Created by the developers at ILM.
Starting on a mobile app can be a daunting proposition.
Your stakeholders at Rex’s Gym really need this app to help drive customer retention, promote the business, and make payments a breeze.
Getting the development environment set up, learning a new language, understanding a wholly different API for screen layouts per-platform, having to go to the Apple Store and buy a Mac (which is the absolutely last thing you thought you would ever do).
Memory management with .NET is generally simpler than it is in languages like C++ where the developer has to explicitly handle memory usage. Microsoft added a garbage collector to the .NET framework to clean up objects and memory usage from managed code when it was no longer needed. However, since the garbage collector does not deal with resource allocation due to unmanaged code, such as COM object interaction or calls to external unmanaged assemblies, the IDisposable pattern was introduced to provide developers a way to ensure that those unmanaged resources were properly handled. Any class that deals with unmanaged code is supposed to implement the IDisposable interface and provide a Dispose() method that explicitly cleans up the memory usage from any unmanaged code. Probably the most common way that developers dispose of these objects is through the using statement.
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We’ve already covered the best practice of Automated Unit Testing. Unit testing has many benefits, but there are times when you need to be able to test how multiple units of code work together. This is when you need Integration Tests.
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) from Microsoft is a framework that allows developers to create a plug-in based application that allows for designing extensible programs by either the developer or third parties. The definition from MSDN is as follows (link):
It allows application developers to discover and use extensions with no configuration required. It also lets extension developers easily encapsulate code and avoid fragile hard dependencies. MEF not only allows extensions to be reused within applications, but across applications as well.
At first glance, it looks like just another IoC container, and it certainly can be used for dependency injection much the same as Ninject or other DI frameworks. But the true power comes when you realize that your dependencies can come from anywhere and be loaded and run at any time, and that is the true purpose of MEF. It allows you to create libraries or pieces of functionality in isolation that perform a very specific functionality (as well as unit test them isolation as well), and then plug them in to a much larger application. This gives you very clean separation of concerns in your code, and allows developers to focus on smaller projects simultaneously and deliver a final product to the client that much faster.
One of the most powerful tools we have as software developers is not a coding pattern, method, framework, or even really code at all. Like a bank keeps its most valuable assets in a safe, so do we as developers seek to protect our most valuable assets, the code we create.
Source control (referred to variously as source control management, version control, revision control, and probably a half dozen other terms as well) describes a system we use to store our code, manage changes to that code, and share our code with others. Our choice of a source control system is one of the single most important decisions we can make, and will radically affect how productive we are able to be.
In this article we will examine the rationale behind source control, and get a rundown of the different types of source control systems available, including examples of each still in widespread use today. After that we will discuss how to structure a solution to get the most out of our source control system, with an emphasis on .NET solutions. Lastly we will learn how to integrate a source control system with the software development lifecycle.
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.
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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