San Francisco
The magic of keeping a band of developers together
As I work as a consultant for Aviva Solutions, and the nature of my job is to be involved in moderately long-running client projects, I don't get to come to the office that often. And if I do, it's on different days of the week. Over the last year so, our locations in Koudekerk aan de Rijn and Ei...
How to optimize your culture for learning, growth and collaboration
At the first day of QCon New York, I attended several talks and open-spaces that had some relation with culture, be it about improving the efficiency of developers, handling disagreement in respectful way, and creating an environment that embraces the learning experience. For instance, one of th...
dependency injection
Don’t blame the dependency injection framework
Over the last couple of months I’ve heard and read quite a few statements that say that Dependency Injection frameworks are bad things that you should avoid like the plague. In my opinion that’s just a result of rejecting something because it has been misused too long. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve be...
dependency inversion principle
Don’t blame the dependency injection framework
Over the last couple of months I’ve heard and read quite a few statements that say that Dependency Injection frameworks are bad things that you should avoid like the plague. In my opinion that’s just a result of rejecting something because it has been misused too long. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve be...
dependency management
Don’t blame the dependency injection framework
Over the last couple of months I’ve heard and read quite a few statements that say that Dependency Injection frameworks are bad things that you should avoid like the plague. In my opinion that’s just a result of rejecting something because it has been misused too long. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve be...
development
The Red Hot Developer - A model for removing distractions from your teams
When your project, product or component gets sufficiently big that it has a large impact on the rest of the organization, you’ll automatically get faced with lots of internal and external distractions. Other teams might want to get that pull request merged as soon as possible, all kinds of questi...
distribution
9 tips to get your distributed teams to collaborate effectively
I’ve seen a lot of prior attempts to out-source work to remote teams fail, have always wondered what was the main reason for this. Is it a culture thing? Is it the time difference. In this post, I describe the things we do ourselves that have made our remote team endeavors pretty successful for t...
docker
Using docker to write automated tests against a real database
It’s 2023, so what if you could run SQL Server in a Linux docker container just before your tests start?
documentation
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
How we document stuff
A recurring topic in every software project I've been involved with is what to document, when to do that, and where to store it. So it wasn't a big surprise that at a recent event, somebody asked me how we track and communicate design decisions. I initially pointed him to an article I wrote in Fe...
domain driven design
The Ugly of Event Sourcing–Real-world Production Issues
Event Sourcing is a beautiful solution for high-performance or complex business systems, but you need to be aware that this also introduces challenges most people don’t tell you about. After having dedicated a post on the challenges of dealing with projection migrations and how to optimize that, ...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Mixed Feelings
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Projections
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Domain Events
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there, could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've do...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Aggregates
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
dotnet
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
dotnetmag
A story about User Stories
My personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements
About ideas that stick
A while ago, some business man from the US who travels a lot throughout the US as part of his job, was sitting in his airline's business lounge for a drink. Right after finishing his 2nd, an attractive women approached him and offered him a drink in exchange for somebody to talk to. Somewhere hal...
The all new coding guidelines for C# 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 have been published!
After 50000 downloads and the recent final release of Visual Studio 2012 / C# 5.0 it was about time to do a thorough update of the C# Coding Guidelines. Although most of the guidelines have been preserved, I’ve tried to rewrite several of them using a less formal and less verbose writing style. I...
Looking back at Build 2012
A question which was asked many times during the week was whether or not this trip to Build 2012 in Redmond was worth the time and money. Even after four days of raw content, there is no short answer here. As Dennis Vroegop clearly illustrated, the organization was definitely not up to the task...
Build Day 4: WP8, Line-of-Business, Web Essentials and lots of laughs
Here we are at the fourth and last day of Microsoft Build 2012. That so many people showed up at the first session is quite surprising considering the attendee party that went on until midnight in downtown Seattle. It was a typical attendee party; free food and drinks and live music. Since being ...
Build Day 3: ASP.NET MVC, TypeScript, SignalR and Node.Js
So at this 3rd day here at Microsoft Build 2012, I'm actually getting lucky. Three great sessions in a row is obviously not something I've seen before. Hey, maybe I'll get to see four great sessions tomorrow. Anyway, with some of the technical debt from last night's Beerfest and a Halloween party...
Build Day 2: Azure, JavaScript and even more XAML and Windows Phone
Because day 2 of the Build conference wasn't any different, it seems that I must learn to accept that a maximum of two good sessions per day is going to be the standard. Fortunately the keynote was top notch with both Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie taking stage. They showed some of the power t...
Build Day 1: Surface, WP8, TFS, Windows Design Guidelines
Day 1 of Microsoft Build was in some way disappointing and at the same time exhilarating. To be honest, I was expecting to be updated on the new stuff Microsoft plans for the near future. The fact that the session list was not disclosed until a day ahead also helped reinforce that expectation. Bu...
Fluent Assertions 2.0 is out of the beta phase
After six weeks of beta testing, it is time to remove the beta mark from Fluent Assertions 2.0. Since the beta was released, we fixed several little bugs that you won’t notice, but the original release notes still apply. Release 2.0 adds a lot of new features and improvements, most noticeably the...
The Best Articles and Blog Posts of August 2012
Here are some of the highlights of the blog posts, articles and whitepapers I’ve read this month. In two short blog posts, Jimmy Bogard explains seven misconceptions of CQRS and Event Sourcing, and also warns us of the impact of eventual consistency on the user experience. Read about the many ...
Quick Review of The Cucumber Book from a SpecFlow perspective
This week I completed reading a new book titled The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy. Aslak is the founder of the Cucumber project (which is what SpecFlow for .NET is based on), and Matt is one of its most active developers. T...
Noticeable quotes from QCon New York
Just to be clear, I didn’t actually attend QCon New York this year. But after the experience of attending QCon San Francisco in 2010, I never forget the many great quotes you’ll find on Twitter. This time was no different. "Distributed objects failed; for very good reasons. Values rule on the w...
If you write an article about TDD, make sure it is correct
I spend a majority of my private time reading articles and blog posts, having discussions on Twitter, or engaging in conversations on conferences and community events. I'm realistic enough to understand that my opinions are not necessarily the truth, so I use those opportunities to challenge my o...
Fluent Assertions gets a bug fix release
While we are working on the next major version of Fluent Assertions, we received several smaller bug reports that we bundled in release 1.7.1. Fixed a bug that occurs when two collections are compared for equality but the collection contains null. Fixed a stack overflow while formatting an obje...
Feedback Requested: Is there any valid usage for the ‘new’ keyword?
Yesterday I ended up being part of a discussion about using the ‘new’ keyword to hide base-class members. A colleague of mine used it to alter a base-class property in a derived class with the purpose of making it more strongly typed. I’ve always rationalized guideline AV1010 (Don’t hide inherit...
