Coding Practices and Design Patterns
To write good code, you need to have a good approach.
The .NET Framework provides built-in capabilities for creating components and services as singletons. If you want to create a singleton process, though, you're on your own. But not really; if you read on, you will find out how to use a Mutex to do the job.
Steve Krug's "Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" provides surprising and sometimes counterintuitive principles that every good website must follow. Krug preaches the importance of removing clutter in order to make the purpose and functionality of a site (or page) clear--and happily, he practices what he preaches in this remarkably lucid book. Here are some of Krug's key insights...
When you are coding in a hurry, it is very tempting to write business logic in the first place that comes to mind, such as a button click handler. However, for all but the simplest systems, such a practice leads very quickly to a chaotic system whose business logic is scattered like the ash from an erupting volcano. Create a great domain model, though, and you will be able to nimbly align your software with your emerging business needs.
Every time I see an example of copy-and-paste programming, I'm like a bull who just spotted a waving red flag. "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY) is a principle every programmer should live by, for Turing's sake! Read on for a discussion of why copy-and-paste is egregious, and how to refactor an expansive set of conditional logic branches into a concise and elegant piece of code.
Just by calling a class' constructor, you are tying your code to some implementation details of the class. Since good software uses loose coupling, though, you should develop the habit of providing a static construction method and hiding a class constructor. There are exceptions that prove the rule, however, as noted both in this article and in the comments. Read on to learn how to develop the good habit, and when you should consider breaking it....
A skill that is useful during traffic stops can also help you write correct loop iterations.
The moral of this tale is simple: in test-driven design, you have to fail before you can succeed.
The idea behind test-driven design (TDD) is to incorporate testing into the process of constructing your system, rather than waiting for developers to check in their code and to build a system that someone else tests. TDD has some advantages worth considering...
I have been saved from many a peril during my adventure of a life. When I was instrumenting a large system recently, I realized just how wonderful good design can make your software development life...