Articles filed in category 'Development Process'

Dino talks about the best possible layout for your project in MVC 5, and gives some great tips for helping you keep it all organized and effi cient.

If you’ve ever argued with management about how unit testing is beneficial, speeds up the process in the long run, and makes the software work better, you’ll recognize John’s point of view. If you haven’t (yet) had the argument, you’ll want to have this article handy.

In the third installment of his WPF series, Paul shows you how to get feedback using an Entity Framework entity class. He also shows you how to start expanding user activities, like adding, editing, or deleting screens.

If you ever thought you’d like to develop the Next Big Thing, you’ll need Q’s advice about how to get started and what to do before you start writing code.

Jeffrey shows you how to organize your code to suit DevOps, configure the five Azure DevOps products, automate your pipeline for speed, and build quality into each stage of your process.

Have you ever wondered how to use your browser (and those of your customers) as rich clients without plug-ins or ActiveX objects? Shawn Wildermuth tells you how.

Software developers are good at writing applications. Testers are good at testing applications. In the software development world where separation of concerns is a never-ending quest, it seems logical to apply the rule to the software development cycle. “Let the developers code; QA can be responsible for making sure it works.” It provides an object-oriented management approach where each team is responsible only for what they are best at, and the two teams interface thro...ugh one simple property, each: the result of their logic and expertise. The system is of logical design. It appears to be a logical pattern. Or so it seems. See More

Extreme Programming and Scrum compliment each other, but they weren’t made from the start to fit together hand in glove.Practicing Extreme Programming and Scrum are more effective when practiced together, and even more effective when practiced together as Behavior-Driven Development.

Automated build tools have been around for a long time.Many of the early tools were simple batch scripts that made calls out to other command-line tools like compilers and linkers. As the need for more and more complexity in the build scripts was realized, specialized tools like Make were introduced. These tools offered more than just sequential processing of commands. They provided some logic and decision making as well as coordination of the various parts of the build ...process. Since Make was first introduced, many variations and specialized versions have been introduced for various languages and platforms. Rake - the “Ruby Make” system - may not have much more than its namesake to claim a connection to Make, but it is a build tool that is quickly growing in popularity and providing .NET developers with new options.See More

Although some of us write code for the pure joy of it, Dino invites us to think about mobility and the cloud to make apps reflect the world we live in.

Have you ever spent hours and hours trying to figure out one little bug? Stayed up all night trying to work out a sweet piece of code? Gotten totally lost in trying to see how some new developer technology works?

Software development is a collaborative process.This article is the first in a series focused on the tools and techniques developers use to effectively work in concert. Special attention will be paid to the needs of distributed teams where some or all of the team members travel frequently or work remotely.

Almost every programmer knows (unless you have been living under a rock for the last five years or so) that you should be using classes for all of your programming. You should also be using collections of objects instead of using a Data Reader, a DataSet, or a DataTable in your applications. The reasons for using collections are many and are explored in this article.

Customer relationships are an often-overlooked part of what we, as programmers, do. But customers are essential; after all, they're the ones we are creating systems for. We've heard from many programmers that customers are obstructive, stubborn, and computer-illiterate. Have you experienced similar frustrations? Why do projects often seem like battles, rather than cooperative efforts to solve specific problems?

Jeffrey gives us an overview and demonstration of a continuous delivery environment and shows us some great tools along the way. Using integrated development and operations, he gets the most out of cloud technologies.

You have decided to take the plunge and create a Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition operating system-aware application. This decision comes with a new set of requirements when it comes to enabling Tablet PC-specific features and deployment of your application. This article will take you through the process of creating a Tablet PC-aware application and deploying it in the enterprise.

Learn how to use XP (eXtreme Programming) techniques to improve the way you deliver softwareIn my book, "eXtreme .NET," I introduce a team of developers who are learning how to improve their ability to deliver great software. In this article, you'll follow this team as they learn about a new tool to help them develop software solutions using the .NET Framework. The tool they are going to explore is called Cruise Control and it helps the team continuously integrate their code.