Almost five years at Aviva Solutions and still enjoying it every minute
I know, I know, I’m still 3 months away from it. But without doubt, on the 1st of February, I will be celebrating my first 5-year anniversary in the 15 years of my professional career. That might sound silly, but I’ve always had a problem of getting restless after a few years . It never was a pro...
In Retrospect: About Bugs
This is the third of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at th...
In Retrospect: About the Sprint Planning
This is the second of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at t...
Silverlight Cookbook: Switching to another IoC Framework
The Rationale As long as I have been using the Dependency Inversion Principle, Microsoft Unity has always been my preferred Inversion-of-Control framework. So it’s not strange that the Silverlight Cookbook has been using Unity 2 in both its WCF/REST layer as well as within the Silverlight client....
In Retrospect: About Requirements Management
This is the first of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we decided throughout 14 sprint retrospective. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the mistakes a team of 9 develop...
So what does Windows 8 mean for .NET developers?
Last updated on September 22nd Unfortunately, the Microsoft Build conference conflicted with our company's 5-year anniversary and the associated sailing trip in Greece. Fortunately, the blogosphere and twitter-space provided plenty of opportunities for trying to grasp what the stuff Sinofsky and...
Yes, the Silverlight Cookbook is still alive
Although it might not seem like that, I am still working on the Silverlight Cookbook. However, I’ve just moved to a new house, so I ran out of time recently. Fortunately, since my colleague Martin Opdam is actively working on Fluent Assertions, so I only have to divide my free time between the co...
Speaking at Developer Developer Developer North
I’m honored to have been selected to speak at my first event in the United Kingdom, Developer Developer Developer North, hosted at the University of Sunderland, near New Castle. Our job as a software developer seems to revolve mostly around programming languages, frameworks and Visual Studio. And...
Why I created Fluent Assertions in the first place
A few weeks ago I read The value of open-source is the vision not the source code and that made me think about my own reasons for starting Fluent Assertions, now more than a year ago. In the light of that article, lets briefly go over my own goals for Fluent Assertions. The intention of a unit te...
Fluent Assertions 1.5 is done! Now it’s time for that summer.
In the last couple of months, me and colleague Martin Opdam have spent a considerable amount of time on both improving the reporting capabilities of Fluent Assertions as well as fixing and incorporating various community contributions. Because of the many changes required, a very busy client proj...
Choosing the right web technology for business applications
Before I continue with the rest of this post, I first need to make a disclaimer. I'm in no way an expert on all things Microsoft has to offer in the web realm and have yet to complete a full-fledged ASP.NET MVC & JQuery project. However, I see myself as someone who quickly grasps the potenti...
Where to find me during the Developer Days 2011
Somebody recently asked me what sessions I was planning to attend at the upcoming 2011 edition of the Microsoft Developer Days in The Hague. To be honest, my primary reason for going to a Dutch conference is to chat with fellow .NET enthusiasts, and attending sessions is usually a side-effect of ...
Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook
In the 2nd half of 2010 I was so fortunate to get the chance to build my first enterprise-class line-of-business application written in Silverlight 4. And although I designed my original reference architecture earlier that year, actually building it is a completely different thing. I learned a lo...
Another release for Fluent Assertions
It’s only February, but I’ve received so many requests from the community that another release of Fluent Assertions was easily warranted. New Features Somebody working under the name of CtrlAltDel pointed me at the little-known fact that floating point variables are inheritably inaccurate and...
ALM Practices every developer should know about
So now that I’ve finished my multi-part post on getting the most out of user stories, it is time to provide a nice convenient overview of some essential practices that I’ve blogged about. I don’t have any additional parts planned, but if I come up with something new, I’ll make sure this list is u...
Fluent Assertions as a NuGet package
As of now you can download the latest version of Fluent Assertions directly from within Visual Studio 2010. Just install the NuGet package manager, select Add Library Package Reference from the project context menu and search for FluentAssertions.
Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions
Yesterday, I blogged about the newest release of Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and promised to demonstrate the new event monitoring syntax. Since I’m a Silverlight addict, I decided to show you an example of a MVVM unit test when using the traditional Assert class and the same exampl...
A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions
Christmas usually means a week off and a whole lot of free time between the social obligations and spending some quality time with my wife and daughter. That’s why I decided to get rid of some of the backlog items for the next version of Fluent Assertions. And I’m done, version 1.3.0 is a fact. N...
December Update of the Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0
I finally found some time to update the coding guidelines with some feedback I received since it’s original release in June this year. I’ve removed the following guidelines because I found that they were either very exotic or not general enough for most developers: Avoid side-effects when...
A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro
Last Thursday, me and my employer Aviva Solutions hosted the December edition of the DotNED user group in Leiden. And yesterday a shared my Silverlight reference architecture on this year’s last SDN Event. I gave two talks that evening and one last night and wanted to share my slides and example ...
ReSharper versus CodeRush through the eyes of a keyboard addict
I've been a very long-time and very happy user of ReSharper, and I’ve become very dependent of it. I wouldn't know what to do with a plain Visual Studio 2010 installation. However, I also heard many great things about the combination of DevExpress's CodeRush and their Refactor! Pro products. Appa...
The subtleties of Silverlight’s cross-browser compatibility
Last week we put our first full-blown Silverlight 4 line-of-business application into production, and just yesterday, we’ve run into our first production issue. Consider the width specifications of the DataGrid columns in this XAML fragment: This XAML file was generated by Expression Blend and h...
Deliberate Discovery, No SQL and CQRS at QCon
The 2nd day of QCon was not one where I chose wisely. My focus for this conference was everything Agile and anything from the well-known speakers. So I ignored most sessions that had words like REST, SQL or Java in it. How wrong I was…. But I did not discover that until I heard and read about all...
Pretotyping, Best Patterns and History Lessons
The compression ratio of the content versus the timing available is quite high here at QCon. Already at the first official day, I attended 7 (!) talks. That's quite a lot of information to process. Unfortunately, the difference in quality is really noticeable. Some talks were absolutely awesome a...
Quotes from QCon
One of the funny things of this QCon is the many tweets that the attendees have been throwing into the world wide web. That's great for a speaker because now they get immediate feedback on their performance, both good and bad. These are some of the quotes I found funny, inspiring or refreshing: ...
Agile Architecture according to Dan North
Updated on March 3rd 2012 with a PDF of Dan North’s mind map On the first day of the QCon conference in San Francisco, I attended a full-day tutorial titled "Secrets of Agile Architecture" hosted by Dan North. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was hoping for some refreshingly new insight...
Silverlight Cookbook: ViewModels, Coroutines and Binding Conventions
This post is part of a series of blog posts detailing various aspects of the Silverlight Cookbook, an initiative to demonstrate proper design choices for building enterprise-class line-of-business applications with Silverlight (and WPF if you will). It currently consists out of the following part...
