I’m a programmer but I don’t like to write code. OK, it’s not the whole truth. I don’t like to write the code that is repeatable. Whenever I need to do something more than twice, I start thinking about automation. Hopefully, this problem can be addressed with code snippets. Visual Studio provides a predefined set of snippets that can be extended, but if you are a Resharper user you should definitely get to know LiveTemplates because it’s more powerful and easier to configure. ... Read More

Multithreading is one of the most difficult aspects of programming and can cause a lot of headaches. The main source of problems is often improper usage of synchronization mechanisms, which can result in deadlocks or a complete lack of synchronization despite our expectations. The infamous deadlocks can be detected in runtime thanks to tools like Concurrency Visualizer, Parallel Tasks Window or with WinDBG !dlk command. However, these tools are often used only after some unexpected behavior is observed, but it would be nice to reduce the feedback loop and detect these issues in design time. ... Read More

Recently, I’ve been asked if Roslyn can be used for helping with writing code that involves preparing mocks with NSubstitute. Of course, my answer was "Yes" but instead of rushing into creating a new project that would implement this functionality, I performed a small research. I checked nuget.org and Visual Studio extensions marketplace, and I discovered that there was a bunch of existing analyzers and extensions that facilitated working with mocks and not only for NSubstitute but for other mocking frameworks, just like Moq or Fake It Easy, too. ... Read More

Over a year ago I wrote a blog post about designing exceptions. I found this article very useful by myself and I used it as a reference a few times during code review. However, it’s almost impossible to expect that, after reading the recommended resource, anybody would start to apply described rules immediately and remember about them all the time. It’s a learning process and it takes some time. A while ago I got interested with Roslyn (I even delivered a public presentation about it - polish recording available here) and there is a really cool thing about Roslyn analyzers that can solve this problem - they help to actively introduce best practices into your codebase. ... Read More

In the last few projects that I’ve attended, I was deeply involved in continuous integration. What I mean is that I was either fully in charge of setting up, configuring and maintaining CI or I was a consultant, helping other teams to deal with different problems related to this subject. All projects have been using TeamCity as a platform for continuous integration. It has a lot of predefined jobs that facilitate most common activities necessary to build pipelines, as well as rich UI that helps to easily configure it and examine pipeline results. ... Read More