Tag Archives: Awesome

You can have nice things

.NET, , ,

I have come across a few things that are legitimately pleasant to use, so I thought I should collate them here to aid my aging memory. Dear reader, I am not attempting to copy Scott Hanselman’s tools list, I am stealing the concept.

Github Actions

Yea, not something revolutionary I just uncovered that you never heard of before, but still. It’s pretty great. Out of all the yet-another-yet-another-markup-language-configuration-file-to-configure-a-thing tools that exist that help you orchestrate builds, I personally find Github Actions the least weirdly magical and easy to live with, but then I’ve only tried CircleCI, Azure DevOps/TFS and TeamCity.

Pulumi – Infrastructure as code

Write your infrastructure code in C# using Pulumi.It supports Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and Kubernetes, but – as I’ve ranted about before, this shouldn’t be taken as a way to support multi-cloud, the object hierarchy is still very bespoke to each cloud provider. That said, you can mix and match providers in a stack, let’s say you have your DNS hosted in DNSimple but your cloud compute bits in Azure. You would be stuck doing a lot of bash scripting to make it work otherwise, but Pulumi lets you write one C# file that describes all of your infra, mostly.
You will recognise the feel of using it from chef, basically you write code that describes the infrastructure, but the actual construction isn’t happening in the code, first the description is made, the desired state is then compared to the actual running state, and adjustments are made. It is a thin wrapper over terraform, but it does what it says on the tin.

MinVer – automagic versioning for .NET Core

At some point you will write your build chain hack to populate some attributes on your Assembly to stamp a brand on a binary so you can display a version on your site that you can track back to a specific commit. The simplest way of doing this, without needing to change branching strategy or write custom code, is MinVer.

It literally browses through your commits to find your version tags and then increments that version with how many commits there are from that commit. It is what I dreamed would be out there when I started looking. It is genius.

A couple of gotchas: It relies – duh- on having access to the git history, so you need to remember to remove .git from your .dockerignore file, or else your dotnet publish inside docker build will fail to locate any version information. Obviously, unless you intended to release all versions of your source code in the docker image, make sure you have a staged docker build – this is the default in recent Visual Studio templates – but still. I encourage you in any case to mount your finished docker image using docker run -it --entrypoint sh imagename:tag to have a look that your docker image contains what you expect.

Also, in your GitHub Actions you will need to allow for a deeper fetch depth for your script to have enough data to calculate the version number, but that is mentioned in the documentation. I already used a tag prefix ‘v’ for my versions, so I had to add that to my project files. No problems, it just worked. Very impressed.

Simple vs “Simple”

Uncategorized, ,

F# has two key features that makes the code very compact. Significant whitespace and forced compilation order.

Significant whitespace removes the need for curly braces or the use of keywords such as begin/end. Forced compile order means your dependencies have to be declared in code files above yours in the project declaration. This gives your F# projects a natural reading order and makes projects follow a natural order that transcends individual style.

Now there is a user voice suggestion that the enforced compile order be removed.

I think this is a good idea. I am against project files. As soon as you have three or more developers working in the same group of files, any one file used to maintain state is bound to become a source of merge conflicts and strife. Just look at C#.

I am sure your IDE could evaluate the dependency order of your files and present them in that order for you, heck one could probably make a CLI tool to show that same information if the navigational benefits of the current order is what is holding you back. Let us break out of IDE-centric languages and allow the programs to be defined in code rather than config.

Rebootcamp

.NET, Architecture,
I have been saying a bunch of things, repeating what others say, mostly, but never actually internalised what they really meant. After a week with Fred George and Tom Scott I have seen the light in some way. I have seen proof of the efficacy of pair programming, I have seen the value of fast red-green-refactor cycles and most importantly I have learnt just how much I don’t know.

This was an Object Bootcamp developed by Fred George and Deliberate and basically consisted of problem solving in pairs going over various patterns and OO design in general, pointing out various code smells to look out for and how to refactor your way out of trouble. The course packed in as much as the team could take over the course of the week and is highly recommended. Our finest OO developers in the team still learned new things over the week and the rest of us learned even more.

Where to go from here? I use this blog as a way to write down things I learn so I can reference it later. My fanbase tends to stick to my posts about NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC 3 or something from several years ago, so I need not worry about making things fresh and interesting for the readership. The general recommended reading list that came off of this week reads as follows:

So, GoF and Refactoring – no shockers, eh? We have them in our library and I’ve even read them, even though I first read some other derivative book on design patterns back in the day, but obviously there are things that didn’t quite take the first time. I guess I was too young. Things make so much more sense now when you have a catalogue of past mistakes to cross-reference against various patterns.

The thing is, what I hadn’t internalised properly is how evil getters and setters are. I had some separation of concerns in terms of separating database classes from model classes, but still the classes didn’t instantiate good objects, they were basically just bags of data, and mediator classes had business logic, messing with other classes data instead of proper objects churning cleanly.

Encapsulating information in the system is crucial. It is hard to do correctly, but by timeboxing the time from red to green you force yourself to build the next simplest clean thing before you continue. There is no time for gold plating, and boy you veer off and try something clever only to realise that you needed to stop and go back. Small changes. I have written this so many times before, but if you do it properly it really works.  I have seen JB Rainsberger and Greg Young talk about this, and I have nodded and said sure. Testify! “That would be nice to get to do in practice” was my thinking. And then I added getters and setters to my classes. Or at least made them anemic by having a constructor with parameters and then getters, used by demigod classes. The time to make a change is yesterday, not tomorrow.

So, yes. Analysis Patterns is a hard read, said Fred. Well, then. It seems extremely interesting. I think Refactoring to Patterns will be the very next thing I read, but then I will need to take a stab at it.

I need to learn where patterns could get rid of code smells, increase encapsulation and reduce complexity.

There is a handy catalogue of refactorings that I already have a shortcut to in the chrome toolbar. It gets a lot more clicks now, but in general I will not make any grand statements now but rather come back with a post showing results.

Early Bird campaign ends in two weeks, Aug 15

Early Bird campaign ends in two weeks, Aug 15

We are proud of the program we have put together for Øredev 2013 and we are quite confident you will find the content interesting enough to at least consider coming to Malmö in November.

The thing is, our very lucrative early bird campaign is ending in two weeks, so if you are on the fence, this is the time to pull the trigger and make that reservation. It is easier to beg accounting for forgiveness than to ask for permission. It can’t hurt to at least ask.