Design
There are 8 entries for the tag
Design
Not too long ago, I posted a survey on my blog asking a set of questions meant to gather information that would help the NuGet team make a decision about a rather deep change. You can see the results of the survey here. If there’s one question that got to the heart of the matter, it’s this one. We’re considering a feature that would only allow a single package version per solution. As you can see by the response to the question, that would fit what most people need just fine, though there are a...
Hi there, it’s time to shine the bat-signal, or better yet, the NuGet-Signal! The NuGet community needs your help! We’re wrestling with some interesting wide ranging design decisions and we need data to test out our assumptions and help us make the best possible choices. I won’t go into too much detail about the specific issue as I don’t want to bias the results of the following survey. I simply want to gather information about common practices by answering a set of questions that mostly have empirical answers. I think it’s a given that most Visual Studio solutions...
Recently, I tried to accomplish a simple task on a website which frustrated me because what should have been simple, was not. All I wanted to do was go to the Mix website and quickly find links to my sessions so I could post them here. Even I should be able to figure this out. As a note, I’m using the Mix site as my illustration here, but I do it out of love and not mean spiritedness. Mix is my favorite conference, but its website…leaves something to be desired. It seems particularly interesting that I’d run into...
Usability and Discoverability (also referred to as Learnability) are often confused with one another, but they really are distinct concepts. In Joel Spolsky’s wonderful User Interface Design for Programmers (go read it!), Joel provides an metaphor to highlight the difference. It takes several weeks to learn how to drive a car. For the first few hours behind the wheel, the average teenager will swerve around like crazy. They will pitch, weave, lurch, and sway. If the car has a stick shift they will stall the engine in the middle of busy intersections in a truly terrifying...
The design is never right the first time. Nor is it usually right the second time. This is one of those key lessons you learn over time building real software, and is the source of one of the chief complaints leveled at the Waterfall methodology for building software, which puts heavy emphasis on getting the design right up front. We have to define “right” in this case. If by “right” you mean perfect, then I don’t think the design is ever right, as I’ve argued in the past that there is no perfect design. Recently, this lesson...
One interesting response to my series on versioning of interfaces and abstract base classes is the one in which someone suggested that we should go ahead and break their code from version to version. They’re fine in requiring a recompile when upgrading. In terms of recompile, it’s not necessarily recompiling your code that is the worry. It’s the third party libraries you’re using that poses the problem. Buying a proper third-party library that meets a need that your company can be a huge cost-saving measure in the long run, especially for libraries that perform non-trivial calculations/tasks/etc... that are...
Eilon Lipton recently wrote a bit about context objects in ASP.NET MVC and in an “Oh by the way” moment, tossed out the fact that we changed the IHttpContext interface to the HttpContextBase abstract base class (ABC for short). Not long after, this spurred debate among the Twitterati. Why did you choose an Abstract Base Class in this case? The full detailed answer would probably break my keyboard in length, so I thought I would try to address it in a series of posts. In the end, I hope to convince the critiques that the real point of...
When discussing the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework, one of the key benefits I like to tout is how this framework will improve testability of your web applications.
The response I often get is the same question I get when mention patterns such as Dependency Injection, IoC, etc...
Why would I want to do XYZ just to improve testability?
I think to myself in response
Just to improve testability? Isn’t that enough of a reason!
That’s how excited I am about test driven development. Testing seems enough of a reason for me!
Of course, when I’m done un-bunching my knickers, I realize that despite all the benefits...