Technical

Extension methods are an integral part of modern .NET and some of .NET’s best features such as LINQ. Unfortunately, a lot of developers get intimidated by them and don’t understand what’s going on under the surface or how to build new ones. In this article I’ll attempt to demystify extension methods and illustrate how they can be used to build elegant and fluent code.

Code reviews are a place of contention for a lot of teams. Even when teams know code reviews are worth the effort, they still struggle to make them effective. Code reviews usually become a place for everyone’s subjective opinion to come out which leads to arguments, hurt feelings, and distrust within a team. Once distrust starts on your team, it's hard to recover. Animosity will grow. Lack of confidence declines. Motivation declines. Code quality will suffer. For these reasons, having an as close to an objective process in your code reviews is vital to your team’s success. So how do get to performing objective-based code reviews? I suggest you use a checklist.

Test-driven development is awesome, it gives you a safety net to rely on so the code can be confidently refactored. TDD learners normally start at unit testing, those cover independent parts of the software to the detail and are a great thing, but what is the guarantee that when you glue all classes together they work as expected? For testing that everything works together, we need different types of tests.