In my book “eXtreme .NET” I introduce a team of developers who are learning how to improve their ability to deliver great software. They’re learn how to use XP (eXtreme Programming) techniques to improve the way they deliver software. In this article, we’ll continue to follow this team as they learn about Resharper, a tool they are considering using to help with refactoring their code.

Git has some similarities to Subversion, but it’s in the differences that Git shines. Derick looks at some of the features that Git provides, for which Subversion has no equivalent.

Using code snippets can make it quick to add common code pieces to your application. Creating your own snippets allows you to create a library of custom code pieces and share them with other developers.

Continuous Integration might seem like a lot of cooks stirring the same pot, but Geoff shows us how it’s more like a community of mentors.

May/June 2008 MVP Corner by Jean-Paul S. BoodhooSo you have researched agile development techniques, and are all fired up to put them into practice.Armed with this drive and passion to learn, what are some steps that you as an individual can take to incrementally grow your knowledge and practice of agile development techniques?

Martin introduces Design by Contract and Code Contracts, and gives you a sneak preview of Pex—Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, he will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.With Code Contracts, Microsoft delivers its own flavor of Design by Contract for the .NET Framework. But wait, what is this thing sometimes called C...ontract-First Development? How will it change the way you develop software and write your unit tests? And first and foremost, how do you use Code Contracts efficiently?In this article, I will introduce Design by Contract and Code Contracts, as well as give you a sneak preview of Pex-Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, I will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.See More

In 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new vision called “Software + Services” that would fundamentally change the way that both Microsoft and their customers build software and have a gradual, yet marked ripple effect throughout the software giant’s entire strategy.

Studies indicate that between 40% and 60% of all defects found in software projects can be traced back to errors made while gathering requirements.This is huge! Finding problems while they are just in the planning stages is MUCH easier to deal with than finding them after the code has been written. So, how can developers avoid these errors and create a solid design for their software? This article will describe various methods for gathering software requirements and w...riting Use Cases - the first two steps in the software development process.See More

Jan/Feb 08 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Everything right or wrong with a software project is management’s fault.Either management staffed the right people or the wrong people. Management was absent or involved. Management is hard, and there are numerous factors that can cause success or failure of a project. In the best situation you have great people who do great work. A software manager can even succeed despite themselves if they happen to staff a top-notch team even though the managers, themselves, might no...t be very competent. The success that a top-notch team achieves is still the manager’s fault. Failure, however, is harder to blame on the team because a manager must be able to solve problems as they come along. This article will focus on tips and knowledge to use when managing an agile software project.See More

If you were wondering how to make sure that your team communicates well, you’ll want to follow along closely as Sahil makes a bot using Microsoft Teams.

Most people who undergo bypass surgery-are back for another one in just a few years-unless they die first of course.

Nov/Dec 2008 MVP Corner by Juilia Lerman

Here we are again with a new Visual Studio. It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since Visual Studio .NET (codename Rainer) was released. Rainer represented a watershed moment for Windows developers as the promise of a unified language environment had finally been delivered.

First Premier Bankcard (www.firstpremier.com) is the 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the United States.First Premier employs multiple thousands of people spread across the state of South Dakota. A major percentage of the employees at First Premier work in call-center operations helping people apply for credit cards.

Derick outlines how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion, and strong encapsulation. He also shows how the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles can get you there.Most professional software developers understand the academic definitions of coupling, cohesion, and encapsulation.However, many developers do not understand how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion and strong encapsulation, as outlined in this article. Fortunately, others have cr...eated stepping stones that lead to these goals, resulting in software that is easier to read, easier to understand and easier to change. In this article series, I will define three of the primary object-oriented principles and show how to reach them through the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles.See More

May/June 2013 Editorial by Rod Paddock

March/April 2013 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Software development is a lot more than just writing lines of code.You need to think about project management, prototyping, database design, software architecture, framework usage and a whole host of other factors. In this article you will learn one approach to developing software applications from start to finish.This approach has been used successfully to develop hundreds of applications by a software development company that has been around since 1991.