ALM Practices Part 12: Reducing Technical Debt
What is it? Technical Debt is every change to your code base that does not comply with the usual level of quality your team has agreed upon. Since this level of quality has been introduced to guarantee a healthy code base throughout the life time of the system, introducing technical debt essenti...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: The Domain Model
The Domain Model is roughly designed according to the DDD principles where cross-aggregate logic is handled by the command handlers instead of the more traditional domain services. One thing that I changed after I attended Greg Young's DDD/CQRS training is that I no longer allow my domain entitie...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Querying
After having put the introduction and the commanding part behind us, let me explain how I deal with querying. Consider the following slice of the reference architecture. My original intention was to use WCF Data Services combined with NHibernate on the query side. For one, because it allo...
My Silverlight 4 Reference Architecture: Commanding
<p $1=”$1”></p> <p $1=”$1”>After sharing my thoughts on unit testing in Silverlight and the combination of NHibernate and WCF Data Services, it is time to discuss the updated version of the Silverlight reference architecture from one of my posts of last year. To put the discu...
ALM Practices Part 11: Modeling the business domain using Domain Models
What is it? A domain model is typically depicted by a UML class diagram in which the classes and associations represent the business concepts and the relationships between them. Although you can use a piece of paper to draw up a domain model, in most cases a UML case tool is better suited for t...
Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 now available
As promised earlier, you can now download the concept version of my new Coding Guidelines for C# 3.0 and C# 4.0 from a dedicated CodePlex site at www.csharpcodinguidelines.com. The list of changes is quite big, and includes new guidelines covering object-oriented design, design principles, C# 4.0...
Things to do to fill up my free time
Now that my CQRS/Event Sourcing talk for DotNED is done, the pressure on the free hours between work and family has been reduced significantly. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit back and relax. Oh no, I’m full of ideas. so let’s see some of my plans. I’m still going to continue developing The...
CQRS and Event Sourcing
Yesterday evening I did a talk on building a .NET-based system using Command Query Responsibility Segregation and Event Sourcing. We had a lot of awesome discussions on its applicability, and as usual, I ran out of time again. I could have easily spend a full day on this subject, but unfortunatel...
May 27th: CQRS and Event Sourcing, an alternate architecture for Domain Driven Design
Most of us will be familiar with the standard 3- or 4-layer architecture you often see in larger enterprise systems. Some are already practicing Domain Driven Design and work together with the business to clarify the domain concepts. Perhaps you’ve noticed that is difficult to get the intention o...
ALM Practices Part 6: Code Analysis & Guidelines
What is it? Coding guidelines, or coding standards if you will, are documents consisting of rules and recommendations on the use of C# in enterprise systems. They deal with code layout, naming guidelines, the proper use of the .NET Framework, tips on writing useful comments and XML documentat...
Interaction Design according to Alan Cooper
I've recently finished the book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper, a well known proponent for interaction design. To be honest, I never really saw the purpose of interaction design in our projects. But after reading this book, I now know I didn't really understand what it was abou...
Fluent Assertions 1.2 has been released
It has been only 6 weeks since I first released Fluent Assertions to the public, followed by version 1.1 a week later. In the weeks thereafter, I received some nice ideas from the community which caused me to start working on the next version. But it was not easy. I found that designing a small f...
Is Entity Framework 4.0 ready for the real work?
This morning, on the Developer Days 2010, I did a talk on the current state of affairs of the 4.0 version of the Entity Framework, including a rough comparison with NHibernate 2.1. Apparently this is something that’s on the mind of many people. The room was supposed to accommodate a maximum of 80...
My two days of fame at the Developer Days 2010
Some of you who have been visiting the Dutch Developer Days 2010 in The Hague today may have noticed the flyers and banners for promoting the new online version of the .NET Magazine. Those who already know me may have noticed that it’s me on those banners. Since the photographer spe...
The curious case of the unsolved extension methods
As part of my effort to improve the type-safety of Fluent Assertions, I’ve been investigating the possibility to use C# extension methods all the way. Unfortunately I think I’ve ran into the limitations of C# 3.0 (and C# 4.0 since it doesn’t add anything useful for this). Essentially, I’d like to...
ALM Practices Part 5: Checklists
What is it? An (online) list of verification tasks to sign off as part of the delivery process of a newly delivered unit of work. Usually these include things that are often forgotten, or aspects that require explicit verification. See an example of such a list here. Why would you do it? Becau...
TFS, ALM, what’s in a name?
In response to my posts on Peer Reviews, Unit Testing & TDD, and Common Code Layout, someone noticed that all these posts were part of my Team Foundation Server Development Practices series, but not every post actually mentioned TFS. Obviously, he was right. The reason for using the TFS prefi...
ALM Practices Part 4: Common Code Layout
What is it? A collection of rules stating what a block of code should look like. These may include rules on where line breaks are required, how to place parentheses, how much whitespace to put before and after those parentheses, how many spaces to use when indenting and where to insert empty line...
Speaking at the Microsoft Developer Days 2010
Thanks to all the voters who voted for my wildcard proposal on Entity Framework 4.0, I will be speaking at the Microsoft Developer Days 2010, again. Last year, the whole wildcard thingy was a bit fuzzy, but this year, the organization has gone through great lengths to seriously include us wildcar...
Fluent Assertions 1.1 has been released
It’s only a few days ago since we released the first version of Fluent Assertions, and we already have a new release. The reason for this is that the first release was just the public release of an internal set of classes that we’ve been using for a year or so. But this week, we've worked hard t...
User Stories, a different story altogether
My Dutch article on User Stories in Team Foundation Server 2010 is now available online at the SDN site. Read it over here. I will translate it to English soon.
Visual Studio 2010 is huge!
During this week’s PDC 2008, I’ve been spending particular attention to sessions related to the new features of Visual Studio 2010 Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010. The one statement almost every session started with was that this release is huge, and I totally agree! I’ve not seen so ...
drive
An interesting perspective on what drives people
About passion, grace and fire as ingredients in a recipe for fully formed mature adults and high-performance teams as presented by Josh Evans at QCon San Francisco
engineering-principles
How I keep my Git source control history clean
After years of working with legacy code, I’ve learned to value the past and will do what I can to deliver well-focused and organized pull requests
estimations
About software estimation and planning
Estimates are almost always wrong and that’s fine. Just deal with that and prioritize accordingly.
event sourcing
Event Sourcing in .NET - Dealing with projection exceptions
Transient vs non-transient exceptions If I have to name the single biggest flaw in adopting Event Sourcing, it must be our decision to rely on the synchronous dispatching pipeline of NEventStore. It is based on the idea that every event will be processed by all projectors in a synchronous manner....
Event Sourcing in .NET - Using an OR/M as a projection library
I thought we didn’t need OR/Ms anymore? A common advantage of adopting Event Sourcing is that it solves the impedance mismatch between object oriented code and the relation database model. And because of that, Object/Relational Mappers (OR/Ms) have become obsolete. While I agree with the first st...
