Author: Patrick Smacchia
My dad being an early programmer in the 70's, I have been fortunate to switch from playing with Lego, to program my own micro-games, when I was still a kid. Since then I never stop programming.
I graduated in Mathematics and Software engineering. After a decade of C++ programming and consultancy, I got interested in the brand new .NET platform in 2002. I had the chance to write the best-seller book (in French) on .NET and C#, published by O'Reilly (> 15.000 copies) and also did manage some academic and professional courses on the platform and C#.
Over the years, I gained a passion for understanding structure and evolution of large complex real-world applications, and for talking with talented developers behind it. As a consequence, I got interested in static code analysis and started the project NDepend.
Today, with more than 8.000 client companies, including many of the Fortune 500 ones, NDepend offers deeper insight and understanding about their code bases to a wide range of professional users around the world.
I live with my wife and our twin babies Léna and Paul, in the beautiful island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
Strategies to Catch Regression Bugs before Production: A Case Study
That’s quite a coincidence that a few days after promoting the joy of immutability in the post C#9 records: immutable classes we stumbled on a bug due to a mutable...
C#9 records: immutable classes
Record is a long time awaited feature now proposed by C# 9. Finally we have a concise syntax to express this: [crayon-5f921ee585e88165345296/] Isn’t it beautiful? In the NDepend code itself...
New C#9 keywords ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘not’
HoweverThe C#9 language introduces new controversial keywords: and keyword: Conjunctive patterns. Require both patterns to match or keyword: Disjunctive patterns. Require either pattern to match not keyword: Negative patterns. Require...
.NET 5.0 App Trimming and Potential for Future Progress
In this article we will: go through the various ways to publish a .NET 5.0 application, play with .NET 5.0 app trimming to reduce the size of our deliverable use...
Top 10 .NET 5.0 new APIs
When a new major .NET version hits Release Candidate, it is time to use the NDepend code review changes capabilities to browse which new APIs have been added. It is...
Architecture of a C# game rendered with Blazor, Xamarin, UWP, WPF, and Winforms
When I wrote my last post Blazor Internals you need to know I came across this great project on github: AsteroidsWasm. This project is a remake in C# of the...
Blazor Internals you need to know
Lately the Blazor technology received a lot of attention both from Microsoft and from the .NET community. Blazor is a UI technology. The ASP.NET team develops it since 2017. Its...
14 Visual Studio Web Development Productivity Tips
Visual Studio proposes quite a few handy tools to boost your productivity as a web developer. Here are some tips focused around web code edition and web application starting and...
10 Visual Studio Files and Layout Productivity Tips
Nowadays most developers are working remotely. Hence the monitor(s) configuration might have changed, and might change frequently. In this context, it does matter to optimize the Visual Studio layout and...
10 Visual Studio Navigation Productivity Tips
A large code base is a complex asset. Visual Studio is a complex environment. In this context developers spend a significant part of their time searching and navigating across code...
Top 10 Visual Studio Refactoring Tips
With the version 2019 Visual Studio is now mature when it comes to refactoring. This post proposes a tour of the top 10 most used refactoring actions in my opinion....
12 Visual Studio Debugging Productivity Tips
In this post we assume the the reader knows the basics of debugging with Visual Studio: F5 to start running with the debugger F9 set breakpoint on the current line...
10 Visual Studio Ninja Code Editor Productivity Tips
Among the multiple daily development tasks (planning, testing, refactoring, bug fix…) code edition is arguably the most satisfying one. Code edition can be even more satisfying and productive by mastering...
10 Visual Studio Solution Explorer Productivity Tips
The Visual Studio Solution Explorer panel is like home for Visual Studio users. It presents all projects, source files and items thanks to a treeview layout. This panel is quite...
Case Study : Complex UI Testing
In the previous post Case Study: 2 Simple Principles to achieve High Code Maintainability I explained that the principles layered code + high coverage ratio by test are 2 simple...
Case Study: 2 Simple Principles to achieve High Code Maintainability
High Code Maintainability is the key to make both the management and the developers happy: Maintainability lets a product evolves naturally at a sustained pace with controlled cost. Maintainability lets...
Advices to Become a Remote Programmer
With the actual COVID-19 worldwide outbreak many programmers are already forced to work remote, and we can expect that most of us will soon be home. In the IT and...
Don’t rely on someone else to protect your software
This morning I stumbled on this post Decompilation of C# code made easy with Visual Studio on the Visual Studio blog. Basically VS will soon be able to not only...
Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day
The mythical book, Mythical man month quotes that no matter the programming language chosen, a professional developer will write on average 10 lines of code (LoC) day. After 14 years of...
Not planning now to migrate your .NET 4.8 legacy, is certainly a mistake
2020 will see the achievement of the massive remodeling of the .NET platform initiated by Microsoft in November 2014 with the introduction of .NET Core 1, with the promise of...
4 Predictions for the Future of .NET
In May 2019, Microsoft officially announced .NET 5, the future of .NET: it will be based on all the .NET Core work already achieved. Here is the schedule announced: On...
.NET Core 3.0 New APIs
.NET Core 3.0 has just been released, see here the official announcement. In this post we’re going to explain how to list and explore the new APIs introduced since .NET...
Find API Breaking Changes in your .NET Libraries and Frameworks
If you are developing a framework, the last thing you want to happen when releasing a new version of your product is to break the code of your clients because...
Business Complexity vs. Implementation Complexity
It is good software design practice to make sure that methods can be entirely viewed in the code editor that typically shows 30 to 45 lines at a time. The...
Answers to arguments against 100% coverage
I’ve been enthusiast about 100% coverage for more than a decade. The large code base of NDepend we are working on will reach soon 90% overall coverage. Most classes tested...
Static Analysis and Dependency Injection
For quite some years now, we (the NDepend team) got some demand about resolving Dependency Injection, see this page on our User Voices. Lately we’ve been considering such support carefully...
SOLID Design: The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)
After having covered the Open-Close Principle (OCP), the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP), the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) let’s talk about the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)...
SOLID Design: The Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)
After having covered The Open-Close Principle (OCP), The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) let’s talk about the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) which is the I...
Are SOLID principles Cargo Cult?
My last post about SOLID Design: The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) generated some discussion on reddit. The discussion originated from a remark considering SOLID principles as a Cargo Cult. Taking...
SOLID Design: The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
After having covered The Open-Close Principle (OCP) and The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) let’s talk about the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which is the S in the SOLID acronym. The...