The day my build broke

Saturday, November 04 2017 psake powershell

Recently, one of my build scripts failed with an odd error, claiming that the application wasn’t recognized. Given that the script had been working fine the previous day, this error was rather confusing.

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Sharpen The Saw #18

Monday, November 06 2017 sharpen-the-saw

In this episode from July 2016: Learning a healthy fear of legacy code; git 2.9.0 released; the myth or reality of 10x programmers; TeslaCrypt ransomware developers terminate project; the danger of specifying specific thresholds; and Bill Wagner talks about what might be in C# 7.

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Tracking time

Saturday, November 11 2017 psake powershell

For diagnostic purposes, it can often be useful to know when specific build tasks started and how long they took to execute. This information can help you spot anomalies and resolve odd issues.

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Sharpen The Saw #19

Monday, November 13 2017 sharpen-the-saw

In this episode from August 2016: Fact or fiction about agile documentation; using C# as a scripting language; easy to miss code smells; deprecation of the RC4 stream cypher; analogue computers make a comeback; and, Q&A with Scott Hanselman.

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Test Coverage History

Saturday, November 18 2017 psake powershell

On my previous post on code coverage, someone asked if the coverage report could highlight areas where coverage decreased. It turns out that ReportGenerator can do this, but there’s room for improvement.

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Sharpen The Saw #20

Monday, November 20 2017 sharpen-the-saw

In this episode from October 2016: Why it matters how quickly you create new bugs; an extension for VS2015 for editing and previewing markdown; how to write great code that’s not brilliant; Brian Krebs hit with record setting DDOS; typography for user interfaces; and, F# for the rest of us.

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Error Methods

Saturday, November 25 2017 smart-code

Make the exceptions thrown by your methods more informative and useful by including more information with each exception. Do this by delegating the creation of exceptions instances to helper methods that focus on one task.

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Sharpen The Saw #21

Monday, November 27 2017 sharpen-the-saw

In this episode from October 2016: Learning the open/closed principle; new version control features in Visual Studio 2015; Clinical depression in developers; why programming is hard; password security; I Used to be a Human Being; and a video called “For loops considered harmful”.

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