Event Sourcing in .NET - Building fast autonomous projections
The characteristics of a great projection implementation Over the course of the last two years I’ve written numerous articles on the good, the bad and the ugly of Event Sourcing as well as on our experiences building and maintaining a distributed enterprise-class based on this increasingly popula...
Event Sourcing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Just a small post to provide an overview of all the posts in this series.
The Ugly of Event Sourcing–Real-world Production Issues
Event Sourcing is a beautiful solution for high-performance or complex business systems, but you need to be aware that this also introduces challenges most people don’t tell you about. After having dedicated a post on the challenges of dealing with projection migrations and how to optimize that, ...
The Ugly of Event Sourcing - Projection Schema Changes
Event Sourcing is a beautiful solution for high-performance or complex business systems, but you need to be aware that this also introduces challenges most people don't tell you about. Last year, I already blogged about the things I would do differently next time. But after attending another intr...
The Bad of Event Sourcing - The Pains of Wrongly Designed Aggregates
Event Sourcing is a brilliant solution for high-performance or complex business systems, but you need to be aware that this also introduces challenges most people don't tell you about. In June, I already blogged about the things I would do differently next time. But after attending another introd...
The Good of Event Sourcing - Conflict Handling, Replication and Domain Evolution
Event Sourcing is a brilliant solution for high-performance or complex business systems, but you need to be aware that this also introduces challenges most people don't tell you about. In @June, I already blogged about the things I would do differently next time. But after attending another intro...
The Good of Event Sourcing - Projections
It was in 2009 in Utrecht, The Netherlands, when I first learned about Event Sourcing and the Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) patterns at a training Greg Young gave there. I remembered to be awed by the scalability and architectural simplicity those styles provided. However, I als...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Mixed Feelings
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Projections
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Domain Events
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there, could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've do...
Event Sourcing from the Trenches: Aggregates
While visiting QCon New York this year, I realized that a lot of the architectural problems that were discussed there could benefit from the Event Sourcing architecture style. Since I've been in charge of architecting such a system for several years now, I started to reflect on the work we've don...
event-sourcing
10 problems that Event Sourcing can help you solve
I started thinking about the typical problems where I would use Event Sourcing. I came up with a couple of them, some more functional and some more technical.
A recipe for gradually migrating from CRUD to Event Sourcing
if you need Event Sourcing, and you have an existing, more traditional (a.k.a. CRUD) application, there are roughly three strategies you can follow.
16 practical design guidelines for successful Event Sourcing
I’ve written many posts about the strengths and weaknesses of Event Sourcing, but I still thought it might be useful to provide you with a list of the most important practical guidelines and heuristics that I think are needed to be successful with Event Sourcing
fluent-assertions
Monetizing open-source development and supporting the community
Some thoughts on how we could convince companies to support the open-source community.
Comparing objects with disparate members in Fluent Assertions
Some examples on how to use the new WithMapping API to compare objects with differently named properties or fields
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
Fluent Assertions 6.0, the biggest release ever
Now, after two alphas and three betas, it’s time to let Fluent Assertions 6 enter the real-world. Let me provide you with the highlights of this release.
fluentassertions
Fluent Assertions 5.0: The best unit test assertion library in the .NET realm just got better
It has been almost a year since version 4.19, the last functional release of Fluent Assertions was shipped. Not because of a lack of feature requests, but simply because this new version has cost me all the private time I had. My main goal of this release was to repair some of the design mistakes...
fluid-caching
Profiling legacy code using characterization tests
As you might have read, I've been refactoring some example code for a multi-threaded cache that I got from CodeProject into a source-only NuGet package which will soon be published as FluidCaching. Since this cache has been built to be very performant, the internal algorithms are not trivial to g...
A least recently used cache that you can use without worrying
At the beginning of this year, I reported on my endeavors to use RavenDB as a projection store for an event sourced system. One of the things I tried to speed up RavenDB's projection speed was to use the Least Recently Used cache developed by Brian Agnes a couple of years ago. This cache gave us ...
git
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
Merging Git repositories without losing history
With a bit of Git magic, it’s quite easy to merge the commits of one repository into a specific folder of another without losing the Git history
How I keep my Git source control history clean
After years of working with legacy code, I’ve learned to value the past and will do what I can to deliver well-focused and organized pull requests
A Git collaboration workflow that provides feedback early and fast
At Aviva Solutions, we’ve been using Git for a little of over two years now and I can wholeheartedly say that after having worked with TFS for years, we’ll never go back… ever. But with any new technology, practice or methodology, you need to go through several cycles before you find a way that w...
How Git can help you prevent building a monolith
During last weeks' Git Like a Pro talk I tried to convey the message that switching to Git is much more than introducing a new source control system. It will affect not just the way you commit source code, branch or merge, it changes the entire development workflow. In fact, I'm willing to claim ...
Why you should abandon TFS and adopt Git
Almost every time I do some kind of talk somewhere, people ask me for advice on how to convince their management that they should drop Microsoft Team Foundation Server's source control system and move over to Git. In this post, I'll be talking about the source control system only. Both Visual Stu...
Software versioning without thinking about it
Solving the versioning problemIf you're building libraries, products or any other software system, versioning is usually a pretty big deal. It's the only way to determine what version of that library, product or system you're looking at. Before an organization settles on a versioning strategy, ma...
gitflow
How to use GitVersion to get sensible versioning
How combining the clarity of Semantic Versioning, a release strategy like GitFlow or GithubFlow and GitVersion gives you sensible and automatic artifact numbering
github
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
A Git collaboration workflow that provides feedback early and fast
At Aviva Solutions, we’ve been using Git for a little of over two years now and I can wholeheartedly say that after having worked with TFS for years, we’ll never go back… ever. But with any new technology, practice or methodology, you need to go through several cycles before you find a way that w...
A least recently used cache that you can use without worrying
At the beginning of this year, I reported on my endeavors to use RavenDB as a projection store for an event sourced system. One of the things I tried to speed up RavenDB's projection speed was to use the Least Recently Used cache developed by Brian Agnes a couple of years ago. This cache gave us ...
gitkraken
How I keep my Git source control history clean
After years of working with legacy code, I’ve learned to value the past and will do what I can to deliver well-focused and organized pull requests
gitversion
How to use GitVersion to get sensible versioning
How combining the clarity of Semantic Versioning, a release strategy like GitFlow or GithubFlow and GitVersion gives you sensible and automatic artifact numbering
greenfield
What it takes to make legacy code bases rock solid
Another thing I realized last year is that I really love working on legacy code bases and making them rock solid.
inner sourcing
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
integration tests
An opinionated definition of a unit test
During the same C# code reviews that triggered last week’s blog post about writing great unit tests, another discussion tends to pop-up, in particularly with new joiners (both experienced and junior):
inversion of control
Don’t blame the dependency injection framework
Over the last couple of months I’ve heard and read quite a few statements that say that Dependency Injection frameworks are bad things that you should avoid like the plague. In my opinion that’s just a result of rejecting something because it has been misused too long. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve be...
jetbrains
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
jetbrans
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
leadership
A surprisingly accurate model to improve your communication skills
It may be coincidence, but the two best tutorials I attended at Agile DevOps East both ran on the same day. The first one focused mostly on agile transformation, but briefly touched on the leadership topic. This one, let by Jennifer Bonine, took this further by focusing on being a better leader b...
