Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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 below

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

Custom AuthorizationHandler for SignalR Hubs

How to implement IAuthorizationRequirement for SignalR in Asp.Net Core v5.0 Been battling this for a couple of days, and eventually ended up raising an issue on Asp.Net Core gitHub  to find the answer. Wanting to do some custom authorization on a SignalR Hub when the client makes a connection (Hub is created) and when an endpoint (Hub method) is called:  I was assuming I could use the same Policy for both class & method attributes, but it ain't so - not because you can't, because you need the signatures to be different. Method implementation has a resource type of HubInnovationContext: I assumed class implementation would have a resource type of HubConnectionContext - client connects etc... This isn't the case, it's infact of type DefaultHttpContext . For me I don't even need that, it can be removed completely  from the inheritence signature and override implementation. Only other thing to note, and this could be a biggy, is the ordering of the statements in th