The more experience I gain with F#, the more I like it. So, when contemplating how I might convince someone to give it a try, I briefly contemplated which feature of the language might be most compelling, and quickly decided on Discriminated Unions. I’ll try to explain the value of Discriminated Unions by walking you…
I will continually add to this post as I encounter more favorite quotes. I will do my best to properly attribute them as well. “First, solve the problem. Then, write the code. ” - John Johnson “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. ” - Martin Fowler “Good…
I apologize for not being able to resist the link-bait title. I’ll try to keep that to a minimum. Sharing this much detail is likely a terrible move from a security-by-obscurity perspective, but the new “rig” I have set up for hosting the blog is too interesting to me to not detail. Hardware: BeagleBone Black…
I’ve noticed a common (anti) pattern that a couple of unrelated teams I’ve worked with have settled into, which I will explain in detail. A common pattern to prevent null reference checks littering one’s code is the Null Object Pattern. The Null Object Pattern is an abstraction created to stand in for some concrete object…
Compile-time string interpolation is one of the many language benefits of F# that has made the language quite a joy for me to work in so far. However I have found it difficult to get all of the various *print* (read: “star print star”) methods straight in my head, and I could never find any…
I recall being taught at the very beginning of Computer Programming 101 about the distinction among compile time errors, run time errors, and logic errors. The definitions are easy to memorize by rote and are easy to accept at face value, however throughout my career I have observed code written in a way which suggests…
Tired of slow, long-running unit/integration test suites? Want to speed up your feedback cycle while coding? Me too. At my current employment I am working with by far the largest Visual Studio solution that I have ever encountered and some of the tests run very slowly. I like a rapid feedback loop: Write a few…
If you have a class under test into which you are dependency injecting multiple (mocked) dependencies, you might have struggled with strategies for minimizing code duplication when creating your class under test along with its mocked dependencies: [TestFixture] public class MyTest { [Test] public void Test1 { // Arrange var myDependency1 = new Mock<IMyDependency1>(); var…
This handy tip might save you from being bitten by an odd edge case: Assert.IsTrue(new object[]{}.All(x=> false)); This assertion will always pass on an empty set, no matter what the lambda expression. I scratched my head and thought about it for a it, and agreed that I don’t see any better way the .NET team…
Notice the difference in spacing. You select a build platform named “Any CPU” in Visual Studio 2010 (which is automatically created with your solution), but to target that platform when using msbuild.exe from the command line (or from Nant, or whatever), be sure to leave the space out, and use /p:AnyCPU. If you are using…