About smooth agile transformations and the “why” leader
For my annual conference trip, I decided to skip the always-great QCon conference for once and instead attend Agile DevOps East in Orlando, Florida. In addition to the typical conference schedule, I also registered for some of the half-day and full day tutorials. One of them, How to lead high-per...
learning
You can’t know everything (and where I get my knowledge from)
I don’t believe somebody can be really proficient in multiple platforms and programming languages, so invest in knowledge wisely.
legacy
From clone to running a code base in under 5 minutes
If I can’t clone your repository and get the application running in under 5 minutes, you’re doing something wrong
What it takes to make legacy code bases rock solid
Another thing I realized last year is that I really love working on legacy code bases and making them rock solid.
liquidprojections
Event Sourcing in .NET - Dealing with projection exceptions
Transient vs non-transient exceptions If I have to name the single biggest flaw in adopting Event Sourcing, it must be our decision to rely on the synchronous dispatching pipeline of NEventStore. It is based on the idea that every event will be processed by all projectors in a synchronous manner....
Event Sourcing in .NET - Using an OR/M as a projection library
I thought we didn’t need OR/Ms anymore? A common advantage of adopting Event Sourcing is that it solves the impedance mismatch between object oriented code and the relation database model. And because of that, Object/Relational Mappers (OR/Ms) have become obsolete. While I agree with the first st...
Event Sourcing in .NET - Building fast autonomous projections
The characteristics of a great projection implementation Over the course of the last two years I’ve written numerous articles on the good, the bad and the ugly of Event Sourcing as well as on our experiences building and maintaining a distributed enterprise-class based on this increasingly popula...
logging
7 symptoms of insufficient traceability in your software project
Another part of what I call internal quality is the traceability of decisions, choices and considerations in software development..
maintainability
How modern engineering principles reinforce each other
How modern engineering practices contribute to readability, testability, isolation, tracebility and discoverability.
An opinionated definition of “maintainable code”
I’ve been looking for a better way to explain the difference between a developer complaining about quality and a product owner or manager.
9 simple practices for writing better object-oriented code
Consider a fantasy game that must track a collection of items, each having a certain amount of quality (or value) that increases or decreases after time passes. This collection contains the following six items:
maintenance
From clone to running a code base in under 5 minutes
If I can’t clone your repository and get the application running in under 5 minutes, you’re doing something wrong
What it takes to make legacy code bases rock solid
Another thing I realized last year is that I really love working on legacy code bases and making them rock solid.
maturity
You can’t know everything (and where I get my knowledge from)
I don’t believe somebody can be really proficient in multiple platforms and programming languages, so invest in knowledge wisely.
How modern engineering principles reinforce each other
How modern engineering practices contribute to readability, testability, isolation, tracebility and discoverability.
An opinionated definition of “maintainable code”
I’ve been looking for a better way to explain the difference between a developer complaining about quality and a product owner or manager.
microservices
Scaling a growing organization by rearchitecting the monolith
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous post, I elaborated on Randy's classification system to illustrate the phases of a growing organization and how that...
Microservices: The State of the Union
After attending a full-day track with multiple sessions and open-spaces on microservices at QCon New York, it is clear that this technique took flight since I first heard about that at the same conference in 2014. A lot of companies made the jump to solve their technical and organizational scalin...
monetizing
Monetizing open-source development and supporting the community
Some thoughts on how we could convince companies to support the open-source community.
naming
9 coding practices that have a smell
Code that may be readable but which purpose is unclear doesn’t make anybody happy
How I keep my test names short and functional
Naming in software is hard, so here’s how I name and group my automated tests to use them as documentation
nhiberate
How to get the best performance out of NHibernate (and when not to use it at all)
Use the right tool for the right problem A very common sentiment I'm getting from the .NET community is the aversion against object-relational mappers like NHibernate and Entity Framework. Granted, if I could, I would use an (embeddable) NoSQL solution like RavenDB myself. They remove the object-...
nhibernate
Event Sourcing in .NET - Dealing with projection exceptions
Transient vs non-transient exceptions If I have to name the single biggest flaw in adopting Event Sourcing, it must be our decision to rely on the synchronous dispatching pipeline of NEventStore. It is based on the idea that every event will be processed by all projectors in a synchronous manner....
Event Sourcing in .NET - Using an OR/M as a projection library
I thought we didn’t need OR/Ms anymore? A common advantage of adopting Event Sourcing is that it solves the impedance mismatch between object oriented code and the relation database model. And because of that, Object/Relational Mappers (OR/Ms) have become obsolete. While I agree with the first st...
nuget
Principles for Successful Package Management
How applying the SOLID principles on package design can help prevent the dependency hell
The magic of hiding your NuGet dependencies
Welcome to the dependency hell While working on a little open-source demo project, I ran into that well-known challenge of NuGet dependency management again. This little project results in a NuGet package, that on itself also relies on other packages. Now, if I would just add those dependencies ...
nuke
How to use GitVersion to get sensible versioning
How combining the clarity of Semantic Versioning, a release strategy like GitFlow or GithubFlow and GitVersion gives you sensible and automatic artifact numbering
14 reasons for adopting Nuke as your next build automation tool
How Nuke solves all of the problems of PSake, Cake and BullsEye and should become your build automation tool of your choice.
object-relational mapper
Event Sourcing in .NET - Using an OR/M as a projection library
I thought we didn’t need OR/Ms anymore? A common advantage of adopting Event Sourcing is that it solves the impedance mismatch between object oriented code and the relation database model. And because of that, Object/Relational Mappers (OR/Ms) have become obsolete. While I agree with the first st...
open-source
Monetizing open-source development and supporting the community
Some thoughts on how we could convince companies to support the open-source community.
The responsibilities of an open-source developer
The proudest moment anybody initiating an open-source project can experience is when that project finally gains the momentum to make a difference within the community it targets. When my colleague Martin and I published the first release of Fluent Assertions on CodePlex in 2011 (yeah, those were ...
A least recently used cache that you can use without worrying
At the beginning of this year, I reported on my endeavors to use RavenDB as a projection store for an event sourced system. One of the things I tried to speed up RavenDB's projection speed was to use the Least Recently Used cache developed by Brian Agnes a couple of years ago. This cache gave us ...
outsourcing
9 tips to get your distributed teams to collaborate effectively
I’ve seen a lot of prior attempts to out-source work to remote teams fail, have always wondered what was the main reason for this. Is it a culture thing? Is it the time difference. In this post, I describe the things we do ourselves that have made our remote team endeavors pretty successful for t...
ownership
Real-world challenges and solutions for building high-performance teams
The open-space format gives you a chance to hear about other people’s challenges and how other experienced folks respond to that. I attended one on building high-performance teams.
