We’ve all heard the mantra – Unit Testing is good for the soul. We hear about the goodness of things like JUnit, NUnit, and TDD from other people. But you’re not convinced. After all, it takes more time to write unit test code – and you’d rather get on with the next feature. Besides, whether it’s true or not, you certainly feel like your progress is ......

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The CLR is full of surprises. Microsoft has a built-in System.IO.Path class, to deal with all the path parsing issues we often run across. One of the most useful methods in there can get rid of all the special case code we write to combine path strings. How many times have you written something like this to combine two path strings -- taking into account ......

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I use a coding tool called ReSharper - and I was pleasantly surprised the other day when it pointed out a copy & paste bug that was waiting to explode. You see, copy and paste programming is so very easy to do - that we all do it. Even the best of us accidentally leave in duplicate code snippets from time to time. Why Cut & Paste is so bad There ......

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Christopher Diggins has an interesting post on Intentional Programming. This is a new way of applying top-down design. It's a very good idea: you write your code nice and clear, with calls to sub-methods that "do the right thing" - sub-methods that you'll write later. The advantage of this is that your code will be quite readable. And since our code ......

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Imagine hanging onto one of the solid rocket boosters when the Space Shuttle goes up. This is a cool 4 minute video of a camera on one of the Atlantis flights. It's on from takeoff - to separation - to splashdown. There's no sound, but just try to imagine everything shaking around you... http://mfile.akamai.com/185... ......

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The other day, I had to fix a particularly nasty bug with a NullReferenceException. During the process, I came up with a couple alternatives to fix it and decided to document why Checking for Null Fields is BAD http://geekswithblogs.net/d... Technorati tags: CodeGaffes, Geekswithblogs ......

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In my company, I've been able to join various projects over the years. As a result, I'm usually modifying or adding to legacy code. Of course, in reality, all code is legacy code after about a week. In looking at code (written by others as well as myself) I sometimes see bad coding practices. These are always obvious in hindsight. In the spirit of blogging, ......

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One of the benefits of object oriented design, is that some problems show up during compile-time instead of at run-time. And you know that run-time issues always show up at the worst possible time, like at a customer site. This CodeGaffe happens when a programmer writes code that "enforces" something with comments, or Assertions. Have you ever seen ......

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I was fixing a bug the other day, when I ran across this comment (marked in red): if (condition1){ //… some useful code …}else if (condition2){ //… some useful code …}else{ // this can never happen} My first thought was, if this can never happen then why not throw an exception in case it does? So I added a line to throw an exception. if (condition1){ ......

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One of the benefits of using modern editors is that it's really easy to navigate your code base. If you're looking at a method call, for example, you can use a keystroke combination to jump to the method definition. But there's a drawback to this. If you're not careful, as you add new code you can end up with monster methods, or monster-sized classes. ......

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This CodeGaffe covers two similar problems. The first one involves Booleans, while the second covers any variable type. Here's some code that contains 2 bugs in one line. This is a practice to avoid. Can you spot the 2 bugs? if (m_condition = true) { // *** DON'T DO THIS! // do something} If you had any trouble spotting the problem, that's because you're ......

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Today's CodeGaffe is something I see all the time. It creeps into your code over time. Here's the scenario: Your class has grown from its humble beginnings, and there are now fields in your class that should not be used by some of your methods. In essence, you want some of your data to be private from part of your class. As in "really private". If you've ......

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Microsoft added a new keyword to C# and VB for 2005 (CLR 2.0): partial Don't use it. partial is used to physically break up a class definition into multiple files. When the compiler sees the keyword partial it finds all the related partial files in order to compile the class. This makes it possible to split the code for a single class across multiple ......

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Visual Studio has a nifty feature called Pre-Build and Post-Build events. These are used to include extra DOS commands before or after the build. But there's a gotcha! And it will bite you when you least expect it. In Visual Studio, there is NO ERROR CHECKING except at the end of an event. Any errors that happen prior to the final step are lost. Keep ......

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We all have old code snippets in our code base. Whether it’s a method that’s no longer used, or a few lines that we’ve replaced - our code has sections commented out. When should we remove them? How should we comment them out? If you’re not careful, commented out code can cause future problems. Read on. Code Gaffe #1: Sneaky Commented out code Commented ......

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