Contradictions in TDD and why it’s merely a guidance and not the gospel
Test-driven development (TDD) is a highly popular and highly misunderstood subject. And there is no surprise as to why it’s so misunderstood. If you look at any single guide on what the canonical TDD rules are supposed to be, it would be vague and incomplete. Today, I will demonstrate to Continue Reading
Getting audio working on Ubuntu VM on Hyper-V
As the author of NetCoreAudio, a .NET library that is designed to play audio on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, I need to have all three operating systems available for testing. The simplest and cheapest way to set up multiple operating systems is to use virtual machines (VMs). My main Continue Reading
6 ways to annoy a software developer
Being a software developer makes you see the world in a particular way. Because of this, software developers usually share similar opinions on certain things. This is why there are things that are almost guaranteed to annoy any software developer. It’s good to know these things, so you aren’t hated Continue Reading
Building your own audio player with .NET – part 3
This is the third and final part of the tutorial on building a platform-independent audio app on .NET. In the first part of this tutorial, we talked about setting up the general project structure and enabling audio playback capabilities on Windows. The second part of the tutorial spoke about adding the ability to play Continue Reading
Building your own audio player with .NET – part 2
This is the second part of our series of tutorials on building audio capabilities into .NET, which the platform doesn’t have out of the box. In the first tutorial of this series, we set up a basic project structure and added a class that enabled us to play audio on Windows. However, Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
Coordinating IoT cluster with SignalR
Clustering is an important functionality in the Internet of Things (IoT). It allows multiple devices to act as one and coordinate the work between themselves. For example, you may have IoT devices that are making real-time audio announcements at the departure gates of an airport. If the gates are in Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
How to make money by creating online courses
There are many ways of making money online, whether you do it as your main activity or as a side project. And today, we will be talking about the method that I am most familiar with – publishing online courses. I have been doing it as a side activity for Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
Why you don’t need maths to become a programmer
Programmer, also known as software developer or software engineer, is an in-demand profession that usually pays well. Another good thing about it is that, unlike it is in other skilled professions, you don’t require a formal qualification to become a software developer. Most employers are interested in your skills and Continue Reading
Differences between .NET, .NET Core, and mono
Historically, .NET Framework was a Windows-only software development framework. In fact, many developers who don’t regularly work with it still believe that .NET and its languages, such as C#, are only available on Windows. It all changed in 2016 when .NET Core was released. The biggest selling point of .NET Continue Reading
Why studying algorithms will enhance your programming career
As someone who is interested in becoming a software developer, you have probably heard that it’s important to learn algorithms. Or maybe you have already started your programming career and haven’t yet encountered a situation where knowledge of algorithms would be beneficial to you. Either way, you might be wondering Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
The art of scientific debugging
In your software development career, you will have to spend a lot of time finding bugs in the code and figuring out why it doesn’t do the thing it’s supposed to do. This is what the process of debugging is all about. Because debugging is where the majority of developers Continue Reading