Ownership at the right level
Ownership is not an all-or-nothing concept, so Netflix acknowledges up to five levels that each give a leader and its people a tool to clarify the expected/accept level of autonomy
package-management
Principles for Successful Package Management
How applying the SOLID principles on package design can help prevent the dependency hell
people
Key takeaways from QCon New York 2017: The Soft Stuff
This year, for the third time since I joined Aviva Solutions, I attended the New York edition of the famous QCon conference organized by InfoQ. As always, this was a very inspiring week with topics on large-scale distributed architecture, microservices, security, APIs, organizational culture and ...
performance
The (in)sanity of performance testing web applications
Learn about the functional and technical challenges of achieving realistic and useful performance tests.
How to get the best performance out of NHibernate (and when not to use it at all)
Use the right tool for the right problem A very common sentiment I'm getting from the .NET community is the aversion against object-relational mappers like NHibernate and Entity Framework. Granted, if I could, I would use an (embeddable) NoSQL solution like RavenDB myself. They remove the object-...
planning
20 questions to determine whether your teams are mature enough
In this final post of this series, I’m going to change direction and talk about the predictability and maturity of your development team(s)
About software estimation and planning
Estimates are almost always wrong and that’s fine. Just deal with that and prioritize accordingly.
powershell
Software versioning without thinking about it
Solving the versioning problemIf you're building libraries, products or any other software system, versioning is usually a pretty big deal. It's the only way to determine what version of that library, product or system you're looking at. Before an organization settles on a versioning strategy, ma...
Bringing the power of PowerShell to your build scripts
If you look back at the last couple of years, you’ll notice an increasing attention for best practices that should make us more professional software developers. We design our classes using Test Driven Development, we review our code in pairs, and we apply all kinds of architectural principles su...
productivity
About software estimation and planning
Estimates are almost always wrong and that’s fine. Just deal with that and prioritize accordingly.
8 signs that your architecture is causing your developers to stumble over each other
In this third post of the series, I’ll share my perspective on how architectural constraints and decisions can hamper productivity.
12 opportunities to improve the productivity of your development teams
In this second post of the series, I’ll discuss the opportunities organizations miss to improve the productivity of their teams.
programming
12 opportunities to improve the productivity of your development teams
In this second post of the series, I’ll discuss the opportunities organizations miss to improve the productivity of their teams.
projections
16 practical design guidelines for successful Event Sourcing
I’ve written many posts about the strengths and weaknesses of Event Sourcing, but I still thought it might be useful to provide you with a list of the most important practical guidelines and heuristics that I think are needed to be successful with Event Sourcing
Event Sourcing in .NET - Dealing with projection exceptions
Transient vs non-transient exceptions If I have to name the single biggest flaw in adopting Event Sourcing, it must be our decision to rely on the synchronous dispatching pipeline of NEventStore. It is based on the idea that every event will be processed by all projectors in a synchronous manner....
Event Sourcing in .NET - Using an OR/M as a projection library
I thought we didn’t need OR/Ms anymore? A common advantage of adopting Event Sourcing is that it solves the impedance mismatch between object oriented code and the relation database model. And because of that, Object/Relational Mappers (OR/Ms) have become obsolete. While I agree with the first st...
Event Sourcing in .NET - Building fast autonomous projections
The characteristics of a great projection implementation Over the course of the last two years I’ve written numerous articles on the good, the bad and the ugly of Event Sourcing as well as on our experiences building and maintaining a distributed enterprise-class based on this increasingly popula...
psake
14 reasons for adopting Nuke as your next build automation tool
How Nuke solves all of the problems of PSake, Cake and BullsEye and should become your build automation tool of your choice.
Bringing the power of PowerShell to your build scripts
If you look back at the last couple of years, you’ll notice an increasing attention for best practices that should make us more professional software developers. We design our classes using Test Driven Development, we review our code in pairs, and we apply all kinds of architectural principles su...
qcon
Real-world challenges and solutions for building high-performance teams
The open-space format gives you a chance to hear about other people’s challenges and how other experienced folks respond to that. I attended one on building high-performance teams.
Ownership at the right level
Ownership is not an all-or-nothing concept, so Netflix acknowledges up to five levels that each give a leader and its people a tool to clarify the expected/accept level of autonomy
An interesting perspective on what drives people
About passion, grace and fire as ingredients in a recipe for fully formed mature adults and high-performance teams as presented by Josh Evans at QCon San Francisco
Key takeaways from QCon New York 2017: The Soft Stuff
This year, for the third time since I joined Aviva Solutions, I attended the New York edition of the famous QCon conference organized by InfoQ. As always, this was a very inspiring week with topics on large-scale distributed architecture, microservices, security, APIs, organizational culture and ...
Key takeaways from QCon New York 2017: The Tech Stuff
This year, for the third time since I joined Aviva Solutions, I attended the New York edition of the famous QCon conference organized by InfoQ. As always, this was a very inspiring week with topics on large-scale distributed architecture, microservices, security, APIs, organizational culture and ...
Scaling a growing organization by reorganizing the teams
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous two posts I discussed a model to understand the needs of an organization in its different life phases, as well as a...
Scaling a growing organization by rearchitecting the monolith
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous post, I elaborated on Randy's classification system to illustrate the phases of a growing organization and how that...
Understanding a growing organization and the effect on technology
The characteristics of a growing organizationDuring this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. Randy explained us how every start-up goes through several phases, each with a differ...
Microservices: The State of the Union
After attending a full-day track with multiple sessions and open-spaces on microservices at QCon New York, it is clear that this technique took flight since I first heard about that at the same conference in 2014. A lot of companies made the jump to solve their technical and organizational scalin...
