Building Rich Web Apps: jQuery & MVC vs. Angular.js & WebAPI

December 16, 2013 by 40 Comments

As a developer,  you may have gotten used to hearing this: technology is changing! The web is no exception. Looking back 10 years ago it was amazing to be able to provide a web user experience that offered any degree of similarity to what was commonly available in thick clients or desktop applications. You might have been able to pull it off with ASP.NET Web Forms, but were probably plagued by complicated code, sluggish performance, ViewState bloat and a strong distaste for a language seemingly devised by the devil himself: JavaScript.

Fast forward to 2013: most of your customers are now used to rich web applications like Gmail or Facebook. Furthermore it is likely they aren’t using the web as much in a browser but but are instead using thick client applications on their smartphone or tablet. Regardless of the the platform, one thing is certainly true: your customers aren’t asking for a rich experience in their applications, they are demanding it.

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Filed Under: .NET, Best Practice, Frameworks, Javascript Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

XSLT Best Practices

August 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a functional language for transforming XML documents into another file structure such as plain text, HTML, XML, etc.  XSLT is available in multiple versions, but version 1.0 is the most commonly used version.  XSLT is extremely fast at transforming XML and does not require compilation to test out changes.  It can be debugged with modern debuggers, and the output is very easy to test simply by using a compare tool on the output.  XSLT also makes it easier to keep a clear separation between business and display logic.

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Filed Under: Best Practice, Data, Maintainability, Performance Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Best Practices for Dependency Injection

March 12, 2013 by 1 Comment

Dependency injection (DI) is a design pattern meant to transform hard-coded dependencies into swappable ones, generally at run-time. DI is the primary mechanism by which to implement Inversion of Control (IoC) techniques to load dependencies at run-time as well as the most effortless way to swap dependency implementations with mocks or stubs for unit testing. DI is a best practice that yields more readable and maintainable code due to the way all of an implementation’s dependencies are knowable at-a-glance and by the amazing side effect of creating easily testable code.
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Filed Under: Best Practice, Design, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Automated Unit Testing Best Practices

March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Having a suite of automated tests for your code helps improve software quality and maintainability in several dimensions. Writing unit tests for your software is likely to cause you to incorporate several design aspects that make it easier for other developers to use your and which have the side-effect of dramatically increasing the maintainability of your code overall. Testable code typically has fewer tight couplings between components, dependencies that are injectable, and encourages SOLID design principles in a naturalistic way because SOLID code makes writing tests (and therefor all usage) of your code easier. Automated unit tests also help you write a verifiable usage contract between your components that enables you to find and isolate bugs or perform major refactoring on your code without fear of breaking existing features. All of this leads to higher quality software.
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Filed Under: .NET, Best Practice, Maintainability, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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