Extreme DRYness

I ran across an interesting scenario at work today that I think merits some discussion. In this post, I’ll cover what DRY is, and when following it religiously may actually cause problems.

Local Functions, At It Again

I thought I got out everything during my rant about the new C# features, but apparently I missed something…

Breaking Changes

Today we’re going to talk about breaking changes in libraries. Specifically, we’re going to answer the following:

• What constitutes a breaking change?
• How can I avoid making breaking changes?
• When is a breaking change a good idea?
• How do I indicate that a new version contains a breaking change?

Eliminating Hard Dependencies

You found it! After many hours of scouring the internet, you’ve finally discovered the library that does precisely what you need. Except… it has a dependency… on a package that your architect has declared unfit for your company.

Hide Your Secrets

In the last post we discussed why it could be preferred to expose all of your methods publicly. However, I deliberately left something out. Some of you may have noticed.

Handling Errors from Plug-ins

Before we get into today’s topic, I have some sadness to report. My beloved Dallas Stars were eliminated from the NHL playoffs. Also, my favorite player, Trevor Daley, who now plays for the Pittsburgh Penguins, has suffered a broken ankle and will not be able to play in the Stanley Cup games. Happily, if the Penguins win the Cup, he’ll still get his name engraved on its holy base!

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get on to software.

Last time we built a very simple pluggable program where each plugin provides a translation of the string Hello, World! Today, we’re going to explore some of the problems inherent in our approach.

Architecture Always Applies

I recently ran into an issue with Nuget packages. At work, we have a private Nuget repository for code that we’d like to share across applications. It’s mostly common frameworks, like configuration and logging.