Even with all the new features in the Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI), sometimes the only way to accomplish a task is with good old fashioned T-SQL code. (Fortunately, “code” is the acronym for this great magazine!) In this latest installment of The Baker’s Dozen, I’ll present 13 T-SQL programming tips that could help you accomplish different database tasks.

“Integrate the data tier developer in to the core development life cycle and process.”That is one of the main objectives of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, also known under its project name “Data Dude”. Bringing the data tier developer into Visual Studio is the first step in enabling closer integration between the application and data tier developer. Having both environments leverage the same Team Foundation Build (Team Build) system enables daily ...and automatic integration of changes into the build process, enforcing closer integration and shorter feedback cycles between the two originally disjoint disciplines.See More

Applications grow more and more complex, while turnaround times get shorter and higher quality is expected.Application boundaries are becoming blurred since data has to be available throughout the system in a seamless fashion. Data also has to be available in distributed environments, and as if that weren't enough, distributed systems are also expected to work when connections are down! How do you keep up with all of this?

When Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition appeared in 2002, developers were sometimes confused about whether to write code on a Tablet PC or if it were possible to develop Tablet PC applications on existing desktop computers.The solution turned out to be fairly straightforward, if less than intuitive. However, with the addition of Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs), multiple releases of the Tablet and Touch Technology API, and now the Windows Vista™ operating system, this ques...tion arises again: What do you need to do to set up your developer environment and create applications for these form factors?See More

Increasingly, we rely on NuGet Packages in our .NET Development efforts. When you need to add a library to your project, whether it is Entity Framework, AutoMapper, jQuery, etc., NuGet makes that task a simple one. What happens when you are on a plane, train, an automobile - in some circumstance where you are not online and consequently, not connected to your NuGet package source? This is where a local NuGet package source comes in handy. Locally, we can easily stand up ...an IIS-based NuGet package source. While useful, that is not the simplest thing we can do. Fortunately, the NuGet authors had the foresight and wisdom to allow us to create file directory-based NuGet package sources. This brief article will take you through the steps to create your own local NuGet package source.See More

In this interesting exploration of design, John looks at all kinds of design, from architecture to household appliances, showing us the best way to figure out what’s necessary and what isn’t.

Dino has a somewhat literary take on the things that go wrong in software development. You’ll follow him through the seven rings of Software Hell in a parallel to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

If you want to develop code that’s flexible, extensible, maintainable, and testable, you’ll want to read Paul’s article about some basic things to keep in mind before you start.

You have been given the task of creating some business objects for a new .NET project.The UI has not been created (or designed) yet, so you start coding right away. After creating the first few objects, you decide that maybe you should do some unit testing. How?

Utilize unit testing in your Visual Studio .NET development. Automated unit testing enables a team to exercise its entire code base against a battery of tests. This facilitates a quick, reactive environment by providing instant feedback during development. Changes to the code will be tested for validity and any errors will become apparent. Your code will become simpler and you will have great example documentation for using your code.

So you wanna be agile, do you?You want to work in small increments and continuously deliver business functionality. You want to embrace change, even if that means taking on new requirements late in the game. But wait, won’t that be dangerous? It doesn’t have to be if you’ve got a solid Continuous Integration infrastructure in place.

If you’d like a neat summary of the many interesting and useful changes in CODE Magazine’s free development framework, you’ve come to the right place. Markus talks about themes, input validation, security, and binding, Web API service hosting, calling REST services, and interacting with the community and GitHub.

Functional programming is all the rage and Microsoft's foray into the functional world is called F#. Rachel introduces you to this first-class functional language with the ability to harness the rich .NET ecosystem.

Have you ever found a great app idea but struggled to use it? Q explains some basic steps you can follow to be sure that your creation doesn’t get put in the pile of unused apps.

Using this new tool and a few familiar ones, Sahil shows us how to build a simple app that we can sell on Apple or Windows App Stores.

In the second article of the series, Markus talks about keeping your code readable and maintainable by controlling how often and where you reuse objects.