My latest article entitled The Open Closed Principle is available in the June 2008 edition of MSDN Magazine . I tried to present both the motivation for following the OCP and some design strategies (besides the obvious Plugin example) and related principles to bring your design closer to being "Open...

I'm going to propose a new design concept with an admittedly awkward name called the "Put Code Where You'd Expect to Find It" Principle. It means exactly what it sounds like. A team should strive to consistently put different types of code into separate, logical places in the structure...

One of the first ongoing lesson for making Test Driven Development succeed for you is to learn how to write isolated tests with less effort. My Fourth Law of TDD is all about recognizing the need to do testing piecewise as a vital part of formulating software designs. One way or another, all design concepts...

Getting back on track with the " Maintainability " series of posts. I'm doing this way too late at night, so the coherence might be lacking. Don't Repeat Yourself Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is a statement exhorting developers to avoid duplication in code. Duplication isn't...

Jay Kimble , CodeBetter's resident AJAX guru, issued a little challenge to us TDD bloggers about using Test Driven Development to develop a custom extension to the MS Ajax ScriptManager control . In the comments, Jeff Perrin (you need to blog more Jeff) proposes a solution that's about what I...

I'm a card carrying member of the SOA skeptics club, but I'm going to push for a dose of SOA thinking to my current client. I do understand the potential benefits of things like BAM, BPM, and flexible orchestration if the entire enterprise were really Service Oriented, but I generally think of...

The title pretty well says it all. If changes in two or more components or subsystems can affect or break the other, you better get yourself a comprehensive automated build of some kind that exercises the integration of the two. In particular, and my hot button issue for the day, make database changes...

Occasionally, ok often, I'm gently mocked for the length of my posts. I start with good intentions of making short, pithy Jason Yip -style posts, then think of something else I want to say and 10 pages later I manage to hit the publish button. This is one of those that got away from me. I'm writing...

Sort of a continuation of the ongoing maintainability series, it's time to look at some of the benefits. And rant because that's just what I do. After publishing My Programming Manifesto (about the things *I* was thinking about at the time) post, Scott Watermasysk quite correctly stated that...

My employer, Finetix , added my blog to their main feed and my most recent post at the time just happened to be about Star Wars, so I thought I needed to put up my first "Grown Up" post of the year. Before you read on, I am assuming some reader familiarity with the ideas of loose coupling,...