How to optimize your culture for learning, growth and collaboration
At the first day of QCon New York, I attended several talks and open-spaces that had some relation with culture, be it about improving the efficiency of developers, handling disagreement in respectful way, and creating an environment that embraces the learning experience. For instance, one of th...
ravendb
A least recently used cache that you can use without worrying
At the beginning of this year, I reported on my endeavors to use RavenDB as a projection store for an event sourced system. One of the things I tried to speed up RavenDB's projection speed was to use the Least Recently Used cache developed by Brian Agnes a couple of years ago. This cache gave us ...
recruitment
Hoe de IT markt het jonge talent te veel heeft verwend
Het was januari 1997. Ik was net afgestudeerd van de HTS Electrotechniek. Trots als een pauw op mijn ingenieurstitel én die dikke 9 voor mijn afstudeeropdracht bij - toen nog - Philips Semiconductors, ging ik op zoek naar een job. Maar dat viel nog niet mee. Philips had een aannamestop en van rec...
refactoring
12 opportunities to improve the productivity of your development teams
In this second post of the series, I’ll discuss the opportunities organizations miss to improve the productivity of their teams.
remote teams
9 tips to get your distributed teams to collaborate effectively
I’ve seen a lot of prior attempts to out-source work to remote teams fail, have always wondered what was the main reason for this. Is it a culture thing? Is it the time difference. In this post, I describe the things we do ourselves that have made our remote team endeavors pretty successful for t...
remote-working
How to work from home and still keep your sanity
Given the signs that this working-from-home isn’t going to change for another six months or so, let me share some of the things that have helped me to stay sane
resharper
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
retrospective
The Good of Event Sourcing - Projections
It was in 2009 in Utrecht, The Netherlands, when I first learned about Event Sourcing and the Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) patterns at a training Greg Young gave there. I remembered to be awed by the scalability and architectural simplicity those styles provided. However, I als...
rider
A month without R# or Rider - Editing, Debugging & Refactoring
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at editing, debugging and refactoring.
A month without R# or Rider - General usability and code navigation
Did Visual Studio really get so much better since the last time I tried? Or is JetBrains Rider still years ahead of the competition. Let’s look at general usability and code navigation
roadmaps
About software estimation and planning
Estimates are almost always wrong and that’s fine. Just deal with that and prioritize accordingly.
roslyn
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
scalability
Scaling a growing organization by reorganizing the teams
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous two posts I discussed a model to understand the needs of an organization in its different life phases, as well as a...
Scaling a growing organization by rearchitecting the monolith
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous post, I elaborated on Randy's classification system to illustrate the phases of a growing organization and how that...
Understanding a growing organization and the effect on technology
The characteristics of a growing organizationDuring this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. Randy explained us how every start-up goes through several phases, each with a differ...
semantic versioning
How to use GitVersion to get sensible versioning
How combining the clarity of Semantic Versioning, a release strategy like GitFlow or GithubFlow and GitVersion gives you sensible and automatic artifact numbering
7 symptoms of insufficient traceability in your software project
Another part of what I call internal quality is the traceability of decisions, choices and considerations in software development..
False positives and semantic versioning
As part of stabilizing an upcoming release, I always dog food a beta package against the 12000 unit tests in one of our bigger projects. In the early days, that would surface all kinds of edge cases I never thought of. In every single case, the first thing I would do is to add a new unit test to ...
sharepoint
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
software development
8 signs that your architecture is causing your developers to stumble over each other
In this third post of the series, I’ll share my perspective on how architectural constraints and decisions can hamper productivity.
12 opportunities to improve the productivity of your development teams
In this second post of the series, I’ll discuss the opportunities organizations miss to improve the productivity of their teams.
software documentation
7 symptoms of insufficient traceability in your software project
Another part of what I call internal quality is the traceability of decisions, choices and considerations in software development..
software-architecture
The many hats of a software architect
After a discussion with some folks on what being a software architect really means, I decided to capture the many hats you have to wear
solid
6 signals that your architecture is not visible enough
I’ve been reflecting on common issues that make it hard for the developers to understand the architecture
Are you at your Plateau of Productivity yet?
A little story about the typical adoption process of TDD and how that works for other tools, principles and practices
sonarqube
SonarQube for mixed .NET and JavaScript/TypeScript projects
SonarQube always had a bad reputation when it comes to repositories that contain both the front-end as well as the back-end code. Here are two approaches.
source control
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
How to use GitVersion to get sensible versioning
How combining the clarity of Semantic Versioning, a release strategy like GitFlow or GithubFlow and GitVersion gives you sensible and automatic artifact numbering
7 symptoms of insufficient traceability in your software project
Another part of what I call internal quality is the traceability of decisions, choices and considerations in software development..
source-control
How I keep my Git source control history clean
After years of working with legacy code, I’ve learned to value the past and will do what I can to deliver well-focused and organized pull requests
strategic design
Should architecture be constrained by reality?
Should architects make decisions with the constraints of available capacity in mind? Or should they strive to ignore the reality and pursue only the best solutions?
team
The Red Hot Developer - A model for removing distractions from your teams
When your project, product or component gets sufficiently big that it has a large impact on the rest of the organization, you’ll automatically get faced with lots of internal and external distractions. Other teams might want to get that pull request merged as soon as possible, all kinds of questi...
Key takeaways from QCon New York 2017: The Soft Stuff
This year, for the third time since I joined Aviva Solutions, I attended the New York edition of the famous QCon conference organized by InfoQ. As always, this was a very inspiring week with topics on large-scale distributed architecture, microservices, security, APIs, organizational culture and ...
Scaling a growing organization by reorganizing the teams
During this year's QCon conference held in New York, I attended a full-day workshop on the scalability challenges a growing organization faces, hosted by Randy Shoup. In my previous two posts I discussed a model to understand the needs of an organization in its different life phases, as well as a...
How to optimize your culture for learning, growth and collaboration
At the first day of QCon New York, I attended several talks and open-spaces that had some relation with culture, be it about improving the efficiency of developers, handling disagreement in respectful way, and creating an environment that embraces the learning experience. For instance, one of th...
A Git collaboration workflow that provides feedback early and fast
At Aviva Solutions, we’ve been using Git for a little of over two years now and I can wholeheartedly say that after having worked with TFS for years, we’ll never go back… ever. But with any new technology, practice or methodology, you need to go through several cycles before you find a way that w...
Why software innovation is not a free pass for doing whatever you want
Somebody on Twitter recently posed the question whether innovation in software and agile development can co-exist or not. To remove any misinterpretation - something quite common for Twitter discussion - I asked him to clarify what he meant with the word 'innovation'. In short, any kind of softwa...
How we document stuff
A recurring topic in every software project I've been involved with is what to document, when to do that, and where to store it. So it wasn't a big surprise that at a recent event, somebody asked me how we track and communicate design decisions. I initially pointed him to an article I wrote in Fe...
Dude, you can’t solve all the problems by yourself
I think that the gist of this post should be pretty clear. Unfortunately I've fallen in that same trap myself many times. So often, I had to refrain myself from pulling somebody's keyboard from under their hands, just because I thought I could fix the problem at hand myself much faster. But with ...
The subtleties of developer commitment
In a recent post, I concluded that I have a strong tendency towards tactical architecture. From that perspective, I try to avoid big-design-upfront. I have a built-in allergy for rebuilding stuff that is already out there. I would never consider building my own message bus or event sourcing frame...
Getting your teams to communicate effectively
Lets be honest here. For a very long time, if I had to choose between an averagely skilled but well-spoken developer and a very skilled and experienced introvert, I would probably choose the first. And yes, I do realize that these are two extremes and that most people have characteristics of both...
Slack? An even better cross-team collaboration tool?
