When I'm a new team member

Jsut had a meeting about how to improve the build process for the team - the current structure of the code in the source control system means I can't just get the code out and build it - this to me is the sign of a failing project\team!

I believe every project should be structured so that the following use cases are valid for any new developers coming onto a team, there's nothing more demoralising to new team members when you have to some kinda of voodoo to get a project to build;

As a developer I want to install the IDE So that I can compile source code.

As a developer I want to install the source control client So that I can extract code for compiling.

As a developer I want to compile the code So that I can verify the code compiles sucessfully.

As a developer I want to install a unit test framework So that I can execute unit tests for the code.

As a developer I want to execute the unit tests for the code So that I can verify the tests execute successfully.

Now this is not about being able to the run the application in a local debug build this about being able to confirm I'm standing on firm ground and I'm ready to start making changes to code base with confidence. (because the unit tests are all successful). For me one of the reasons for unit testing is to give team members & new starters the confidence to change code I've written without requiring my hand-holding.

There's nothing worse than being a new team member and not being productive ASAP.

Awkward Coder

Comments

Implementing a busy indicator using a visual overlay in MVVM

This is a technique we use at work to lock the UI whilst some long running process is happening - preventing the user clicking on stuff whilst it's retrieving or rendering data. Now we could have done this by launching a child dialog window but that feels rather out of date and clumsy, we wanted a more modern pattern similar to the way <div> overlays are done on the web. Imagine we have the following simple WPF app and when 'Click' is pressed a busy waiting overlay is shown for the duration entered into the text box. What I'm interested in here is not the actual UI element of the busy indicator but how I go about getting this to show & hide from when using MVVM. The actual UI elements are the standard Busy Indicator coming from the WPF Toolkit : The XAML behind this window is very simple, the important part is the ViewHost. As you can see the ViewHost uses a ContentPresenter element which is bound to the view model, IMainViewModel, it contains 3 child v...

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

WPF tips & tricks: Dispatcher thread performance

Not blogged for an age, and I received an email last week which provoked me back to life. It was a job spec for a WPF contract where they want help sorting out the performance of their app especially around grids and tabular data. I thought I'd shared some tips & tricks I've picked up along the way, these aren't probably going to solve any issues you might be having directly, but they might point you in the right direction when trying to find and resolve performance issues with a WPF app. First off, performance is something you shouldn't try and improve without evidence, and this means having evidence proving you've improved the performance - before & after metrics for example. Without this you're basically pissing into the wind, which can be fun from a developer point of view but bad for a project :) So, what do I mean by ' Dispatcher thread performance '? The 'dispatcher thread' or the 'UI thread' is probably the most ...

Awkward Coder

Search This Blog