Sharpen up Your Tech Skills

This section contains many articles that aim to help you to build your tech skills and become a better programmer.

Building your own audio player with .NET – part 1

As great as .NET is for writing software for multiple platforms, it lacks some important capabilities. This applies to those functionalities that would work radically differently on different CPUs and operating systems. One of these is the ability to play sound. With its predecessor, the .NET Framework, you could play sound easily by using classes […]

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Why every programmer needs to know design patterns (and how to learn them easily)

This article is a modified introduction to the book The easiest way to learn design patterns. The book is available in digital format at LeanPub and in either Kindle-specific format or in print from Amazon. Design patterns are something that you will need to get familiar with as a programmer who works with object-oriented languages.

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What programming language to learn first – the case against C++

You can become a programmer without a formal computer science degree. Around 30% of software developers are self-taught. But you would probably want to know which language to learn first. After all, there are many of them out there. Well, the answer to this question is simple enough if you are learning on the job.

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Always make your apps localizable from the start

Any major software development framework has in-build localization mechanism. This will allow any app built with it to be able to easily change the language and other culture-specific settings depending on the users’ preferences. You may think that this doesn’t apply to your app. Perhaps you never intend to release it outside of your own

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Why you should care about functional programming

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort developing its main functional language, F#. Over time, it has been given many cutting-edge features and tooling, far better than anything available in any other language on the .NET platform. This has got the software development community excited and the official Visual Studio Magazine article where the announcement was

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Why TDD is severely overhyped (and why you should still try it)

Test-driven development (TDD) is all the hype these days, especially if you frequent LinkedIn and various software development community forums. It’s almost like a religion these days. Many TDD evangelists will keep saying that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. They will try to convince everyone to start using it. Some even go as

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The easiest way to run and debug .NET AWS Lambda locally

.NET developers who are new to AWS Lambda functions often struggle to figure out how to test them locally. The documentation is somewhat sparse or it proposes excessively complicated ways of doing this. For example, there are articles and YouTube tutorials proposing to use AWS Serverless Application Model Command Line Interface (SAM). Well, there is

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