Static analysis can be a great way to ensure that your code is robust and clean. Unfortunately, many static analysis tools are prohibitively expensive and/or fiendishly complicated. In today’s post, I’d like to talk a little about Roslyn-based code analysers, which cost nothing and are easy to set up. In fact, keep reading for seven reasons that they’re ace.
Tag Archives: c#
Using XML comments to provide Intellisense hints
Today I had reason to do something I haven’t had to do in a really long time: add IntelliSense hints to a library we supply. Because it’s been so long since I last did this, I had to look up one or two details, so I thought I’d share a quick summary.
PiLights part 1 – kit and test code
At work, we have a system that lots of users interact with, but which sometimes needs some “alone time”. From time to time, we email our users and ask them to close the client application, so that it can do what it needs to do. (Needless to say, this software was not written in-house!) Users being what they are – and emails being what they are – this approach leaves something to be desired.
A colleague and I put our heads together and decided that we needed something obvious, intuitive and highly visible. “What if,” we thought, “we could wire up some traffic lights to a Raspberry Pi?” So that’s what we decided to do. In this multi-post blog series, I’ll outline what parts we used, how we wrote the software, and how we made our little old Pi ready for the enterprise environment. In this first episode, I’ll focus on how we got to a working proof-of-concept.
How-to: Set up log4net on a new project
Today I want to talk about adding log4net to a new project. It’s not hugely complicated or high-tech, but there are a few factors that mean I always seem to struggle with one aspect or another. There’s usually an irritating couple of minutes when I’m Googling questions and seeing purple links! This post is a sort of memo to myself then, and perhaps next time this post will be among those Google results!
What is “boxing”? (And why should you care?)
If, like me, you’re coding education was (ahem) “non-standard”, you might not have given much thought to the underlying mechanics of how .NET uses memory. Us C# developers are a bit spoilt really. We can pretty much get on with the coding, without having to concern ourselves with allocating memory or worrying about leaks. The CLR does an excellent job of sorting it all out behind the scenes.
It was only when boxing came up in a conversation recently that I realised how flakey my understanding of memory management in .NET really was. I mean, I sort of knew the concepts, but I think I thought I knew it better than it turned out I did. So I went away and brushed up and thought I might as well share my new understanding. In this post I’ll try to cover some basic concepts, such as value types vs reference types, the stack and the heap, and boxing and unboxing. I’ll finish by explaining both why you should care and why it’s less of an issue these days. In future posts, I may go a bit deeper into some of these concepts, using this post as a reference. Continue reading