Two weeks ago, I talked about Flowdock, an online tool to aggregate multiple sources into a single environment where agile teams can work together. I also promised to look at an alternative service named Slack. When we introduced Flowdock, somewhere in November 2013, Slack was still in its very e...
You don’t know what you don’t know
More or less since the start of my assignment at my current client, four years ago, we have had some form of a cross-team stand-up at 10:00 every day (often named Scrum-of-Scrums). But now that we have around 10 teams, we started to notice some issues lately. People joined too late or didn't even...
team work
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
team-performance
Real-world challenges and solutions for building high-performance teams
The open-space format gives you a chance to hear about other people’s challenges and how other experienced folks respond to that. I attended one on building high-performance teams.
Ownership at the right level
Ownership is not an all-or-nothing concept, so Netflix acknowledges up to five levels that each give a leader and its people a tool to clarify the expected/accept level of autonomy
An interesting perspective on what drives people
About passion, grace and fire as ingredients in a recipe for fully formed mature adults and high-performance teams as presented by Josh Evans at QCon San Francisco
teamcity
A beacon of light in the shadow of failing builds
As long as I can remember, I've been using an automatic build system to regularly verify the quality of the code based I've been working on. First using Team Foundation Server, but since a year or so, Jetbrains' Team City. In my current project we use continuous integration builds for running the...
teams
20 questions to determine whether your teams are mature enough
In this final post of this series, I’m going to change direction and talk about the predictability and maturity of your development team(s)
How to work from home and still keep your sanity
Given the signs that this working-from-home isn’t going to change for another six months or so, let me share some of the things that have helped me to stay sane
9 tips to get your distributed teams to collaborate effectively
I’ve seen a lot of prior attempts to out-source work to remote teams fail, have always wondered what was the main reason for this. Is it a culture thing? Is it the time difference. In this post, I describe the things we do ourselves that have made our remote team endeavors pretty successful for t...
technical
8 signals that you don’t control your technical complexity
In this first post of a series, I’d like to focus on the challenges companies are facing while controlling their technical complexity.
test driven development
My Laws of Test Driven Development
These are the practices and principles that have helped me avoid shooting myself in my own foot while practicing Test Driven Development.
15 flags that tell you that your testability practices need maturing
In this fourth post of the series, I’ll share some of the (red) flags I might raise while measuring the maturity of testing.
The three mental modes of working with unit tests
The other day, while pairing up on some unit test, I started to realize that I generally have three modes of looking at my unit tests.
An opinionated definition of a unit test
During the same C# code reviews that triggered last week’s blog post about writing great unit tests, another discussion tends to pop-up, in particularly with new joiners (both experienced and junior):
12 tips to write unit tests that don’t cripple your codebase
Over the last months, I’ve been involved in more and more code reviews, mostly because we’ve increased the level of quality required for code changes to our code base. While doing that, I started to track my most frequently used review comments intended to improve.
test-driven-development
What’s the “unit” in unit testing and why is it not a class
If you choose the wrong unit testing scope, you’ll regret adopting unit testing and TDD in the first place
Are you at your Plateau of Productivity yet?
A little story about the typical adoption process of TDD and how that works for other tools, principles and practices
9 coding practices that have a smell
Code that may be readable but which purpose is unclear doesn’t make anybody happy
How I keep my test names short and functional
Naming in software is hard, so here’s how I name and group my automated tests to use them as documentation
How to properly test your HTTP API contracts in .NET
The route, the headers and the specific JSON returned by an HTTP API are the contract, and thus should be treated as such
testability
My Laws of Test Driven Development
These are the practices and principles that have helped me avoid shooting myself in my own foot while practicing Test Driven Development.
15 flags that tell you that your testability practices need maturing
In this fourth post of the series, I’ll share some of the (red) flags I might raise while measuring the maturity of testing.
testing
The (in)sanity of performance testing web applications
Learn about the functional and technical challenges of achieving realistic and useful performance tests.
threading
The curious case of a deadlock in Autofac
It has been more than two years since we switched from Microsoft Unity to Autofac and we haven’t regretted this a single day. Not only is the resolution performance much better than Unity, but it’s the feature set, in particular the relation types, that makes a world of difference. In terms of co...
tool
SonarQube for mixed .NET and JavaScript/TypeScript projects
SonarQube always had a bad reputation when it comes to repositories that contain both the front-end as well as the back-end code. Here are two approaches.
tooling
22 reasons to ditch Azure DevOps and switch to GitHub as soon as possible
How Azure DevOps is holding back the teams I work with to collaborate efficiently and commit code that has a high level of traceability, and how GitHub fixes that
Confluence, a wiki that will make people collaborate on documentation
An in-depth evaluation of SharePoint, Azure DevOps Wikis and Atlassian Confluence as a documentation and collaboration platform
traceability
7 symptoms of insufficient traceability in your software project
Another part of what I call internal quality is the traceability of decisions, choices and considerations in software development..
unit testing
The three mental modes of working with unit tests
The other day, while pairing up on some unit test, I started to realize that I generally have three modes of looking at my unit tests.
12 tips to write unit tests that don’t cripple your codebase
Over the last months, I’ve been involved in more and more code reviews, mostly because we’ve increased the level of quality required for code changes to our code base. While doing that, I started to track my most frequently used review comments intended to improve.
unit tests
An opinionated definition of a unit test
During the same C# code reviews that triggered last week’s blog post about writing great unit tests, another discussion tends to pop-up, in particularly with new joiners (both experienced and junior):
unit-testing
What’s the “unit” in unit testing and why is it not a class
If you choose the wrong unit testing scope, you’ll regret adopting unit testing and TDD in the first place
9 coding practices that have a smell
Code that may be readable but which purpose is unclear doesn’t make anybody happy
How I keep my test names short and functional
Naming in software is hard, so here’s how I name and group my automated tests to use them as documentation
How to properly test your HTTP API contracts in .NET
The route, the headers and the specific JSON returned by an HTTP API are the contract, and thus should be treated as such
Using docker to write automated tests against a real database
It’s 2023, so what if you could run SQL Server in a Linux docker container just before your tests start?
How to stop forgetting to await an awaitable call
Do you often forget to await an awaitable method in C#? Here’s an elegant solution.
Fluent Assertions 6.0, the biggest release ever
Now, after two alphas and three betas, it’s time to let Fluent Assertions 6 enter the real-world. Let me provide you with the highlights of this release.
user stories
A story about User Stories
My personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements
Why software innovation is not a free pass for doing whatever you want
Somebody on Twitter recently posed the question whether innovation in software and agile development can co-exist or not. To remove any misinterpretation - something quite common for Twitter discussion - I asked him to clarify what he meant with the word 'innovation'. In short, any kind of softwa...
versioning
False positives and semantic versioning
As part of stabilizing an upcoming release, I always dog food a beta package against the 12000 unit tests in one of our bigger projects. In the early days, that would surface all kinds of edge cases I never thought of. In every single case, the first thing I would do is to add a new unit test to ...