Making Development with PowerShell More Hospitable

As generalists, we can and do work across many platforms and frameworks. But that doesn’t mean that we’re immediately comfortable when we have to pack up and move from the platform we typically call home, where we’ve got things arranged just the way we like it. When moving from a Unix-like platform to Windows, things […]

Soft Deleting in Entity Framework Core

Deleting data in any software system can be a tricky problem. Often, instead of deleting data and permanently losing it, it may be preferable to keep the data, but make it invisible to users.

Reactive Extensions, ReactiveUI, and Whistling Tea Kettles

How does reactive programming work? “It’s all streams,” our program manager explained. “When you update a property in one part of the system, it causes another property in a different part of the system to update, too. It will take a bit to wrap your mind around.” In my head, I pictured properties all over […]

Pattern Matching in C# with Switch Statements

While trying to figure out the best way to structure my “reducer” functions in a Redux-style Xamarin app, I found out that C# 7.0 introduced pattern matching support in switch statements!

TDD in a REPL, Continued: Read-Eval-PrettyPrint-Loop

Last December, I wrote about using F#’s interactive REPL to facilitate TDD. Since then, enough interesting developments have happened that I think the topic is worth revisiting.

DRYing Up Shared Web.config Settings

I recently modified some connection strings and settings across multiple ASP.NET web applications in a large solution. It (only) took an hour, but in the process I found multiple incorrect and stale settings. The code violated the DRY principle. The fix involved referencing the common shared settings from a single source instead of repeating them […]

Evolving My C# Style

I’ve done a lot of C# development over the past three years. I’m very happy with how the language has evolved. During that time, my coding style in C# has also evolved. Here are some simple techniques I’ve found that have increased the quality of my C# code.

A Feature-Oriented Directory Structure For C# Projects

After working on .NET applications for the past six years, I recently spent a few months using Ember.js and AngularJS. Both originally supported organizing files in a project by type: separate top-level directories for models, controllers, views, etc. But this has changed over the past few years to prefer organizing by feature area—Ember with pods […]

Using a Design-Time ViewModelLocator With Caliburn.Micro

I was introduced to Caliburn.Micro less than a year ago, and it has since become my preferred MVVM framework for XAML development. It supports several conventions that reduce boilerplate code. It’s an opinionated framework that encourages a ViewModel-First approach during development. Unfortunately, design-time support out of the box is limited to ViewModels with a public […]

Improving Analysis with C# 6 Exception Filters

C# 6 recently added support for exception filters, which enable a few helpful scenarios. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how they can be used to improve debugging and crash dump analysis.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

.NET / WPF