Dotnet

What is NDepend? When developing software it’s important to focus on fullfilling customer requirements, providing best possible user experience, performance, security, availability and many other -ilities to ensure success of the software you’re building, as well as keep your current users loyal and happy about your product. It’s equally important to keep the code base maintainable and clean, minimize complexity, dependencies and technical debt, ensure that the new code follows the same quality and design standards as the rest of the code base. This is something that’s extremely difficult to achieve manually, especially when you have a bigger application with tens of developers working on it. Fortunately for us there are many tools in the industry that may help us with this. Recently I got an opportunity to explore and experiment with a tool called NDepend and I would like to share some of the possibilities this tool provides in this blog post. ...

What is static code analysis and why do I need it? Developers are doing an important job - we create programs and systems that make life on this planet easier, better and safer. Ideally. But, how do we actually ensure that the code, that these systems and programs are built upon, is actually secure? Though we're developers we're also humans, and humans make mistakes. Let's say we're developing an online store where users can buy products, pay for them and get them delivered to their doorstep by providing their personal and credit card information. While developing this application we've unintentionally introduced a SQL injection vulnerability which was discovered and exploited by a malicious actor resulting in him/her getting access to application's database and stealing all information about our customers and their credit cards. Well, that sounds pretty scary, don't you think? ...

If you're a .NET developer, I bet that at least once you've experienced errors like "System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly '[ASSEMBLYNAME], Version=x.x.x.x, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxxx' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)" If you did, welcome to the club! I've been dealing with issues like this for several years now and there are some tools out there that could make this process less painful. Trust me, sometimes it may get pretty painful… ...

There are probably no developers out there (or at least very few) who have never created a console application - use cases where such apps are a first choice are hundreds, if not thousands. In my team we have several administrative tools that are being distributed as console apps in addition to the main application. Multiple stakeholders are using these apps in order to easily perform administrative tasks, make changes to application's metadata, interact with the database, integrate customizations into standard application functionality, etc. ...

Doing development for microservices is quite different from development for a monolithic application - it will require changes in the mindset, either you want it or not…But it's not only the mindset that will undergo changes. Let's say that you're working on creating a new component for your application that will provide functionality for sending e-mail notifications to your users. If you're creating this component for a monolithic application, you typically have one place where you'll add backend changes and one place for frontend changes. And then those changes are magically included as part of the build and deployment of the application. Nice and straightforward, huh? ...